We are, at once, both student and teacher. While showing an openness to someone with divergent views, I am the student learning about a new perspective, but to an observer I am teaching the art of listening with an open mind. I am always the teacher of what "I am being" in each moment. We get hung up on the roles of student and teacher and fail to recognize that we are always occupying a position of both these processes in everything we do. Even when I am standing in front of a group explaining some arcane teaching, humility dictates that I have a responsibility to be the student of audience reactions. Otherwise I am sure to find myself lost in a cul-de-sac of hubris.
The simultaneity involved in this student/teacher process highlights our interconnectedness with whatever condition, or situation, in which we are involved. Every human situation is made up of a plethora of varying causes or conditions that constitute our life in any given moment. Whether in a conversation or simply sitting on a park bench, we can never escape our responsibility as both student and teacher.
It is in this way that we may recognize responsibility for our own karma. I am what I present to the world; and it is the condition to which others will respond. If I am feeling angry, I am that anger. My attitude, expressions, or behavior - that which I am - will teach or give birth to a response in those who come in contact with me. In this way anger or love is reborn in another, in the form appropriate to that student’s condition. Each cause (a lesson taught) is the expression of a condition (teaching) previously caused (taught and learned).
How can I even imagine that there is a boundary between being student and teacher in human society? It is a multifarious ordeal; being human. And it is for this reason that the Buddha taught that we must be the “lamp unto ourselves” and “work out our own salvation with diligence.” It takes diligent effort to recognize the nuances of how this responsibility plays out in our individual lives and those of our unsuspecting students. But it is this for which I am responsible above all else.
"Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
October 13, 2010
October 8, 2010
Reality and Truth: My Journey
"Truth is the understanding of what is from moment to moment without the burden or the residue of the past moment." - Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living
Growing up I was always skeptical of what others offered as reality and certainly what they deemed as truth though I was unable to express my own perspective on these slippery subjects. However, over the years and after long and very interesting discussions with friends, I came to a clearer understanding of what these terms mean to me. Simply stated reality is the way it is. It refers to the state or condition of each and every moment as it arises. It is my experience of the present without - and this is an important point - without any corruption by judgment, interpretation, definition, comparison, or any of the other dualistic manifestations available to human consciousness.
As such, everything is reality as-it-is; the way it is before we mentally dissect it into discreet parts and make categories that separate them. As you can imagine, living one's life as though this is the truth about reality requires more than a "little bit of work."
One might ask, “So what? Why should I even stretch myself to think about such things? It all sounds like stuff for philosophers and I need concrete things to help me with my everyday living.” And this is a perfectly valid question; one that I asked many times as I put down articles and walked away from books that broached similar subjects. This post is my attempt to offer some personal truths that have emerged as tools for me to see how, contrary to my initial assumptions, these ideas, deeply explored are valuable in finding our way through the tangled skein of illusions found in everyday life. We all must find our own way of course, and for me it has been through meditation, study, and endless discussions with fellow travelers. I share it with the reader as a tease; an introduction to what I hope will be his or her own search for…..Truth, happiness, peace, contentment, or just a better way to live.
There is an endless number of far more qualified teachers, both lay and academic, to whom the reader might ultimately want to turn for long-term leadership. My intent is simply to offer my experiences, the strength that I have found along the way, and the hope it brings each day in support of my desire to become a better human being. And for this opportunity, I am truly grateful. I owe a debt of thanks to my friend Nadine who urged me to enter the 21st. century and create this blog.
Meditation stands as the foundation of my journey and while for some the lofty goal might be Enlightenment, for me the aim is to simply change through love, tolerance, compassion, and equanimity with all that life offers. A wide range of Eastern thought and meditation continues to support my search for meaning and an understanding of the world both inside and outside my body. It has been and will continue to be a journey with no end, for I am a human being biologically tethered to a limited field of possibilities. Welcome to the labyrinthine corridors of my mind.
It is the nature of human consciousness to dissect and categorize the inherent oneness of which we are part, into discrete entities so they can be processed by our senses. This process is achieved by our dualistic apprehension of sense data and as a result, we suffer. We suffer because we are continually ill-at-ease with the changing nature of our world, be it physically, emotionally, or psychologically. We are always in a struggle with the nature of an ever-changing and therefore ambiguous, tentative, and frightening universe both in and outside our bodies. However, this existential dis-ease is not really due to the nature of a changing universe - it results from our perspective or posture in relation to it.
