Waking Heart

I, No Bot

2010-09-06T08:58:55-07:00

I have been inadvertently weeding out potential suitors with a sort of Buddhist IQ test. When I first moved to the Bible Belt, I began a search for kindred spirits by posting an ad online which read, “Buddhist seeks fellow Buddhists.” My initial search for a Zen center or other non-Christian spiritual hub was unfruitful, so I turned to the community pages of the personals. I targeted my ad to anyone in the Buddhist community, assuming there was one. I included my photo, reasoning that people are more likely to reply to a stranger if they have a sense of what that person looks like, and received a slew of messages, most of which read, in short, “I’m not a Buddhist, but do you want a back rub?” Sigh.

A few messages surpassed the Homo erectus grunt, “hey text me,” so I responded. At least five times, I was asked, “Are you real?”

“Well, that’s a funny question to be asking a Buddhist!” I replied. “If you get that, write back.”

Rather than amusement or any other acknowledgment of irony, the common response was, “I’m sorry… I had to make sure you’re not a bot.” Apparently, online personals are often the target of automated bots designed to cull working email addresses or propagate spam. I don’t really know what a bot is, in this context. All I know is that I am not a bot.

I was too uninspired to continue the exchange, crestfallen by the lack of any meeting of minds.

I went through a phase, which I imagine every Buddhist goes through, of sensing that I have no inherent existence, which took form in my ego as a belief. The dissolution of ego can soon return as ego’s dramatic self denial.

Early this year, I received a survey in the mail from the census department. Totally without thinking, I tossed it into the trash. I had the distinct, subconscious sense that I did not count among those who walk the earth.

I received another survey weeks later and ignored that one too. I never thought twice about it. I had somehow accustomed myself to perceiving that I had no place in the world.

I have a book of Buddhist fiction on my shelf entitled, You Are Not Here. Apparently, the government disagrees with me. Months later, a census official knocked on my door. She let herself in, made herself at home, and launched into an impromptu interview.

I giggled to myself. After years of crushing Buddhism and a long struggle with an old death wish, this woman barges into my house with the express mission of acknowledging that I do, in fact, exist.

I was reminded of a story about two philosophers attempting to settle a disagreement. James Boswell recounts it in The Life of Samuel Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

The purpose of waking up is not to escape life but to enter it more fully. One does not disappear from this moment, as one might hope. Yet, something does dramatically change.

In my ensuing mental fantasy, I am running like a loose chicken down the street. The theme song for The Dukes of Hazard is playing in the background. The census lady is chasing after me, waving her paperwork in the air.

“I don’t really exist,” I yell. “I have no place in this world,” I cry, to no avail.

She catches up with me, kicks me in the shin, and says, “I refute it thus!”

The injury returns me to this moment, to the reality of what is and to my self, and yet my illusory self still has the quality of being illusory. Perhaps one day, there will be a new check box on the census survey to accommodate Buddhist Americans: “Neither exist nor do not exist.”

I stopped looking for a Buddhist confidant. My mind is drawn to memories of insightful, intuitive companions who once graced my life, those whose mindful, nurturing touch continuously reminded me that I am real. There are things we can know in the body that no philosophy can articulate. I may not find a Buddhist confidant in the Bible Belt, but there are plenty of beautiful people here who know how to be real. Just ask the federal government.

Data, Data Everywhere and Not a Drop to Think

2010-08-31T11:46:29-07:00

Analyzing the data for my dissertation is highlighting for me the limits of intellectual knowing. Welcome to the Zen of graduate school! Every time I look at my data, I get a different take on it. It should not be so complicated, but the results are highly dependent on a number of factors, and I get a wildly different story depending on what cross section of data or interesction of factors I’m looking at. Each approach to the analysis seems as justified as any other, although of course I could be wrong.

I fell asleep in Walmart this afternoon. I haven’t done that in a long time, I realize now. I was pushing my cart down the aisles looking for a new garden hose, and suddenly I was reminded of the slew of dreams I had last night. In moments, I was back in my dreams. After nearly thirty minutes, I realized I’d been browsing the aisles in a deep stage of sleep. I felt as though hours had passed, a day even. I was disoriented, hardly able to track the train of mental activity that led me from my entrance into the store until my exit. I don’t understand why, but in the past twenty four hours, it feels as though ten or twenty days have passed.

When I got home, I set up a garden sprinkler for my children to enjoy, and within minutes, it was upside down and twisted. They called for help, and when I ran to fix it, I realized I had dreamed of fixing an upside down, twisted sprinkler the night before. The parallel was so vivid, that I had to sit down. Most of my dreams materialize within days or weeks, depending on the intensity of the experience. Often, I feel as though “real” life is a rerun of my dreams.

In such moments, the temptation is to feel as though I’m losing touch with reality, but I think the “reality” that is slipping away is the fabricated one, the one we habitually turn to as a touchstone. Waking up spiritually is essentially this same process on a deeper level, losing touch with our false realities, a process of profound unknowing. Letting go of the attachment to knowing opens up a whole new way of experiencing reality.

I’ve come to believe that the Bible Belt is the rehab center for thinking addiction. As an academic scholar with an obsession for philosophy and a craving for science, thinking is my heroin. Since I moved here in July, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been in severe withdrawal. The only university here is structured around religious fundamentalism. Growing up, I could see the City of Faith from my bedroom window, three gold plated skyscrapers emblazened with crosses where Oral Roberts once broadcast his pleas for money. After a bankruptcy, the City of Faith became a call center for a variety of credit card companies. The crosses were somehow removed from the gold windows. The buildings seem darker now. Oddly, since then, three or four people have suffered injuries due to mechanical failures in the elevator system. They were rising in an elevator when it suddenly snapped and fell. I laughed when I heard this story. In the very structures people once entered to rise to heaven, people are plummeting towards hell.

Last week, I drove behind a pick up truck with a bumper sticker showing an image of Obama reading a newspaper. The sticker said, “Our nation needs a leader, not a reader.” I cringed. How, pray tell, would such a message propagate without the capacity to read?

On a few occassions, I have felt like the most intelligent, well educated person in the state, a most arrogant and certainly false perception, but there it was, that feeling inside me. For even thinking such a thing, the universe ought to humble me, I thought, by thrusting me into a room with far more educated people. I found myself contemplating how nice that would be, but knowing how these things work, I would probably get punched in the face by the fellow in that pick up truck and end up in the emergency room. Wish granted! Oh, the hours I would enjoy babbling incoherently to the neurologist in charge of my case!

My brother, who works in a machine shop here, also struggles with a longing for fellow intellectuals. As I was writing this, he found comic relief by posting a status update in Facebook with the following message:

Secret to life:

-.. .-. .. -. -.- | — …- .- .-.. – .. -. .

The message: DRINK OVALTINE. (For the reference, see this movie excerpt.)

I have nearly given up on dating. My search for a kindred spirit is too driven by the need for someone with whom I can “talk shop.” I went to dinner with a kind and attractive dancer. Though quite intelligent, scholarly thinking was not his drug of choice. The evening was lovely, but I longed to talk about science and philosophy, subjects that did not go over well. I felt like the narrator from Nova backstage with an adolescent rock band, a complete alien. The next day, my seven year old son explained to me the logic of wormholes and exclaimed, “Did you know Stephen Hawking lost the black hole race?” I sighed and thought, “I would love to meet a man who could talk with me the way I can talk with my seven year old.”

We reminisced about the contributions of Leonard Suskind to the understanding of black holes. Suskind disagreed with Hawking’s assertion that information is irrevocably lost when matter and energy enter a black hole and demonstrated that, in fact, information is retained.

In other words, even in the crushing jaws of a singularity, the universe still “knows.”

From the perspective of analytical thought, information is lost the moment the puzzle pieces become hopelessly scattered. In the realm of pure being, however, the puzzle is always complete.

Last year I had a vision during meditation that I was standing in a circular room surrounded by windows looking out across a landscape, and every window offered such a different view that it did not seem like the same landscape, and some voice said, “There are many perspectives on the same thing.” Examining data from my experiments reminded me of my dream. Like holding up a crystal to the sun and getting different displays of light depending on how you tilt it, the conclusions change so dramatically with even the slightest shift in perspective, but the crystal is always the same.

Which perspective is the right one? Consider the possibility that they are all true. In the movie Shutter Island, a federal marshall arrives on an island harboring a mental hospital for the criminally insane. He spends the entire movie trying to get to the truth, trying to uncover reality, and he apparently succeeds. Imagine though, if you ever watch it, that every part of the movie is just as true as any other. What if reality changes as one’s perspective changes, so that every part of the movie is actually perfectly true at the time? What if, instead of uncovering the truth, he is creating it, even to the very end?

I often get the distinct sense that we can change our reality in this moment so completely that we acquire a new past. Ursula K. LeGuin explored this possibility in The Lathe of Heaven. If reality were a dream taking place in an eternal now, even the past could be recreated. The story we tell about our past seems just as malleable as our aspirations for the future. All you need to do is approach the data in a slightly different way. Tilt the crystal in the sun ever so slightly. Cut out a different cross section of your history. Examine a different slice.

Knowing is premised on the belief that there is something external and separate to be known, that our task is to somehow reach out and ascertain the objective reality, allowing it to impress itself upon our senses, but what happens when awareness itself is the fundamental nature of what lies “out there?” When you reach out with your measuring instrument, you create the data you are struggling to discover. Look at the measuring instrument itself. In the desire to know what is, you are the very thing you are trying to know.

