Another Mary Oliver Monday
Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light,
are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,
the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue
shoulders of the ponds,
and every pond, no matter what its name is,
is nameless now.
Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this:
the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(image from: Slope in a Forest on Attersee Lake, by Gustav Klimt)
Just Right
I’ll probably finalized my flight plans today for the January trip to Burma (Myanmar), in honor of which I post this sample teaching from Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who leads the Shwe Oo Min meditation center where I will be staying in Yangon.
“Keep your mind as calm and as relaxed as possible, not too tense or not too lax. Don’t be anxious about your practice. The mind needs to be able to adjust accordingly, walking the middle road between too much and too little effort, neither overzealous nor disinterested. The wise mind makes adjustments as needed during meditation.
“Sometimes, even with all this fine-tuning, there might still be craving. You may also find that you are feeling drowsy even with faith and confidence in the mind. The mind may still be weak or there may be a great deal of wanting and expectations in the mind. Be calm and relaxed.
“What can you know? It’s very simple. You can only know as much as the momentum that you have will allow. There is no need to put too much energy or to focus in on something. Take the view that everything happening in the mind and body is happening according to nature. This is all dhamma nature at work.”
“Keep it simple! It’s good if there is knowing; it’s not good if there is no knowing. There is a Burmese saying: ‘Ignorance is worse than being deprived.’ But far worse than being ignorant is not wanting to know!“
(image from: Maddonni Tarot)
Think About It
Continuing from Friday’s post on Training in Compassion by poet and Zen priest Norman Fischer:
Another way to Train in the Preliminaries is to deeply and systematically contemplate a set of four traditional reflections. Fischer writes, “If you really take these seriously, if you really think about them long enough and hard enough to see how true they really are, it will change your outlook on life, and you will have found the motivation to begin again.” The reflections are:
The rarity and preciousness of human life.
“Your living body is a fortunate, rare, and precious gift, and your human mind–consciousness risen to the point where there can be identity and value and thought and beauty and autonomous choice–is dear beyond compare.”
The inevitability of death.
“Most of us believe we don’t have to worry about this…because death comes in old ago, and since we are not now so old, it’s not a problem for us. But death doesn’t come only in old age, it comes at any age, and nobody knows when. And even if it were to come in old age, old age comes much more quickly than you thought it would: you were young, you blinked your eyes, thirty or forty years flew by, and now you are no longer young….This is a serious problem, and it’s a problem now, not later.”
The awesome and indelible power of our actions.
“In Buddhism this is called karma, which is not mystical or fatalistic. Karma simply means that each of our actions produces a result. And this means every action, both large and small. All of our thoughts, words, and deeds have consequences, and we may never know the measure of these consequences though they are extensive and powerful. In other words, every moment of our lives…..we have been affecting the world in some subtle yet real way; every moment, we have been participating in creating the world that now exists for ourselves and others.”
The inescapability of suffering.
“Although we don’t like to think about ti, it seems that sorrow and suffering are inevitable in any human life, even a happy one. There’s the suffering of loss, of disappointment, of disrespect; the suffering of physical pain, illness, old age; the suffering of broken relationships, of wanting something badly and not being able to have it, or not wanting something and being stuck with it….These things are part of life. No one can avoid suffering.”
The point of contemplating these four reflections is that they will cause us to “appreciate the seriousness of our human condition and to recognize that we have to live as seriously as we possibly can in response to the gift and the problem that is our life.”
(image from: Phantasmagoric Theater Tarot)
Thanks for Everything
Last night at the Dharma Seed KM Group, we listened to a talk by my teacher, Lila Kate Wheeler, titled: The World of Experience. Lila is also a travel writer and novelist, and she often uses poems as part of her talks…but not just from the standard “dharma talk” poets.
Last night, she included this poem from John Giorno, an AIDS activist who spent a lot of time with Andy Warhol and friends.
Thanks for Nothing, by John Giorno
I want to give my thanks to everyone
for everything
And as a token of my appreciation
I want to offer back to you
All my good and bad habits —
magnificent, priceless jewels,
wish-fullfilling gems,
satisfying your every need and want
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
May all the chocolate I every ate
come rushing through your blood stream…
make you feel happy.
I give enormous thanks to all my lovers,
beautiful men with brilliant minds
and great artists.