As I’ve said, Truth or reality is for me, the present-as-it-is before the neuro-chemical nature of our bodies deconstruct it into manageable parts - and at the same time it is also our present-moment after it has been deconstructed. I suggest that there does exist a oneness or undifferentiated whole, as well as a dualistic world which we perceive through our senses. Just as the distant planet when seen through a telescope is bright and clear yet when we search for it with the naked eye, all we find is another patch of darkness; a void....though illusory. Regardless of which “truth” we are in touch with in any moment, it is the truth nonetheless, because it is true for us, as it is, in that moment – dualistic or One.
All thoughts and ideas are merely illusions created by our dualistic mental processes. They are illusions in the sense that there is no separate, identifiable essence inherent in them. They are merely “fingers pointing to the moon” – thoughts or ideas that represent discreet parts of one, magnificent, on-going process. A process we see represented in our world by a coming and going, birth and death.
Each day, minute, or second, the mind creates abstractions from sensory data culled out from the one ongoing present moment. When I was able to recognize this process as a fact, verification seemed to arise everywhere. Clarity flashed onto the scene at a friend’s house in Lakewood, Ohio. I was sitting quietly reading a book, the subject matter now far from recollection, and it burst upon me like a meteor. I remember yelling to my friend in the kitchen, “Oh my God I understand it!” This was one of those ideas I just hadn’t been able to get my head around and had put it in storage. “Hey, I’ve got it,” I yelled again, “there is just this moment - Now is all there is.” My friend was less than impressed with the exhuberance or my insight. But I was ecstatic and tossed the idea around for hours, looking at it from all directions and thrilled as a child at Christmas. From that “Aha” I was renewed in my belief that answers would come if I could just be patient and continue to walk my path.
And then years later, I was again primed for an insight. It was New Years Eve as I recall, and if I hadn’t turned on my computer I wouldn’t have realized it. I was living at a meditation center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I had little contact with worldly events for a number of months, save for a periodic email from friends. I was learning first hand how comforting it can be to just stay focused on the present versus the mental cacophony born of the world at large.
In a rare excursion into Internet news, I read where President Ford had been laid to rest and it prompted thought once again about how life is but a continuous oneness. That it's the function our mind which creates, as Einstein said, the "optical illusion of separateness" and while it may seem as though there will always be time to create things, to do things, or go places, the fact is - we are in the future now.
I realized with a new clarity that there will come a moment when I come face to face with death, when my time has really come to an end, and all options are exhausted. When this moment arrives (and this is a bit of a misnomer because it is not the moment that arrives, but rather a situation or set of circumstances that arises as the present moment), I will look back on what are recalled as previous moments, and recognize that there is not, actually, the distance between now and then that I had imagined. Every present moment, although seemingly separated from the previous one by some imaginary expression of time, actually cradles my entire life, beginning to end. There are no starting and stopping points in this present oneness. It's awe inspiring when recognized at our deepest level - I am but awareness. Or if one prefers, consciousness is at once me and, at the very same moment, that process by which this “I” is created, extracted, out of the vast ocean of is-ness.
With the help of science, and a meditation practice, one can begin to see that boundaries are assumed to be present simply because we are unable to have a sensory experience of our actual connection to this Oneness. For instance, our ability to hear sounds or see colors is limited to a small number of wavelengths by our biology. Our bodies are biologically wired to work within specific parameters. Beyond these parameters, dictated by nature, we are unable to sense the fullness of data available. Rather than there being an end to color when we no longer see it, we have found that there are wavelengths we are just unable to process. We are unable to function at a multitude of sensory levels, and therefore have the illusion of a static boundary and so it appears there are actual, solid barriers, or boundaries between us and the rest of the world. We live our lives through this illusion of separateness. However, we do have the capacity to recognize our error (root of our suffering is after all - Ignorance) and we have the ability to transcend this limitation.
To transcend is not to make this illusion go away, but to live in harmony with it. By recognizing my inability to process all the information available, I will not put an end to suffering in the world, and it will not make life easy by removing obstacles or painful times. But it does allow me to recognize that whatever this moment holds, it is not exactly as it is perceived. And since I can never be aware of the "whole picture" it is an indication that it is likely that “the world is unfolding as it should.” (Desiderata, Max Ehrman, 1927).
I used to grapple with this idea, as though once attained it would shelter me from anxiety and stress; as though something would miraculously fall into place and all would be simplified. However I now see that this awareness is but a tool. A point of leverage allowing me to overturn the heavy burden of fear, disappointment, regret, and all manner of dissatisfaction that reside in my attachment to time and circumstance. It is then up to me to learn to accept life as it comes and not interpret whatever is happening, as somehow interfering with my life. This is my life - just as it is - now!.