After watching Shutter Island, I had vivid dreams that I was going into other people’s dreams and teaching them how to navigate reality. One person was trying to jump up from the ground onto a high ledge, but he couldn’t do it. I sat next to him and explained that the thing to understand is that you never actually move. Instead, it’s the scenery that changes, so if you want to jump high in a dream, you have to imagine the sight of the ground becoming the sight of the ledge. In other words, you have to imagine a new perspective. You don’t actually go anywhere, but suddenly, you’re reality changes, and you’re on the ledge, and that’s how you get from point A to point B. In the next portion of my dream, a girl had jumped from a ledge and fallen to the ground. When she realized she had died, my task was to teach her not to punish herself or be disturbed by her own death. Before long, she was riding a white pony through a vast meadow, happy and content. I’ve had this sort of dream for years, dreams in which I’m helping people learn to navigate reality by showing them that they are creating the very terrain they are navigating.

While waking up, I saw a game board, unusually vivid, calming and serene. The board was a representation of the many elements of my reality causing me confusion, except I could see all the playing pieces, every single data point, all at once, and everything made sense. Slices of data that had evoked pain were integrated with slices of data that had evoked joy and love, and the whole picture was truly sublime.

How, in all of this confusion, does one find tranquility and joy? Pain and confusion are products of thought, or grasping at particular perspectives. Analytical thought never takes everything in at once. Only being does that. Being is vastly more intelligent, because it is all the data points. In Joy and Healing, Torkom Saraydarian wrote, “I saw a man watching the sunset. He was all joy. He was in worship. He was the rays of the Sun. He was the symphony of the forms of colors.”

Study the sun to appease the analytical mind. Become the sun to appease the heart.

Words from the Heart

2010-08-24T20:33:37-07:00

Two nights ago, I opened my door, and a moth flew in. She flew straight to my kitchen lights, as moths do, drawn to any source of illumination as though it were the sun. To direct her out of my house, I turned off my kitchen lights, turned off my living room lights, and turned on the garage light. When I opened the door again, she flew out.

Sometimes, when we discover a source of illumination that looks like the sun but is merely reflected light, the only way to redirect us back to the true source is to turn it off.

In the past few weeks, a light that drew me like a moth was turned off. I cannot say precisely who or what that light was, because whatever I write will give the wrong impression. I turned to words in an effort to reconnect, as I always do, to clear the skies, but words are often precisely how I muddy the waters of love.

Words of response did not come. Frustrated, I grabbed a book, prayed for wisdom, opened to a random page and read these words from Zen master Mumon (1183-1260):

“Words cannot describe everything,
The heart’s message cannot be delivered in words.
If one receives words literally, he will be lost.”

A few days later, my mountains of words were still met only with silence. I was still wielding words in an effort to connect, and they still seemed to fall short of conveying my understanding and love. I grabbed another book, opened to a random page, and read these words from The Tempest by Kahlil Gibran:

“We were both silent, each waiting for the other to speak, but speech is not the only means of understanding between two souls. It is not the syllables that come from the lips and tongues that bring hearts together.

There is something greater and purer than what the mouth utters. Silence illuminates our souls, whispers to our hearts, and brings them together. Silence separates us from ourselves, makes us sail the firmament of spirit, and brings us closer to heaven.”

The same message a second time. When such a coincidence happens, I give the universe all my trust. I need to learn to communicate with my heart, not my mouth, I thought.

Finally, yesterday, I realized that I was using words to speak to egos, not to hearts. There is little point in speaking to egos about matters of the heart; no amount of analysis will impart to an ego what only the heart can receive.

It was an ego I flew towards, forgetting that the light I originally saw was not the same as the ego encapsulating it. (Great Scott, he was right.)

I realized just how little interest I have in getting other egos involved in issues of the heart, and I dropped it. In the very minute that I dropped it, I received a call; the silence was broken. And I felt more clear about everything than I had been in months.

An hour later, I drove to a forest retreat for an impromptu period of solitude and silence. I was, like a moth to a flame, drawn like mad to the true light, the Source. I could feel it.

“You have loved my reflection in forms so well that now there is no meditating.”
~ Rumi

I sat in the meditation room, a beautiful circular room of dark wood and candles with enormous windows looking out into the woods. I let the words die.

I thought I would be sitting in a soup of pain. My dissertation failed. I discovered a mistake yesterday, corrected it, and realized that nothing had actually worked. At the same time, a fellow student informed me that another research group had published several studies just like the ones I had tried to do as a student. It was not the first time I received such news. I struggled for so long, fifteen years, to communicate a deep set of ideas, losing much in the process, and others beat me to it. Raining maggots indeed. I cried to my friend on the phone: “For fifteen years, I have wanted with every part of my being to understand the mind and heart, to understand suffering, find some way to heal suffering, and tell others about it so that they could read my words and heal.” I’ve always put it that way, exactly, emphasizing the act of writing some sequence of words that could impart healing.

“Everything I’ve done has been for nothing,” I said.

…And what a wonderful nothing it is.

I thought I would be sitting in a soup of pain. Instead, I was opened by some incomprehensible grace to a river of bliss. Divine nectar. I sat on my cushion feeling love shooting through me, and somewhere in that river was understanding. So much understanding, I could never ever hope to capture it in words. I thought I would be sobbing, but instead, I only laughed.

While on retreat, a book by Thomas Merton caught my eye, Choosing to Love the World. This book is so beautiful. It begins with the following quote:

“The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.”

I turned to a random page to a chapter called “Dialoguing with Silence” and read this:

“It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud man impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard. The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to. The humble man asks nothing but an alms, then waits and listens.”

Skimming the pages, I came across this as well, which captured this transition from words of the ego to words of the heart:

“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

So with that, I let go of words and send to you, dear Reader, all the love in my heart. When the lights have all gone out, and the wind stops speaking to you, know that you are loved, and you are not alone.

Pinch Me, You’re Dreaming

2010-08-21T11:24:11-07:00

Last night, my dream world took some odd turns. First, I dreamed that I woke up, and there was a consciousness attached to my backside, clutching me. The attachment filled my body with a sense of pleasant satiety, the sort of appeasement you get from sucking down a milkshake, but when I turned my head, I saw his face in vivid detail, and it was hideous. When I realized that this thing stuck to me was so unappealing, I willed him away in a flash. Somehow, I caused a wind to blow his being right out of my world, and he was whisked away like dust.

I got out of bed, my body heavy and my mind thick with sleep, and walked down the hall. I entered my bedroom where my two boys were sleeping, except my youngest son was accompanied by a younger version of himself. That’s when I realized that I was still asleep.

Walking around in a dream, I decided to do an experiment. I walked into the kitchen and found a box of petit desserts cakes that I had just purchased from the grocery store. But in waking life, I hadn’t actually tried one yet. I’ll try a bite in this dream, I thought, and when I wake up, I’ll taste the desserts and see if they taste the same as in my dream. If I tasted them in the dream world, would I taste them correctly? If so, what would that mean about the relationship between the dream world and the “real” world?

I opened the box and pulled out one of the delicacies and savored it as slowly and consciously as I could. I focused on every layer of flavor, imprinting it on my memory.

When I actually woke up, I realized that I had never actually purchased a box of petit desserts. And I thought I was lucid.

Yesterday, my mom mentioned seeing a movie called Shutter Island. I’ve never actually seen it myself, but her only remark was that it impressed upon her just how much our ego can trick us into believing a certain reality.

The problem seems to lie in those aspects of reality which we don’t even think to question. Lately, a Buddhist teacher keeps quoting a Zen saying to me, “Little doubt. Little awakening. Big doubt. Big awakening.” How much more lucid would I have been if I had actually wondered whether I even owned a box of dessert cakes? But nothing prompted me to wonder.

When Bad Dreams are Good Signs

2010-08-19T18:01:31-07:00

It was raining maggots! I wish the maggots were metaphorical, but they were quite real. Well, sort of. This is a very weird story.

About three years ago, I sat down to contemplate what I should study for my dissertation. I was working towards a PhD in psychology, and I needed to come up with my next research project. After reading several journal articles on social disgust, I decided to study the relationship between physical or core disgust and social or moral disgust.

For three or four hours, I wrote the draft for a reseach prosopal. In the introduction, I described scenes that evoke physical disgust, like rotten grapes and maggots. In fact, I spent at least an hour describing rotten grapes and maggots in colorful detail. After many hours, I realized that I hadn’t taken the trash to the curb. When I pulled the trash bags out of our large trash bin, I found that the trash bin was full of maggots. Buckets of them!

There were so many, I had to pull the trash can into the backyard and blast them out with a garden hose. I could not remember the last time I’d even seen a maggot, but the coincidence did not escape me.

Around the same period, a similar coincidence occurred. I sat on a picnic blanket in a park writing a short story. The story began with a man closely inspecting a housefly. I sat on my blanket struggling to describe the intricate features of a fly, and wrote as much as I could within an hour, when I noticed a fly crawling on my blanket. Without thinking, I put my finger in her path, and she crawled onto my finger! She stayed still while I brought her up to my eyes and gazed intently at her. She remained on my finger for more then twenty minutes, and I was able to finish my story.