May they come here and now
and make love to you.
May they hold you in their arms….
if you are attracted to any of them.
May they come back from the dead and do whatever is your pleasure.
Huge hugs to all the friends who betrayed me.
Big kisses to all the loves that failed.
I delight that your vacuum cleaner is sucking everything into your dirtbag.
You are none other than a reflection
of my own mind.
And America, thanks for the neglect.
I did it all without you.
Let us celebrate that you and I
never really existed.
Thanks for introducing me
to the face of my own naked mind.
Thanks for nothing.
(image from: Paper Source)
Mary Oliver Monday
How about a little Mary Oliver to start the week off right:
Grass, by Mary Oliver
Those who disappointed, betrayed, scarified! Those who
would still put their hands upon me! Those who belong
to the past!
How many of us have weighted the years with groaning and
weeping? How many years have I done it how many nights
spent panting hating grieving, oh, merciless, pitiless remembrances!
I walk over the green hillsides, I lie down on the harsh, sun-
flavored blades and bundles of grass; the grass cares nothing
about me, it doesn’t want anything from me, it rises to its
own purpose, and sweetly, following the single holy dictum:
to be itself, to let the sky be the sky, to let a young girl
be a young girl freely–to let a middle-aged woman be, comfortably, a middle-aged woman.
Those bloody sharps and flats–those endless calamities of
the personal past. Bah! I disown them from the rest of my
life, in which I mean to rest.
(image: Landscape by Paul Gauguin)
Start Now
I’ve discovered a terrific new book by poet and Zen priest, Norman Fischer. It’s called Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong. Basically, he’s taken the 59 “slogans” used for reflection in the Tibetan Lojong practice and given them a contemporary, cross-traditional rendering that I find quite refreshing.
The first slogan is: Train in the Preliminaries. He describes three ways to understand and practice with this slogan, including the fundamental direction to:
Start a meditation practice, a daily practice if possible, and trust that sitting regularly with attention on your breathing and the feeling in your body will provide the spiritual inspiration and force necessary to set a new process in motion in your life.
He also gives very clear instructions for basic meditation practice, including this lovely summation:
Meditation is, fundamentally, sitting with the basic feeling of being alive. What is the basic feeling of being alive? Being conscious, embodied, and breathing. That is actually what it feels like to be alive. Every moment of your life, and all of your feelings, thoughts, and accomplishments, depend on this, but most of us hardly ever notice it. In meditation our task is just to be present with this and nothing else. Simply sitting aware of the feeling of being alive.
…Essentially, it is nothing more than sitting with an honest awareness of the process of your life. While such awareness may seem exactly like the self-consciousness we usually feel in daily living, meditation practice will show us that it is in fact subtly but crucially different in that is is nonjudgmental and all-inclusive awareness.
This nonjudgmental and all-inclusive awareness, promoted and developed by meditation practice but more than meditation practice, will help us eventually understand and put into practice the wisdom and flexibility to deal with the events of our lives, and with others.
(image from: A Whole World, by Couprie and Louchard)
2013
Postcard from Burma: Bagan
Travel plans are starting to firm up for the Dedicated Practitioner trip to Burma, which will include a 5-night stay in Bagan. Here’s what Lonely Planet has to say:
Why go?
Marco Polo, who may or may not have visited on his travels, describes Bagan as “one of the finest sights in the world”. Despite centuries of neglect, looting, erosion, regular earthquakes (including a massive one in 1975), not to mention questionable restoration, this temple-studded plain remains a remarkably impressive and unforgettable vision.
In a 230-year building frenzy up until 1287 and the Mongol invasions, Bagan’s kings commissioned over 4000 Buddhist temples. These brick and stucco religious structures are all that remain of their grand city, with the 11th to 13th century wooden buildings having long gone.
Many restoration projects have resulted in a compromised archaeological site that can barely be describes as in ruins. Often the restorations bear little relation to the building systems and techniques used at the time of original construction. Still, Bagan remains a wonder. Working temples like Anada Pahto give a sense of what the place was like at its zenith while others conceal colorful murals and hidden stairways that lead to exterior platforms and jaw-dropping views across the plain.