One day, while pondering the notion of a timeless present, an incident came to mind that frames a recurring pattern in my thinking over the years. I was forever imagining scenarios in which I was the hero. Whether I was on the football field scoring touchdowns, winning the high school state basketball championship in the final seconds, or writing the novel that would catapult me ahead of Hemmingway as an icon of American literature. And while somewhat adolescent, these desires are not far off the norm and probably quite achievable for more of us than we imagine……… if we are willing to pay the price to achieve them.
It was after we had graduated from high school and a friend had joined the Air Force. His father was a commercial pilot and my friend loved everything about flying. We were close during those tumultuous high school years of male competition over everything from girls to who was the toughest. One spring when the annual carnival came to town he played a marching-song for our male bravado and foolishly, I allowed myself to be talked into going on a ride called The Bullet. It consisted of two bullet shaped, caged, seats that spun the riders laterally, and if that weren’t enough, these spinning bullets where attached to a long arm that fired them in a head-over-heels fashion at the same time. He loved it. I could hear him laughing and calling to me to join him in his revelry. I was petrified beyond explanation and if I had had the strength in my hands, my death grip on the bar in front of me would have been broken it in two. And years later, had he lived through the Air Force training mission in which his jet plane crashed into a ball of flames, it would have been one of the stories we repeated over and over at class reunions until others refused to listen.
When I attended his funeral I was struck by the realization that he lived every minute of his short life with an energy and focus about which I knew nothing. And while at that time I didn’t have the ability to put it into words, forty years later I recognized that what he had and I did not, was the understanding that if you want something tomorrow you have to do more than imagine it today. Every dream or project he put his mind to, he worked for in the present, while I stood on the sidelines imagining what the game might be like. He was an active participant in his life and achieved many more dreams than I in the time he was allotted.
Somehow I always assumed there would be time to do what I wanted to do..... in the future. Today I am able to see just how mistaken a notion that was. Through meditative self-inquiry and stretching, reaching, for my own understanding of life, I recognize that the notion of discreet units of time is a construction of my thinking. It’s helpful and necessary in many ways, yet false beyond that window to the world within my mind. In the material world it helps to plan, create time-lines to assist in the accomplishment of goals and to mark progress. But in the realm of the spirit or in moral development it has become clear that if I want to be something tomorrow, I must be it today. For tomorrow never comes; it is always just this moment; here, now. The notion of time leads me astray. If I desire to be loving or kind in some future time and place, it is kindness and love I must embody today. And so it is with all that I wish to be.
The one certainty, one Truth in life is change. The moments, hours, and years that we call our life is the stage upon which we, like Shakespearean actors, play out our part with the deluded certainty that our personal life and loves are special. That the suffering and betrayal we experience is somehow different than that experienced by all human beings….and this is simply not so. In the memorable words of Joseph Campbell;
“Fill circle, from the womb of the tomb to the tomb of the womb we came; an ambiguous enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us like the substance of a dream. And looking back at what promised to be our unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and women have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.” - The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Growing up I was always skeptical of what others offered as reality and certainly what they deemed as truth though I was unable to express my own perspective on these slippery subjects. However, over the years and after long and very interesting discussions with friends, I came to a clearer understanding of what these terms mean to me. Simply stated reality is the way it is. It refers to the state or condition of each and every moment as it arises. It is my experience of the present without - and this is an important point - without any corruption by judgment, interpretation, definition, comparison, or any of the other dualistic manifestations available to human consciousness.
As such, everything is reality as-it-is; the way it is before we mentally dissect it into discreet parts and make categories that separate them. As you can imagine, living one's life as though this is the truth about reality requires more than a "little bit of work."
One might ask, “So what? Why should I even stretch myself to think about such things? It all sounds like stuff for philosophers and I need concrete things to help me with my everyday living.” And this is a perfectly valid question; one that I asked many times as I put down articles and walked away from books that broached similar subjects. This post is my attempt to offer some personal truths that have emerged as tools for me to see how, contrary to my initial assumptions, these ideas, deeply explored are valuable in finding our way through the tangled skein of illusions found in everyday life. We all must find our own way of course, and for me it has been through meditation, study, and endless discussions with fellow travelers. I share it with the reader as a tease; an introduction to what I hope will be his or her own search for…..Truth, happiness, peace, contentment, or just a better way to live.