(Incidentally, I did the same thing this summer, very intentionally, with a butterfly. See Hold Our Your Hand. About a week after that post, I went to a river where a butterfly landed on my hand and remained there for more than twenty minutes while I walked along the shore. Reality is weird.)

Lately, I’d been struggling to complete my dissertation. Raising two children on my own with few resources and little money posed a challenge, and moving to a new city consumed a lot of energy. I accepted that it would probably take me months of slow, gradual progress to finish.

Then, about two weeks ago, I received a message from the department informing me that, if I did not enroll for the fall semester, I would owe the graduate school a $6000 degree completion fee.

My mother called, and I related my crisis in a tearful panic. She pressed me to decide whether completing my dissetation was truly a reasonable goal. Would it actually happen, she asked, or would it be wiser to abandon the dissertation? I did not know what to tell her. With my youngest son still at home, finishing seemed less plausible every day. As I tried to answer her questions as honestly as I could, I walked through my kitchen to the far corner. At the same time that I was straining to estimate whether I could finish my dissertation, I noticed an enormous pile of brown rice in the middle of the floor. Without thinking, I reached for a broom. As I brushed the grains of rice together, it finally hit me.

“Oh my god, that isn’t rice!” I wailed. It was a thick pile of maggots the size of a serving platter. “I gotta go!” I yelped, and hung up the phone. One thing that struck me as odd… I didn’t feel disgust. Instead, I was startled but very intrigued. Somehow, the sight seemed positive.

When I turned to leave my kitchen, there were maggots spread across my entire kitchen floor. There must have been at least one maggot on every six square inches of tile. They were light brown and half an inch long and writhing. How did I miss them? How did I not see them? My feet bare, I was consoled to see that not a single maggot lining the floor (and the path I had just traversed) had been stepped on.

My trash can was free of maggots. In fact, I could not locate their source of origin. They literally appeared out of nowhere, and as I swept them up, I would clear a large area, and then turn around, and more maggots had appeared, spread out in an evenly distributed layer. It took me more than three hours to clear my kitchen of every last maggot, because they kept reappearing. I could not explain where they were coming from, and when I told my family about it, they suggested that I examine the ceiling. They seemed to be falling from the sky.

I did examine the ceiling and light fixtures, and I found no trace of them.

The last time I saw a maggot, I told my mother, was the day I originated the idea for my dissertation. “I think this is a good sign,” I told her. “I think this is the answer to your question.”

My mother loaned me the money to enroll and offered to watch my youngest son during the day. I’ve been working on my dissertation every day since then, and I’m almost done.

This was not the first time that a horrible experience was, in fact, a good sign.

When I was forming an ongoing dance event in my new city, I had a horrible nightmare, one of the most disturbing nightmares of my life. I was placing a baby into a washing machine. I woke up moaning with horror, quite disturbed that my mind, that any mind, could even conceive of such a thing, and what can be conceived can be realized, so the thought that such a scene was even possible filled my mind with pain.

Completely distraught, I grabbed the mala beside my bed, held it gently in my hands, and imagined light in the space before me. I was going to do the Tibetan Buddhist refuge meditation, but the moment I formed the intention, a deep peace overtook me, and all of the horror dissolved in a flash, replaced with tranquil pleasure. In that soothing space, I was able to reexamine the dream and see it in a different light.

The day before, I had created a logo for the event, a dancer twirling and swirling in a galaxy of creation. Of course, upon reflection, the image looked very much like someone tumbling in a washing machine. Which was actually kind of funny! In my dream, I was placing a baby into the logo. I wasn’t sending a child to his death. I was giving life to a new project. The dream, which evoked so much horror, was actually a good dream.

What if all of the bad elements of this dream you are having right now, your life, were not bad dreams at all but good signs continuously pointing you to something wonderful and ever present?

There are times when this wonderful, ever present something fills my awareness. The movie Inception gave me a way of describing exactly what it feels like to experience a period of total wakefulness or what I began to call “luminosity.” Many periods of luminosity have occurred my life in recent years, becoming more frequent and more prolonged as time goes on. The luminosity is characterized by intense mental clarity, profound inner stillness, a nearly unbearable bliss, and dramatically altered perceptions of time, space, and my sense of self. There is only the moment and only this. No past or future, yet no sliver of a present moment either. No boundaries. No me. And everything is perfect exactly as it is.

This experience is challenging to explain. How can everything be perfect as it is? Where does the bliss come from? What has really become of time and personal identity?

In the movie, Inception, characters plunge into dreams within dreams. In other words, they dream that they are dreaming that they are dreaming, forming multiple layers of ever deepening dream worlds. However, things that happen to them in one dream are felt and reflected in the deeper dreams. They dream of sleeping in a van that careens off a bridge, and in the dream which their van-riding dream self is having, they begin to float weightlessly through a hotel. Sensing the loss of gravity in the van shapes their dream of the hotel, and suddenly there is a loss of gravity in the hotel.

The mind, occupied by a given dream, this life, is nevertheless engaged in a larger reality, and that larger reality, however one might describe it, is impinging upon our being in this very moment. Your being, your body, everything you see. You are made of it. Deep in dreaming, we feel none of it, but start to wake up, and suddenly, you are floating weightlessly through the air, so to speak. More precisely, you begin to feel the divine light pouring into you, an undending river of love and contentment, and you know that every single thing you are perceiving in this moment, even your flawed, wounded self, is, in actuality, an element of that light. As a consequence, you sense the divine light in everything you stare at and everything that touches your skin and every thought that passes through your mind. Sometimes, in that span of wakefulness, I stare at the ground in front of me, and I feel as though I’m staring into blissful eternity.

I turn to those I love and struggle to convey it, but of course, they already have it. All I can do is enter their dream and hope my presence helps to awaken their senses.

The luminosity can fade when, slowly, one begins to believe in the dream again, to take everything fabricated as the solid reality, or the only reality, and the sensation of the divine river fades, but the river is still gushing into us just the same. There is this faint, lingering memory of the light, but to find it again, we look to the dream… and dream of being thirsty.

Perhaps desire and craving represent what it feels like to perceive the divine light while asleep. Imagine that refreshing water is pouring into your mouth while you sleep, and in your dream, you sense it barely, but because you can’t sense it fully, you experience craving. The craving is not for something you don’t have. The craving is just to wake up. Buddhism counsels against craving, but it’s not desire and craving in themselves that send us deeper into sleep. It’s putting the wrong face to the name, so to speak. Forming a mental image of what would satisfy the craving, an image of something not present. It’s not knowing or not realizing that the craving is already being satisfied, and all we need is to still our dreaming and open our true senses. If you know that all you need is to wake up, don’t lose the craving. Enter it, and let it lift you from the deepest layers of slumber.

After describing luminosity to a friend this way, I found this poem by Rumi:

Infinite mercy flows continuously
But you’re asleep and can’t see it
The sleeper’s robe goes on drinking river water
While he frantically hunts mirages in dreams
And runs continually here and there shouting,
“They’ll be water further on, I know!”

This life, sometimes it feels like a bad dream, but perhaps things are not what they seem. Look at everything that is happening, even losses and irritations, or think back on events that disturbed or traumatized you, leaving you shaken. Then step back, and ask yourself:

If it was a dream, how might it be a good sign? How might it serve to convey some meaning or intuition that could guide you towards awareness of the light continuously entering your being, even as you read this?

We tend to think of things that happen as experiences that are thrust upon us, but sometimes, they are more like demonstrations of some truth unfolding for us to witness. I once dreamed that I was a snake with a terrible desire to bite anything in front of me. I saw a tail dangling in front of me and bit down hard. Within moments, I was wailing in pain. Then, the dream rewound and replayed. In the second version, I was still a snake with a desire to bite, but when I saw the tail, I knew it was me. I put my jaws around the tail and bit gently. I had gone to sleep asking for a better understanding of karma. The dream showed me that bad dreams are not just punishments for our foolish choices. Often, they are just stories designed to show us something, and even the foolish choices are a part of the story.

I Hope You Dance

2010-08-13T15:44:49-07:00

I found a book in an old box that made me realize what the last three years of my life have been all about. Learning to dance.

I bought it at a used bookstore about three years ago, before I filed for divorce, as a gift for my oldest son. The book remained on a shelf at his father’s house after I moved to the other side of town. After two years, when his father moved to another country, and our old house sold, a team of movers boxed up everything my ex-husband left behind, which was quite a lot, and carried it to the home I had created.

One box contained the book, where it remained until I moved to a new city, and finally, I opened it and found it. I haven’t seen it in three years.

The book is “I Hope You Dance,” by Mark Sanders and Tia Sillers, which inspired a song by Lee Ann Womack. The book is a stream of encouraging words. Among them:

Whenever one door closes,

I hope one more opens.

Promise me that you’ll give faith

a fighting chance.

And when you get the choice

to sit it out or dance…

I hope you dance.

I remember my last year of marriage. I was extremely depressed and lonely, and a new life was calling to me. Some energy was pushing its way out of me, a divine passion aching to be birthed and nurtured. Ending a marriage, however, is an act loaded with guilt. When you walk away from a marriage, you are sure to cause suffering. As a Buddhist, that is the last thing I wanted to do, but my whole being was pushing to get out. I prayed for guidance, and the message that came into my life over and over again was “follow your heart.” It was around that time that I found the book, but it seemed fairly meaningless at the time.