Stage Three: Transparency
Continuing from Dancing with Life, by Phillip Moffitt:
“The third stage of awareness, when your mind becomes transparent to ordinary reality, represents the total realization of cessation. At this stage, you are no longer dancing with life, for you are not organized in the ordinary human realm anymore. You are resting in the absolute and have become a direct part of the mystery that illuminates all of ordinary reality. You have achieved the deathless.
“When your mind has realized cessation and become transparent to ordinary reality, you experience all the moments of your existence as equal and meet them with tranquility and compassion. When a moment is pleasant, tender, or beautiful, you receive it as just that; your mind has no inclination to make it you or yours, and there is no clinging to it….Likewise, when a challenging physical or emotional situation arises, or you are confronted with pain and loss, your mind has no inclination to contract; it remains open, available, and calm…..You don’t object to how it is, and you don’t demand that the pain go away, or for life to be other than it is….You are free; you have experienced the sure heart’s release that the Buddha promised.
“…The full realized of cessation results in a fundamental change in consciousness to pure awareness and the realization of emptiness that transcends the ego personality. This core shift is beyond words because your being is essentially reorganized. You are transparent to the delusion of ordinary reality. You are in nibbana.
“…Although this stage of transparency is beyond your personality, the luminous mind shines forth through your personality. Because your mind has awakened and become transparent to this pure awareness, it is now part of that great impersonal illuminating source of all life.”
Wow.
Stage Two: Transcending the Ego
More from Dancing with Life, by Phillip Moffitt:
To reach the transcending-the-ego stage [of awareness], you continue to practice, but now you have your transformed ego as a foundation, so you create less suffering, encounter less inner resistance, and have more faith…
At this stage of liberation you cease to primarily identify with your ego sense of self. You are not suddenly a perfect person; you still have your quirks and shortcomings, but you are not longer thinking, speaking, or acting in ways that are likely to cause harm to yourself or others.
…The particulars of how your transcendence manifests do not really matter. What matters is that you have transcended ego. Therefore, in relating to life, you spontaneously and consistently respond to what is called for, and you do so from a sense of being part of the mystery of the unfolding of your life rather than from your ego. You have not become someone new–you have become more your true nature.
…Many people believe that transcending the ego is the highest human potential. At this stage of being, you cease to identify with the duality that arises in your mind, although there is a “knower” (the subject) and “that which is known” (the object). You are still dancing with life, but the dance is not longer a struggle; it is effortless and natural because you have stopped clinging.
Tomorrow: Stage Three (when your mind becomes transparent to ordinary reality)
Stage One: Transforming the Ego
The “Dancing with Life” KM Group meets tonight and we’ll be discussing the Three Stages of Realization: Transformation, Transcendence, and Transparency described by Phillip Moffitt (in Dancing with Life pages 197-206 in the hardback edition).
Here’s what Phillip has to say about Stage One:
At first your inner changes simply mean that you are becoming psychologically or emotionally healthier….But you intuitively know your journey is about something larger than just creating a healthier ego; therefore, you stick to your practice. What are at first just shifts in your thinking and behavior gradually and cumulatively amount to substantive changes in how your mind is organized, and you enter a new state of development.
You realize that your suffering is the result of the way you are, not the way the world is. You know you know this is true, not because someone told you or you read it in a book, but because you feel it in your body. This direct knowing transforms you within your ego structure…
Once you reach the ego transformation stage of awareness, you feel a sense of ease with life and selflessness that makes you more available to others….You continue to be organized around your ego, but the ego’s identity is transformed, therefore, much of its focus is on wholesome behavior and serving others….
At this stage of spiritual maturity, cessation means you have ceased being self-referencing. You are much less tormented by greed, ill will, and delusion. Despite whatever flaws you may have at present, you are capable of achieving genuine ego transformation…..
If you are exceptionally motivated, you realize at some point that you could spend your entire life exploring and developing within the transformed ego stage and you would still not be free. Therefore, you do not lose the thread of your inspiration. You stay connected to your deeper calling–your heart’s full liberation.
So you persistently practice noting clinging and nonclinging and witnessing arising and passing of phenomena. You can imagine that transcending the ego might be possible. You are not clinging to a desire for transcendence, it is a natural progression; the mind and heart spontaneously move in this direction.
Which takes you to Stage Two. More on that tomorrow.