There is an endless number of far more qualified teachers, both lay and academic, to whom the reader might ultimately want to turn for long-term leadership. My intent is simply to offer my experiences, the strength that I have found along the way, and the hope it brings each day in support of my desire to become a better human being. And for this opportunity, I am truly grateful. I owe a debt of thanks to my friend Nadine who urged me to enter the 21st. century and create this blog.
Meditation stands as the foundation of my journey and while for some the lofty goal might be Enlightenment, for me the aim is to simply change through love, tolerance, compassion, and equanimity with all that life offers. A wide range of Eastern thought and meditation continues to support my search for meaning and an understanding of the world both inside and outside my body. It has been and will continue to be a journey with no end, for I am a human being biologically tethered to a limited field of possibilities. Welcome to the labyrinthine corridors of my mind.
It is the nature of human consciousness to dissect and categorize the inherent oneness of which we are part, into discrete entities so they can be processed by our senses. This process is achieved by our dualistic apprehension of sense data and as a result, we suffer. We suffer because we are continually ill-at-ease with the changing nature of our world, be it physically, emotionally, or psychologically. We are always in a struggle with the nature of an ever-changing and therefore ambiguous, tentative, and frightening universe both in and outside our bodies. However, this existential dis-ease is not really due to the nature of a changing universe - it results from our perspective or posture in relation to it.
As I’ve said, Truth or reality is for me, the present-as-it-is before the neuro-chemical nature of our bodies deconstruct it into manageable parts - and at the same time it is also our present-moment after it has been deconstructed. I suggest that there does exist a oneness or undifferentiated whole, as well as a dualistic world which we perceive through our senses. Just as the distant planet when seen through a telescope is bright and clear yet when we search for it with the naked eye, all we find is another patch of darkness; a void....though illusory. Regardless of which “truth” we are in touch with in any moment, it is the truth nonetheless, because it is true for us, as it is, in that moment – dualistic or One.
All thoughts and ideas are merely illusions created by our dualistic mental processes. They are illusions in the sense that there is no separate, identifiable essence inherent in them. They are merely “fingers pointing to the moon” – thoughts or ideas that represent discreet parts of one, magnificent, on-going process. A process we see represented in our world by a coming and going, birth and death.
Each day, minute, or second, the mind creates abstractions from sensory data culled out from the one ongoing present moment. When I was able to recognize this process as a fact, verification seemed to arise everywhere. Clarity flashed onto the scene at a friend’s house in Lakewood, Ohio. I was sitting quietly reading a book, the subject matter now far from recollection, and it burst upon me like a meteor. I remember yelling to my friend in the kitchen, “Oh my God I understand it!” This was one of those ideas I just hadn’t been able to get my head around and had put it in storage. “Hey, I’ve got it,” I yelled again, “there is just this moment - Now is all there is.” My friend was less than impressed with the exhuberance or my insight. But I was ecstatic and tossed the idea around for hours, looking at it from all directions and thrilled as a child at Christmas. From that “Aha” I was renewed in my belief that answers would come if I could just be patient and continue to walk my path.
And then years later, I was again primed for an insight. It was New Years Eve as I recall, and if I hadn’t turned on my computer I wouldn’t have realized it. I was living at a meditation center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I had little contact with worldly events for a number of months, save for a periodic email from friends. I was learning first hand how comforting it can be to just stay focused on the present versus the mental cacophony born of the world at large.
In a rare excursion into Internet news, I read where President Ford had been laid to rest and it prompted thought once again about how life is but a continuous oneness. That it's the function our mind which creates, as Einstein said, the "optical illusion of separateness" and while it may seem as though there will always be time to create things, to do things, or go places, the fact is - we are in the future now.
I realized with a new clarity that there will come a moment when I come face to face with death, when my time has really come to an end, and all options are exhausted. When this moment arrives (and this is a bit of a misnomer because it is not the moment that arrives, but rather a situation or set of circumstances that arises as the present moment), I will look back on what are recalled as previous moments, and recognize that there is not, actually, the distance between now and then that I had imagined. Every present moment, although seemingly separated from the previous one by some imaginary expression of time, actually cradles my entire life, beginning to end. There are no starting and stopping points in this present oneness. It's awe inspiring when recognized at our deepest level - I am but awareness. Or if one prefers, consciousness is at once me and, at the very same moment, that process by which this “I” is created, extracted, out of the vast ocean of is-ness.