Eventually, I let go of my intellectual arguments, my worries about karma, and followed the raging currents of energy moving me into something new. Surrender.

When I filed for divorce, a symbol appeared to me several times each day in different places and in different contexts. The red hibiscus. I wrote about it in May 2008 in the post, “Luminous and Divorcing” and “And New Wheels.” (PS I’m moving these over from an older blog.)

I took the hibiscus as a symbol of opening. Opening the heart. Certainly, many things happened to encourage that process. (See post, “Open Heart, A Leap of Faith,” from July 28, 2008.)

One night, I painted the image on my torso, and it became a symbol for me of the choice to follow my heart and discover my passion for the Divine Beloved. The image became one of my Facebook profile photos.

Soon after I left my marriage, I met a man who introduced me to a barefoot ecstatic dance event in a beautiful tai chi room with carmel colored hardwood floors and Zen decor. It was an experience I’ve written much about. When I entered the dance, I quickly realized that I had painted that very scene about a year before I ended my marriage. At the same time that I entered the dance, an image of it was hanging on my living room wall.

The painting also represented the willingness to end a marriage, to drop the delicate, expensive vases and let them crash to the floor while leaping through the space with love and trust.

During a time of grief, a song by Lady Gaga came out, “Just Dance.” “It’ll be okay,” she sings. I recited her lyrics like a mantra and continued to dance.

One day, I found a burgundy dress, long and flowing, much like the one on a woman in the painting, with ornate golden swirls and jewels, perfect for the dance. In fact, I could wear it nowhere else. Eventually, I needed to pack the dress away, but when I moved to a new city, I quickly discovered that my brother was a DJ who had also lost his social world and yearned for something more sacred. We created a barefoot ecstatic dance event in this new city, and the response was overwhelming. I wore my burgundy dress again and twirled through the room, so immensely happy.

Before our opening night, I created a logo and placed it in our Facebook group page. A woman in a red dress spins through space, a galaxy of divine creation.

Creation. This process of unfolding is so much like a dream, so intimately intertwined with the contents of our minds and hearts. (If you haven’t seen Inception, by the way, don’t miss it!) After I created the galaxy logo, I found this image of the Milky Way.

Today, I was reviewing posts in the Facebook page for our ecstatic dance, and I noticed something amusing. The image of the hibiscus on my torso looks like the galaxy dancer, our logo for our new dance. The stamen looks something like the dancer’s upper arm, and the petals, her spinning dress.

Perhaps, without realizing it, I was painting an image of my spinning, dancing self, and maybe the symbol of the red hibiscus that appeared so repeatedly during my divorce was an image not just of opening but of dancing.

There is more to this life than what we can see, a harmony and melody to the unfolding that surpasses anything we might expect. It is this music, I think, to which I am learning to dance.

If every song ended the way some of my relationships tend to end, however, I’d be on the floor covering my ears. The more passionate the song, the more cacophonous its ending. That is a part of the dance I can’t seem to master. Why can’t relationships end as gracefully and sweetly as songs end?

I think I know why. When I first moved here, an arts center downtown held a performance in which lights were connected to the heartbeat of dancers. As the dancers moved, the lights flickered on and off in response to their heart.

In this cosmic dance, we must not only learn to dance to the music, we must learn that the music is created by our dance.

It’s a feedback loop. When I experience separation from those I love (among other distressing events), I tend to flail around a lot. And every flail sets new sirens wailing, which cause me to flail even more. Sigh. What I have found, over and over again, is that total surrender is the only way to interrupt the loop and start anew.

The book and song, I Hope You Dance:

The Divine Longs For You

2010-07-31T08:00:38-07:00

Think of a time when you wandered the shores wishing you could just see a lost love again. Longing for a glimpse, another touch, another taste. But things were not simple. Between you, obstructing the exchange of light, were veils of intellect, clouds of fear and judgment. Conditioning. Misunderstanding.

Perhaps you did see him, and perhaps you were able to talk, and instead of dissipating the clouds and rending the veils, they became thicker. Elaborate and sticky like cobweb.

Now I know why dreams and visions of spiders in cobweb have entered my consciousness so many times during the past year. The visions of cobweb always immediately precede an encounter with the complicated messes of mind stuff that blind two people to the simple joy of one another in the very moment they cross paths. Many nights ago, I opened my eyes and suddenly noticed the little spider crawling around in the little cobweb in the corner of my former love’s bedroom window, and the image of it, a veritable dream symbol of immediate significance, impressed itself upon me with such force that I couldn’t think or look away, and minutes later, he arrived home from his trip, a retreat on dream yoga, and cobwebs of mind rose up between us in a dizzying flash. Still half asleep, I soon found myself gone and crawling into the bed of another former love, the generous healer, who rolled over and put his arm around me and fell back asleep.

Thoughts and mental representations of the situation and concepts of relation, even the most straightforward of them all, prevent people from really seeing and knowing one another.

Love and truth are well hidden by misunderstanding and confusion, and we always think it is the other person who is all confused and spiraling out of control.

At the same time, I was wandering the beautiful streets of the city I left behind, finding stillness and pleasure in the picturesque lakes and beaches, with an irrational yearning to bump into another former love, that beautiful, sensitive dancer. Even if I saw him, I could not have spoken to him, but my body still felt a longing to experience him impinging upon my senses once again.

Longing and frustration. I opened to it and let it all in, happily. Sitting on the terrace watching sunset after sunset, I tasted and savored this phenomenon… wanting to meet eye to eye with those we love, see them, touch them, taste them, and know them without obstruction, and to be seen, and to be touched, and to be known without obstruction. And the frustration of obstruction is heavy and burning, an enormous knot in the stomach and a weight on the heart, but in this dream, this beautiful unending teaching, what does it mean to be separated by the cobwebs of mental activity? I know how to wake up to what is… but how do we wake up to each other?

Throughout my trip, I had the very distinct sense that I was asking the wrong question.

On my last day, I rendezvoused with my ex-husband and reunited with my two children. So much joy! On our long drive back to our new home, my seven year old son, a true mystic, told me that he had figured out how the mind and universe work. I giggled, but I’ve learned to listen to him. He said that our only task is to give love to the universe, and when we give love, “it’s like an exchange.” “You give it love, because that’s all it wants, and it makes your wishes come true, because that’s what you want. You can have anything you wish for, and when you reach 100 percent love, you get 100 percent of wishes come true, but it’s not like you’re tricking the universe or being mean or anything,” he added. “It’s like an exchange, because the universe just wants love, and that’s all you’re supposed to do.”

I nodded, and then I realized that I’d forgotten the wisdom of what he was telling me. I was looking at my lost loves and longing to reconnect, but the only task at hand was to give my love to the divine what is.

What was I longing for? For them to be awake to me? Of course, I was experiencing the very pain that the divine experiences for me!

My car sailed along the open highway in the soothing light of the setting sun after a passing rain. I spent so much time during my trip wishing other minds could be fully awake to me and see my heart directly, and this was God’s pain I was feeling, and it never occurred to me that instead of pining away at former loves, I could be giving myself to God.

“Dear Universe,” I prayed, “may you see me. May you touch me. May you taste me. May you be understood and known by me.” I felt a strange compassion for the divine reality, this everything, this ineffable presence.

“May you have me,” I said. “May all the cobwebs that separate us be cleared away. May I be awake to you.”

I wished for God to experience with me what I longed to experience with my former loves. Union. I never prayed like that before. Don’t we always pray to gain entrance into God, but we never wish upon God the joy of gaining entrance into ourselves?

I offered myself, every piece. On one of my last nights in my old town, I wandered the terrace and bumped into a good friend. We sat by the water and talked for a long time, into the night. He was a little nervous and stared at my legs. Before I rose to leave, I put my arms around him. Then I gave him a big, wet kiss, which he received with enthusiasm. I knew he wanted it. He smiled, and we said good bye.

Sometimes I feel like everyone wants a piece of me. A certain resistance rises up, a self protection. All well and good, but there is also, parallel to that body wisdom, a need to make oneself an offering. This is the spirit of the Tibetan practice of chod, and a theme in the movie Seven Pounds, which I highly recommend.

To the divine, I offered myself and let go of everything else. There is nothing else we need to do! Nothing at all! Figure things out? Forget it. It will never happen. The intellect is worthless in that regard. Learn how to navigate this dream? Foolishness! Why would you struggle so hard to learn how to navigate what you are in fact creating? How are you creating it? By your relationship with it, by how you present yourself to the divine.

Very soon, a tremendous, peaceful, inexpressible bliss swept in like the steam of fallen rain filling the dark green forests that extended from the road to the horizon. The way ahead of me was vibrantly clear, the sun now gleaming in the west, touching the trees.

Contemplate that terrible aching longing that you feel when you want to reconnect with someone but there is too much misunderstanding and confusion, and they are not really seeing you clearly. Then realize that the Divine Beloved longs for you in this same way, for your awakening to its true self. Offer yourself to the Divine, and let the dream take care of itself.

Jump In

2010-07-27T15:08:35-07:00

The water’s fine! The expanded self, or luminosity–entering it is like learning to dive into a river. Over time and with practice, it becomes easier. You may still lose your synchrony with the currents, but then you just dive back in, and diving becomes easier until eventually there is no trick to it, no accidental grace necessary. You just do it.

I’m learning how to enter luminosity more easily and voluntarily. I can still choose not to enter it, apparently (sigh), but then I retrace the steps once more, and they’ve become more well worn so that it isn’t a magical accident anymore when I end up there. Just magical. The transition is very easy. You just–die. Die in that the small self offers no resistance to what is but instead, and this is the important part, trusts it completely.

When I moved to another city at the end of June, I didn’t realize that my trust, which was very deep, contained this unconscious belief that with that trust, I would experience no discomfort, and if things were really uncomfortable, I wasn’t doing it right. In this sense, my trust became tied to form, an insidious shift.

My new city is full of discomforts. Foremost is the terrible heat and humidity. At 110 degrees, going outside is out of the question. Then I noticed a total lack of sacred natural settings. The whole city is like a giant strip mall. Parks in which I once communed with nature as a child are now trashed. And the social scene is dominated by fundamentalism. Finding kindred spirits seems impossible (although they are rising up as I plan the ecstatic dance event). Nature, tribe, sun… these are sources of life force for me. I didn’t realize how deeply they sustained me until I lost them.

For the first several weeks, I was in real withdrawal. The withdrawal pains dug into me and became an unconscious bitter resistance, and of course with resistance comes the “me against the world” perspective. You may not think you see things that way, but look hard. Do you feel like you are arm wrestling the world for your highest good?

As I rebelled against the discomforts, I fell asleep to the luminosity. With that came suffering. I resisted the suffering, and I suffered more.

“Bleargh, what happened to my connection with the light at the source of this movie?” I thought. “Slipping away again?” So I took a bubble bath and watched a good movie, danced to a heart pounding song in my living room until my calves were sore, and went to bed with a prayer on my lips: “Please wake me up, universe!”

The beauty is that you can ask for this even from within the darkest confusion and most convincing illusion. You don’t even need to know what you are asking for. How could you anyway? You are essentially asking for a shift in how you perceive, so if you could envision what you are asking for, you would not need to ask. You only need to know that you need it more than anything.

Then you get it. Every time. I slept well, finally, like I did before–that peaceful comforting sleep, like being cradled all night. It should always be that way.

When I woke up, I was compelled to stop whining, let go of my attachments to sacred places and sacred people, and live where I was put. The moment I surrendered, there it was again–right there–engulfing me and sweeping me into itself–the euphoric, ineffably present, healing flow.

You can never acquire it–you just jump back in, jump back in, jump back in. Until one day you get over that silly compulsion to crawl out looking for a drink!

Words in Hollandaise Sauce

2010-07-25T06:48:24-07:00

It’s been a long time since I felt like writing. What’s the point of using words when we can speak directly, with being to being? But then what’s the point of form when everything is in emptiness?

Maybe words give proof to the truth people perceive with their hearts. The messages received by the heart are verified through words, and otherwise they would not believe their hearts. Maybe form serves the same purpose. Form gives proof to what we perceive of emptiness, the mystical experience. Like looking in a mirror–the emptiness verifies itself through form.

A lot of people need words from me right now–lots of different words–and without those words, there is frustration, disappointment, a sense of separateness, or even animosity. But I want to fall silent and stay that way. My reply is in the ribbon of grass between my fingers, not the pen. In the humid air blanketing my skin. In every quanta of form I see them, you, I, reflected. That sounds poetic in an almost alienating way–which is my point exactly.

If you would have me say those words that you would most want to hear, right now, what would they be?

If you knew with absolute certainty that you could speak words to someone and they would hear and understand them completely with their whole being, what would you say?

Sacred is any form which offers, to a given mind, an exit to the void, transparency to the divine. Rather than striving to be loving, strive to be sacred. And to see the sacred, to see all forms as sacred, and in being sacred, love pours out without contrivance.

Words, like form, are most sacred when they are transparent to the silence, giving entrance to the still divine love from which they came. How can we speak words like that?

Just as I was writing about sacredness as transparency of form, I was listening to music playing in a cafe where they sell crepes, and I inquired about the artist. Crystal Castles. A few hours later, in a different context with different people, someone recommended a German group called Glass House, or Glashaus. An interesting coincidence. Both transparent forms in which we reside.

I am back in the town where I lived for the last six years, visiting briefly, contending with a jumble of emotional memories, tumbling through one association after another, familiarity mixed with disorientation, the same world but upside down.

The discombobulation is good. Don’t look for a place to hang on, I remind myself. Let the tumbling direct you to your center. Not the place that doesn’t get tumbled. The center is in the tumbling. Who is tumbling? This pure awareness, this beingness. The tumbling itself. The silence within the noise.

I am literally at the center of the country’s biggest farmer’s market. The market circles a capital building skirted by vast, beautiful lawns of grass with shading trees. Half the town is revolving around the capital square, the whole market spinning, while I lie half asleep on my purple blanket in the grass, very still and very content.

I am reading a new book, an unexpected gift from my sacred friend, called “Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics,” which details that longing for silence and the impulse to transcend everyday social reality that has been gripping me. Not to find stillness in a cave, but to find it in the noise of the ordinary world.

Ironically, as I read it, my cell phone is basting in an oven. Last night, I spilled water on it, and when I woke up, I realized that the keypad no longer worked, and all the while, my phone was calling people who had recently called me. Unsuspecting friends received repeated calls from me until 1:30 in the morning and again at the crack of dawn. When they answered, they heard only silence. Lord, that cracks me up to no end.

Someone suggested I remove the battery and sim card and place it in the oven for the day with only the pilot light on. Another friend remarked, “Ahhh, the flavor of a slowly simmering cell phone! I prefer to leave the sim card in and baste it with a mild hollandaise sauce.” With so many calling on me right now to use words, that seems a fitting fate for my cell phone.

Mmmmm, words.

Hi

2010-07-02T08:01:24-07:00

I am far away now, but not really. A space apart, a place different, another point along the axis of maya, yet right next to you as always. The only space between us that ever creates division is the space we imagine, which is nothing of course, but it does create this very realistic illusion that someone is lost or gone or unrecognizable. Funny how we can become so unrecognizable yet we are always here with each other.

Years ago, I used to wake up in the middle of the night, and for at least five minutes, I did not recognize my husband. Even after years of marriage, I would look at him in complete confusion and ask, “Why are you in here? Shouldn’t you be sleeping somewhere else?” Slowly it would dawn on me. Some part of my mind, the part that keeps a record of his identity and his previous interactions with me, would come back online, and I would say “oh” and go back to sleep.

This happens with people and places and everything else that can change, except often there is no “oh” at the end. Maya, the transient, is shimmering, the scenery on the screen changing continuously, but the light always gushes from the same living source, and the screen, this very awareness you and I now share like Siamese twins joined at the consciousness, is always the same. Which means that no change of scenery can separate us, and no transformation can alienate us, and eventually you will taste this core of light, even from seemingly far away, inexplicably and without any form to accompany it, and you’ll know the flavor like the seasoning of a hometown dish, and you’ll realize that home is always with you. This moment. This moment has your home in it, and you cannot ever lose it.

I woke up in a motel in Cuba, Missouri, on my drive down to my new home, and for five minutes, I had no idea where I was. I had no reference point either in space or in time. Simply, I was in a room. An unfamiliar room.

That experience used to disturb me. I used to think it was the worst feeling in the world, like being totally lost with nothing to hold onto. But now, I savor it. When you feel most lost, you can easily sense your center, the unchangeable, if you just relax and don’t panic. Don’t scramble around looking for something to pacify the disruption, but don’t sink into the disruption either. Just ease into the unfamiliarity expecting to be held, because you will be. You will fall and never hit any ground, which means you can finally see through the illusion of there being any ground or the need for any ground. It’s like walking through a wall, such magical freedom.

I miss old friends and lovers still residing in the town I left behind. Even the ones who wanted me gone from their senses, I miss. The senses mean so little, although there is an emptiness, like the tingling on the strip of skin where one once wrapped a watch, now conspicuously missing. The android in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data, once explained his experience of grief: “As I experience certain sensory input patterns my mental pathways become accustomed to them. The inputs eventually are anticipated and even ‘missed’ when absent.”

But you don’t need to worry about that. Grief is very gentle when we can sense one another’s continual presence. Even in the deepest letting go, the kind that puts us lightyears apart, my goodness our hearts are right next to each other, exuding love.

On Wednesday night, after much searching, I found a Zen Buddhist sangha in the heart (or buckle, as they say) of the Bible Belt. In a town that boasts one of the highest number of churches per capita, there is only one Buddhist temple, but I only need one. On Monday, a sixteen year old boy approached me in a café, struck up a conversation, and tried to persuade me to accept Jesus as the only way to God. I explained that, in fact, I had “accepted Jesus as my savior” during my teenage years, when I was growing up here, but numerous other life experiences had broadened my perspective. I mentioned that Buddhists often view Jesus as an enlightened teacher. I described personal experiences that changed how I approach this Divine oneness, or rather, how the Divine oneness experiences this “me,” but he dismissed them as imaginary.

“I used to have a problem with masturbation,” he said, “but Jesus helped me with that.” I was reminded of the girl in my high school who attempted suicide, because she couldn’t stop masturbating, and her family condemned her as a sinner and found her a Christian psychotherapist. I met her again years later, and she was cured… of Christian fundamentalism… and still masturbating I am happy to say.