With the help of science, and a meditation practice, one can begin to see that boundaries are assumed to be present simply because we are unable to have a sensory experience of our actual connection to this Oneness. For instance, our ability to hear sounds or see colors is limited to a small number of wavelengths by our biology. Our bodies are biologically wired to work within specific parameters. Beyond these parameters, dictated by nature, we are unable to sense the fullness of data available. Rather than there being an end to color when we no longer see it, we have found that there are wavelengths we are just unable to process. We are unable to function at a multitude of sensory levels, and therefore have the illusion of a static boundary and so it appears there are actual, solid barriers, or boundaries between us and the rest of the world. We live our lives through this illusion of separateness. However, we do have the capacity to recognize our error (root of our suffering is after all - Ignorance) and we have the ability to transcend this limitation.
To transcend is not to make this illusion go away, but to live in harmony with it. By recognizing my inability to process all the information available, I will not put an end to suffering in the world, and it will not make life easy by removing obstacles or painful times. But it does allow me to recognize that whatever this moment holds, it is not exactly as it is perceived. And since I can never be aware of the "whole picture" it is an indication that it is likely that “the world is unfolding as it should.” (Desiderata, Max Ehrman, 1927).
I used to grapple with this idea, as though once attained it would shelter me from anxiety and stress; as though something would miraculously fall into place and all would be simplified. However I now see that this awareness is but a tool. A point of leverage allowing me to overturn the heavy burden of fear, disappointment, regret, and all manner of dissatisfaction that reside in my attachment to time and circumstance. It is then up to me to learn to accept life as it comes and not interpret whatever is happening, as somehow interfering with my life. This is my life - just as it is - now!.
One day, while pondering the notion of a timeless present, an incident came to mind that frames a recurring pattern in my thinking over the years. I was forever imagining scenarios in which I was the hero. Whether I was on the football field scoring touchdowns, winning the high school state basketball championship in the final seconds, or writing the novel that would catapult me ahead of Hemmingway as an icon of American literature. And while somewhat adolescent, these desires are not far off the norm and probably quite achievable for more of us than we imagine……… if we are willing to pay the price to achieve them.
It was after we had graduated from high school and a friend had joined the Air Force. His father was a commercial pilot and my friend loved everything about flying. We were close during those tumultuous high school years of male competition over everything from girls to who was the toughest. One spring when the annual carnival came to town he played a marching-song for our male bravado and foolishly, I allowed myself to be talked into going on a ride called The Bullet. It consisted of two bullet shaped, caged, seats that spun the riders laterally, and if that weren’t enough, these spinning bullets where attached to a long arm that fired them in a head-over-heels fashion at the same time. He loved it. I could hear him laughing and calling to me to join him in his revelry. I was petrified beyond explanation and if I had had the strength in my hands, my death grip on the bar in front of me would have been broken it in two. And years later, had he lived through the Air Force training mission in which his jet plane crashed into a ball of flames, it would have been one of the stories we repeated over and over at class reunions until others refused to listen.
When I attended his funeral I was struck by the realization that he lived every minute of his short life with an energy and focus about which I knew nothing. And while at that time I didn’t have the ability to put it into words, forty years later I recognized that what he had and I did not, was the understanding that if you want something tomorrow you have to do more than imagine it today. Every dream or project he put his mind to, he worked for in the present, while I stood on the sidelines imagining what the game might be like. He was an active participant in his life and achieved many more dreams than I in the time he was allotted.
Somehow I always assumed there would be time to do what I wanted to do..... in the future. Today I am able to see just how mistaken a notion that was. Through meditative self-inquiry and stretching, reaching, for my own understanding of life, I recognize that the notion of discreet units of time is a construction of my thinking. It’s helpful and necessary in many ways, yet false beyond that window to the world within my mind. In the material world it helps to plan, create time-lines to assist in the accomplishment of goals and to mark progress. But in the realm of the spirit or in moral development it has become clear that if I want to be something tomorrow, I must be it today. For tomorrow never comes; it is always just this moment; here, now. The notion of time leads me astray. If I desire to be loving or kind in some future time and place, it is kindness and love I must embody today. And so it is with all that I wish to be.
The one certainty, one Truth in life is change. The moments, hours, and years that we call our life is the stage upon which we, like Shakespearean actors, play out our part with the deluded certainty that our personal life and loves are special. That the suffering and betrayal we experience is somehow different than that experienced by all human beings….and this is simply not so. In the memorable words of Joseph Campbell;
“Fill circle, from the womb of the tomb to the tomb of the womb we came; an ambiguous enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us like the substance of a dream. And looking back at what promised to be our unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and women have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.” - The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
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