“I seen miracles,” he continued. So have I, I thought, but where to start. He ended the conversation with a familiar refrain, spoken with a southern accent that now mesmerizes me even though I once used it: “Jesus is the way and the light and anyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus is going to hell.” I had only been in town for one day and already someone tried to save my soul. Amusing.

I was sad. After that encounter, meeting a group of Buddhists was profoundly consoling. No matter how interconnected we are, we all need kindred spirits like we need the right food in our diet.

I entered the sacred space and sat on a cushion beside ten strangers, my body instantly buzzing. Silence. Nothing else.

Space.

This.

Buzzing. Shocks. Opening. Very, very open.

The bell.

Walking. Very, very slowly.

The bell.

Sitting.

Someone was pressing into me with some sort of pain, and I realized I needed to give this person permission to let go without guilt. I needed to take the weight of my well being off their shoulders. Or maybe it was my own delusion rising up for resolution. I don’t know. I don’t know that it matters. Either way, the feelings unfolded, and I welcomed them all the same. I spoke to this person in my heart with a scene, a feeling, like an intimacy with or a knowing of the desired state of being and holding to that.

“It’s okay to feel nothing,” I said.

Okay to feel nothing. There are people in my life to whom I have never given that freedom, and it struck me just how essential it was that I grant it to them. The freedom to feel nothing, knowing that feeling nothing for some span of time does not say anything about how much a person loves you or whether they are “still there.”

I gave this person that freedom, wholeheartedly, with exuberant joy, and suddenly big swollen tears were falling into my open hands, and my chest and my solar plexus opened up and unclenched. This was something I had been gripping for awhile, and now it was released, and it felt so good, I just kept crying, except not a muscle in my face tightened or contorted, so these two little rivers of relief just trickled from my eyes and pooled in my palms, and the oddest thing is that this person I let go of was suddenly more visible to me than ever.

The bell.

Walking. Very, very slowly… open and released. I had just inadvertently or vicariously given that same freedom to myself.

Consider the implications!

Then yesterday, on Thursday in the early afternoon, I was unpacking and hanging paintings and suddenly had to sink to the floor. Someone feeling pain, acute and heavy, like they were missing me but feeling as though they shouldn’t miss me or did not want to miss me, something like that. I couldn’t put a face to it, although I think I know who it was. I sat on the floor hunched over a box and just whispered, lovingly, “Hi.” Later that afternoon, I was struck with that same sadness from that same place and cried with whoever it was, and just said “Hi” as many times as was needed.

If you felt someone grieving for you, and you knew you were right there with them, what would you say to them? What would you send to them?

You would say “Hi, I’m right here,” and send them love. Acquaint yourself with this compulsion. When you grieve for the Divine, the Divine feels it, and in every moment, the whole universe is saying, “Hi, I’m right here,” and sending you love.

A whole cosmos speaking its loving presence to you in every moment! You cannot comprehend how wealthy you are. There are places and people in space and time that are far away, but not really. When this opens into your awareness, it will not matter where you are, who you are, or who you are with… or who you are without. All of it will be like a movie projection on a screen, and the light source will be in you, constant and intimately connected to everything.

Dissolving the Past

2010-06-24T22:31:23-07:00

Your body carries a record of your past experiences, some deep and old and intense, but the past no longer exists. Rather, all you suffer from are imprints. The imprints shift and shape, obstruct, rush, and stifle the currents of energy that flow naturally through your body. Only the patterns you carry right now have any power to harm you. You can heal and awaken not by dwelling on the past and turning it into a catalog of who you are, but by allowing the imprints to dissolve in the currents of energy in your body.

A Dream About Memory

I finally discovered the meaning of a dream I had two years ago. On April 11, 2008, I dreamed that I was lying stretched out and my body was like a vinyl record. Someone put their finger on my body as though they were the record needle, and everywhere they touched, they activated a vibration.

Each vibration was a memory, a full and vivid memory returning to life in all the senses, complete with the thoughts and feelings that once permeated it. I got the sense that my very body was a library of experiences, and each one would be fully relived depending on which part of my body was touched.

One particular spot on my body evoked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr, an admirable, altruistic black man. I wrote that down at the time, but it seemed peculiar and made no sense.

Read on, and I will tell you what it was about.

My Archeological Dig

For the past week, I have been packing from dawn until dusk in preparation for my move. On Saturday, I packed everything in my bedroom. A Tibetan prayer wheel from my Buddhist love, pebbles from a beach in Northern California where we spent the day after my retreat, seeds he gathered from a hibiscus at the botanical gardens, candles, cards, books, gifts, notes, and prayers I’d written out for my children, my family, my Buddhist love, the sociology student I dated and his friend, and others. Every night for nine months, I recited them, wishing them freedom from suffering, contentment and bliss. I placed them among notebooks, necklaces, crystals, and essential oils.

Taking and touching each item was like playing a record containing all of my life experiences during the past few years. Everything playing out in living color, as if everything I touch is the record needle, and I was playing my body’s record of the past. A life review, the kind that supposedly happens after you die. As I poured through my most meaningful possessions, all of the memories awoke in me and resounded with feeling as though they happened just yesterday.

Many of my experiences during the last few years have been extremely painful. Some memories that awoke in me were full of suffering and darkness. A troubled marriage and prolonged divorce. A long period of severe behavioral problems in my psychic six year old. Frequent illness. Six years of intense joint and muscle pain (fibromyalgia or rhematoid arthritis). The loss of my social support network. Single motherhood. The gut wrenching end of several meaningful relationships.

Reliving My Samsara

Not only did I replay sensory memories but emotional memories too. I relived thoughts, perspectives, and beliefs. The record of my samsara. You can replay the experience of seeing the world in a particular way. You can replay a belief system or a set of thoughts about life. Saturday night, I began to replay my suffering, my samsara. My body was the projection screen, and samsara was the movie.

After about sixteen hours of packing, I could no longer stand. I was exhausted and incoherent. I had forgotten to eat. I finally got my kids into bed and fell into mine. A bad dream woke me up at 3 a.m. I was in the city where my Buddhist love is on retreat, and I was wandering the streets looking for him, but he was no where to be found. I saw him briefly, but he passed by me, distracted and preoccupied by good things in his life. When I woke up, I couldn’t sleep. My body was roiling with emotion and memory, activated and sensitized.

I was too hungry to return to sleep, so I found something to munch on and turned on my computer, wandering through my frequent online pit stops. Among them, in-your-Facebook. Somehow, I soon found myself staring at photos of my Buddhist love and his very young and extremely beautiful Buddhist girlfriend kissing him on the cheek, and it hit me just how misguided my hopes had been to offer him any sort of healing or happiness. He didn’t need healing. He just needed someone else. The image and the realization cut into me hard.

I thought of the prayers I had written out for him, the ones I spoke every night. In fact, they had been answered. Answered gloriously. And yet, I was in agony. The intensity of the pain surprised me. The days of strenuous, memory-laden packing had splayed open my heart, taken me back to old times, and laid me bare to jealousy, envy, regret, and bitter grief. Here was something within me not awake.

I peered into this well of pain. I felt its pull like a gravity well in the fabric of my consciousness. Is it possible for me to get caught? It had an illusory quality, a transparency. Slowly, I fell in. The chasm stretched and opened and caught me in the realm of tormented thoughts. At first, I was just experimenting, but soon I was coiled up. I found myself at the bottom of the hole, looking around, examining the dark walls I once identified as my universe.

The sense of being alienated, left behind, and “not enough” was an ancient anguish. Much of that anguish was transformed by our friendship, but the life review brought my old belief tendencies to the surface for scrutiny. While a part of me felt intense pain, another part of me simply thought, “Hmm. Interesting.” The world we create in our own minds feels real, and then there comes a time when we see through it. The memory of delusion itself, however, is unique in the realm of conscious experience. How does one see through blindness?

Memory as a Useful Lie

Memory is essentially a recreation of experience. Simultaneously, it gives us information about the causes of our current patterns and deludes us into having experiences that are not actually happening.

On Monday, after writing about packing as a life review, I was sitting out on the terrace with my boys watching them eat ice cream cones, and I pulled out a book from my bag, The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot. I opened randomly to a section entitled, “The Vastness of Memory,” which caught my eye. In that section, Talbot discussed how the holographic brain could explain its memory capacity and the act of recall. Shine two lasers on a holographic film at just the right angles, and you recreate the image recorded by the original lasers. Similarly, he suggested that when we shine our attention on the mind in the same way, or when sensory experiences touch our mind at just the right spot, we recreate the images of our past. He mentioned that Proust once wrote of a character who was transported back in time to some early, vivid experience upon tasting tea and petite madeleines.

Everything he wrote was a very apt description of what I’ve been experiencing. This is what my hours and days of packing had done. As I poured through my possessions, I shined the light of attention on my being, like lasers directed at particular angles, and recreated images of the past in living color. In fact, any time we interact with the world, I suspect this happens, and much of what we experience is not the world itself but how the world activates the images stored in our body, memories of visions, sounds, emotions, thoughts, perspectives, beliefs, and whole living experiences.

The Man with the Needles

Late Monday night, after reading about holographic memory, my boyfriend came over, and he could tell I was carrying a lot of pain in my body. He is an acupuncturist. We met in December of 2009, about a year and a half after I dreamed that my body was a vinyl record.

He touched a pressure point on my back, behind my shoulder blades. I wailed. I was so tender there. “You know what that is?” he asked. “What?” “That’s your heart shu. It means you have heartache.” He massaged several points on my back which somehow released the pain, then he retrieved his needles and treated me for heartache.

As I lay on my bed feeling the energy in my body shift and open as the needles were going in, I started sobbing. I felt as though I could cry for days. The last four years flashed before my eyes and through my body, and I realized just how much grief I had experienced, and how truly helpless I felt to do anything right or make things better. There is nothing like realizing and deeply accepting that even your attempts to correct your mistakes were just more mistakes.

With every convulsion, the vibrations seemed to ebb from my body. My boyfriend wiped the tears from my face and drew blessing symbols over my body.

He knows my heart has suffered a lot of pain. He’s convinced that an episode of sudden, extreme heart pain that hit me in March was a heart attack. I remember that night. I clutched my chest, feeling as though a knife were lacerating my arteries, fell off the couch, broke into a sweat, and remained in contorted agony for fifteen minutes until he pushed a needle into my palm in a point known to address heart issues. The pain dissolved quickly, and he urged me to see a doctor. Physical pain. Emotional pain. My heart has been through a lot.

I started telling him about my dream, then I remembered the time he explained his philosophy of acupuncture. Months ago, he told me: “Your body is a hologram. Each point corresponds to an element of your system. The needles harmonize your chi.” Stimulating particular points causes the energy to shift and flow in ways that bring healing, peace, and joy. Just like shining lasers onto the holographic film at just the right angles. With every needle, my energy rearranges itself, shifts direction, and flows in a smooth, unified current.

My dream was about him!

About the healing power of acupuncture that would one day grace my life and transform my suffering into awakening. His ethnicity explained the unusual reference to Martin Luther King Jr. My sobbing calmed and soon I was laughing. Over the past six months, he has treated my samsara with his needles at least forty times, and every time, my whole world shifts, and my heart wakes up. Adyashanti wrote that during his tumultous awakening process, his wife, an acupuncturist, helped him immensely. Now I understand what the treatments have been doing.

The needles enabled me to dissolve the cacophany of intense body memories playing in my system. They activated new body memories, which overcame the sounds of samsara. If my body is a movie screen, and samsara is the movie, acupuncture changed the movie by creating new patterns of light on the screen. If my body was a hologram, samsara is the image created by shining two lasers on it at a particular angle, or focusing energy on particular areas of the whole, and acupuncture changed the image by shining lasers from a different angle, outshining the image of samsara, shifting the focus of energy.

Awakening to True Experience

Spiritual awakening accomplishes this same dissolution by drawing our attention to what is really happening. When your attention is filled only by what is really happening, you cannot relive the past without seeing that your experience is nothing but an empty recreation of the original image long since consumed by the void.

For nearly a year, I dated a sociology student with a bachelor’s degree in history who continuously encouraged me to dig into my past and unearth my traumas in order to cultivate a better understanding myself. Towards the end of our relationship, I had a vivid dream that he was trying to drown me in a river, my river of pain. He thought it was needed, but the past does not constrain us. Renewal happens.

I told my Buddhist love about the pain I experienced when I realized that his new relationship was fulfilling him in ways I never could. In fact, I was wrong. There was never anything insufficient about the love I offered. He explained his world to me and wished me freedom from suffering, but even before receiving his words, I was diving into this movie of samsara playing on my body, and it began to deflate. The more I tried to enter it fully, to experience and accept it, the more elusive it became. Of course the pain slipped from my fingers. It was not real. The fears lost their power. A day later, my boys sat down to watch Harry Potter, and just as I was thinking about the deflation of my fears, I walked into the room and caught the scene where a professor is waving his wand at a shape shifting entity who has taken the form of his worst fear, an illusory image of the moon. The professor says “Rediculos!” and the moon turns into a white balloon that quickly deflates as it flies around the room. All the children laugh. I laughed, too.

Look at the past when the patterns of light and darkness, flow and obstruction, that fill your body call for a story. The story can help you make sense of the patterns, enough to unravel them and see through them. But once you have seen through the images you carry, let the stories go. You don’t need them anymore. You are free right now.

This Moment is Home

2010-06-18T22:08:10-07:00

Look up. Set aside the empty box and the packing tape. The sky is a a rich gleaming yellow with a hint of orange, an alien landscape, the sunset through a passing storm. Walk out onto the asphalt driveway. The air is warm and breezy but the lingering raindrops are like ice. Turn around, look at your house, the one you are about to leave. Just above it, cradling it, is a full rainbow.

This is supposed to be a moment of change, a moment of sweeping transition, an “in between.” After six years in this city, I am moving to another state in one week. But, there is no feeling of transition in the air, no sense of that crevice between one time period and another. I am at home in this moment. Right now, I am not going anywhere. I am just putting objects into boxes. Just watching the sun shine through the storm.

The front door is still swung open. A big juicy fly wanders in for shelter, buzzing around as if in a drunken stupor. Picnic ants investigate the entry way.

“Are you moving in already,” I ask. “I am not all the way out yet.”

My feet are gritty from the wet driveway. I wander into the grass, tall and soft like shag carpet, and visit the big tree in the frontyard. The bark is spongy with moisture. I place my hand on its skin, and a faint little spider scurries from my finger. For the spider, the skin of the tree is the landscape. I scurry on the skin of the earth, the beautiful throbbing earth breathing and turning beneath my feet like a sleeping giant.

The lowest part of the field across from my house was soaked after the rain. I walked across it then stopped, and suddenly a sound like trickling water coursed through the ground about ten feet in all directions. I stomped. The trickling repeated. It sounded like a rain stick. (To play the sound, click here.) I had never observed anything like it. I stomped again, this time hunched over examining the soil, looking for signs of little tributaries of rainwater. The sound repeated, but I saw no water moving.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about the skin of Mother Earth.

Yesterday, I returned to the river, swam naked, and lifted a butterfly from my shoe. She crawled around on my hand for a long while. She dashed away and returned a few minutes later. She remained on my hand during most of my walk along the shore, nearly a quarter of a mile, at least twenty minutes. I brought my hand near my face and gazed at her. She licked my skin, dabbing away, not worried about where I was going. It was not long ago that I longed to hold a butterfly, and here she was, appeasing me.

This moment is the beloved.

Even moments that seem difficult. Days ago, I put something in my long hair that permanently damaged it. I wear it up now. I realize that I’ve stopped worrying about making my hair look perfect before I leave my house. Years ago, I would have been tossing and turning at night, my stomach in knots, wondering how long it would take to grow out. Instead, I just… I feel happy. The problem is just another mystery to be solved. Investigating chemical solutions has been… enjoyable. Learning how to braid my hair has been exquisitely pleasing. I look like a true Native American with my hair in a braid. How did something so horrible become a delight?

It is this universe… making love to me with every breath.

I think I get what is happening. It is not so much that my delusions have become quiet and dim. Rather, the real has become louder and brighter. This moment, the real, continuously outshines whatever my mind hashes up. This moment is the sun shining through my storm. The storms come but soon pass and evaporate. My mind still mutters and rambles, and it still triggers cascades of pain, but the pain has nowhere to rest, nothing to stick to. A bubble of pain will rise up and quickly pop, just simply gone. Just gone. Nothing to cling to. I look at it. I could get pulled in, but not really. I can remember what it feels like to be pulled in. Then, this gleaming sun of the real shines across my lap, and my attention is quickly diverted, and the bubble of pain just disappears, and the thoughts that gave birth to it are left baffled and empty handed, sulking away with nothing more to say. They are confused because they never get the last word, they never quite fully resolve things, and yet all is well. The more I experience this, the harder it is to get caught up in thought, so there is a snowball effect, a process that takes on a life of its own. One need only want it. I spent more than fifteen years in a meditation practice to quiet my mind, still my senses, and erode my illusions. Perhaps this layed a foundation, but the real transformation seemed to begin the moment I looked at this sun and simply said, “This is all I want.” Now, I giggle, because it is all there is. How could I logically want anything else? Nothing else is. This sun encompasses everything, contains everything. Everything you think you want is there within it, so you lose nothing.

The real seems difficult to want, because we think of the moment, and it seems at times boring or dreary or empty. But dreariness is not an intrinsic feature of what is. Dreariness and emptiness are thick layers of thought and interpretation blanketing the moment. To use a slightly risque metaphor, attending to this moment and finding only dreariness is like making love to the universe with a condom on. You’re not really tasting it.

Open. Let go. Let go of everything. Absolutely everything. Even the threat of failing at all of this, or the threat of dying, emotionally or physically. Let it all go. Open and let this moment be everything to you. You already know how. If you have ever been in love, you know how. This everything will never leave you.

Love Like You Cannot Imagine

2010-06-17T07:16:30-07:00

In Tibet, they believe that it is possible to foresee, at the beginning of a relationship, how it will unfold, what it will accomplish, and how it will end. If two people can consciously examine this at the beginning, the relationship plays out naturally and peacefully, as roles that once served a purpose fade when needs change.

My relationship of six months, which fulfilled a deep purpose when it began, is winding down. I knew in the beginning that our relationship would be temporary and shared this knowledge with my partner. As our paths diverge, our puzzle pieces seem more incongruous every day. Now… the fading. Roles shift, but the love remains.

At the same time, I notice a swelling of love on the horizon, something glowing brightly in the distance. I sense it growing, as if I were riding alone on horseback through empty fields and prairies under cold moonlight, and my journey was taking me towards a vast city of light. I can feel the warmth of it on my skin as I come closer.

Last weekend, I went dancing and bumped into a man (a.k.a., Andrew) who had once given me a glimpse of what a partner could be like. I remember the night I met him, in November of last year. My Buddhist love brought him to my house, and we watched a movie together. The moment he entered my house, a calm elation filled me, a gentleness, a kinship. We spoke all night about love and relationships. I showed him my books and tarot cards, and we sat on my living room floor as I opened the box under my altar, sharing its contents as though we were children examining treasures in a treehouse. My time with him felt so sacred. I had not seen him since that night.

When I returned home from dancing, I was overtaken with the glow on the horizon, as if all the light of that city suddenly swooped into my room and enveloped me. All I could think was, “What is this? What is this?” Imagery, visual and tactile and emotional, entered my being as though I were watching a movie, a love scene unlike anything I had ever imagined. I thought, “My god, this is what it feels like to be passionately loved.”

Can you imagine the love you want? Are you sure?

Like seeing a new color or tasting a new exotic fruit, I realized this flavor of love had never touched my tongue before. We are all so worried about pleasing a romantic partner, about being wanted and accepted, desired and chosen. As if capturing romantic love involves winning a contest. This love did not feel won. This love was unconditional, an intrinsic feature of the heart which gave it, earned only by my willingness to enter it. It contained no fear or worry, tension, struggle, or grief.

Andrew and I made plans to talk on Friday night. I was sitting on the terrace when he called. He rode out on his bicycle, and I drove out to meet him. We met up at a beautiful nature preserve on the west side where I used to meditate when I was still married. On my way over, I was overcome with intense giddy anticipation. I realized it was the same exact feeling I would get if I were on my way to the airport to pick up someone I was deeply in love with, and I hadn’t seen him in months or years, a feeling of approaching a time of enormous joy. I was so buoyant at the thought of seeing him, I couldn’t muster an adequate “what the hell” feeling. When I got out of the car and saw him walking towards me, I was unequivocally in love.

“I am in it now,” I thought. “That city of light.” The realm of the Divine Beloved. The universe itself has become my lover, and in ornament, in inseperable reflection, was this particular face. Andrew.

I felt so at home with him, like dipping my body into a warm bath, so comfortable and pleasurable you don’t notice the transition or the contrast between yourself and the water. Talking to him was like sucking honey from a flower, sweet and nourishing and perfectly natural and familiar. He has a really gentle, loving way of speaking. I could not stop gazing at his face, and he felt so present. I could feel all of his energy, plain as day, and it was glowing and blending with mine. We came within a few feet of a little bunny, watched it for a long while, then walked very gently past it, and it didn’t run away.

Why do we spend so many weeks and months and years dating people who never give us the feeling of being at home? Why do we invest so much time in people who never can put our hearts at ease? I run to the limits of exhaustion with such lovers, then I move to the comfort imparted by being unstirred. Here I was, however, both stirred and deeply at ease. I will never return to those old forms again.

Andrew told me a story. (I wish I could tell it with the same beauty. I will not do it justice.) Most of us regard the mosquito with disgust. However, one day, he said, he saw a documentary on the life cycle of the mosquito. Moquito eggs hatch in water, and the larva create a buoy of wax that floats to the surface and sticks there. They hang from the surface and create a cocoon. When ready, the newly formed adult mosquito carefully emerges from the cocoon through the buoy of wax. Slowly, the mosquito lifts into the air, unfurls its long legs, and plants them on the surface of the water. If even so much as a breeze disturbs the surface during those precious moments, the mosquito will collapse into the water and drown.

“The next time I saw a mosquito on my arm,” said Andrew, “I could not bring myself to brush it away. I just stood there watching it, so in love with this little creature, knowing how it was born.”

This is true grace. To fall in love so deeply with life that even its painful and repulsive aspects are embraced by it. I began to cry.

Andrew put his bike in my trunk, and we drove to the terrace and sat by the water at night. He pointed at a vast glowing light on the horizon on the other side of the lake. “What is that?” he asked. “Do you know?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, but when I gazed at it, I did not feel uncertainty. I felt reminded of the intuitions about my future. The future that was becoming my present.

Without thinking, I almost put my arm around him to caress him as if it was something I had done a thousand times. Even when I caught myself, I still felt very much like I could do it, and it would be received as if I had done it a thousand times.

I finally dropped him off a few blocks from his house. He reassembled his bike and embraced me. His embrace astounded me. I felt love there, but if I could carbon date it, it would be far older than one night. When I got home, I was reeling. What just happened?

Late that night, Andrew had to leave his home. The situation had grown too intense. By morning, he was living in the apartment of my Buddhist love. Ironically, I had stayed in that apartment when I first left my marriage. I helped him gather his things and offered him company in the painful days that followed.

Forming emotional bonds, experiencing passion and love for another, can lead to enormous grief when the relationship fades. I watched this grief overtake my new friend.

“How do we open to life without suffering?” he asked me. At first, I was not sure how to answer him. Something in me has transformed so radically that I am having greater difficulty describing the path from point A to point B. Initially, all I could think was, well, you just do. Why suffer? But I contemplated his question for days and finally arrived at a more adequate answer.

You open to life… then you stay open. You stay open. You fall in love, and you never fall out. Every form which inspires you to open is yet another face of the Divine Beloved, an endless stream of precious life emerging from the void.

Kindred Spirit

2010-06-14T13:25:37-07:00

A sketch of him sketching me. So strange. In my last post, I wrote about giving unexpected gifts. I mentioned how I used to draw the portraits of my friends and surprise them with it. Three days later, a new friend arrived at my house to spend time with me before my move and, out of the blue, asked if he could draw me.

We pulled out my art supplies and sat on opposite ends of the couch facing one another. Every few moments, we would both look up at the same time, staring at one another’s face, and smily shyly. He giggled when, after nearly thirty minutes of impassioned sketching, he “ruined” it. Actually it was beautiful. Granted, I looked about twenty years older, but the colors were so expressive and moving. When I turned my sketchpad around and let him see what I had done, his eyes lit up.

My new friend, there is something about him. This is the man I referred to as Andrew in “Taste of Love.” He is healing from a situation much like one I faced years ago. I realized that his real name has been rolling off my tongue for nearly a year, since before I met him.

More to come.

The Real Gift

2010-06-10T10:17:50-07:00

I spent the morning looking for a special gift for someone I will dearly miss, a glass teapot to complement the flowering teas I found for him in early March. I thought about the last time I searched for gifts to express my love, and how poorly they were received. The biggest fear while searching for a gift is that the love will not translate. Sometimes, I am overtaken with this paranoid fear that I will buy something horribly stupid, and I won’t realize it until I hand it to the other person.

Giving random gifts has always been a big part of me. When I was young, I made greeting cards and crafts for my family. I gave impromptu gifts to friends at school. Often, I would draw their portrait and surpise them with it. I just wanted to see them experience unexpected delight. On holidays, I would arrive at school with a bag of little presents for everyone I knew. Classmates who had only shared a few words with me would smile when I gave them something silly, like bath salts or chocolate. I would think, “I bet they had no idea they were special to me, and now they know.”

When I was nineteen, I baked a pumpkin pie for my boyfriend (of only two months), carried it on the bus, and walked more than a mile to bring it to his house. The filling had not quite set. It was so awful. “Here, my love… I partially baked you a pumpkin pie and walked across town with it like a lovestruck moron.” Now it just makes me laugh. That was so me.

You never know how someone will receive a gift.

But the real gift is not the object. The real gift is the time spent wandering in search of the object with nothing but kind thoughts of the other person filling your mind and stirring your heart. Expecting nothing more than a chance at giving them a moment of unforeseen happiness.

Spending two hours in the bookstore envisioning her well being, imagining her feeling recompense and a sense of being understood perhaps, wondering what would make her smile, remembering the artistic photo of her beautiful eye upon finding a book whose cover depicted perfection with the image of an eye gleaming gold with divinity. Knowing that the first words out of his mouth would probably be, “You should rip it apart,” and hoping she would. “Now that would be perfection,” I whispered.

The hours spent imagining joy or healing for someone, no matter what the actual gift, never go unreceived. The object itself may fail to convey your love or make amends, but those hours, they cannot fail. The intention that someone experience joy, they will hear it and experience it somewhere deep inside. The real gift, they receive with their heart.

My heart is pulled towards harmony, love, and mutual understanding. Not the agitated kind of pull that cannot sit with exile. A gentle, indomitable pull. Overtures of peace, both material and spiritual, are like waves of a warm sea tugging at the sand, taking immense joy in knowing that harmony will come with time.

Giving up on the dream of harmony with any particular person feels something like abandoning them, something I can’t bring myself to do. No one is an island.

Objects, on the other hand, I have about given up on. I seek them out now only to spend those precious hours in the store meditating on the delight of someone I love.

I had two beautiful packages of tea. One is now in gentle hands. The other, once intended for the Rivierra on the one day friendship seemed possible, I toss to the waves of that warm sea.