Feeling With

"Feeling with" - compassion - is often made difficult by an inability to envision many feelings sharing the same present. The sudden, painless death of a dearly beloved, handicapped 90-year-old parent from overeating at a holiday dinner can at one and the same time provoke grief, joy, and humor. Similarly, sadness shared with suffering humanity must share the joy and humor of its songs, its wisdom, and its hilariously ridiculous follies.

Winter Solstice

An imagined moment of a planet's pause; an instant of fancy, frivolity and forgiveness as life has already moved on.

Kindness

Kindness is a child of joy and serenity, not trumpets and thunder. Chuckle, and others will as well.

Life is an Artist

Life is an artist, and its most magnificent paintings require the canvas of silence.

Beauty

Beauty is not a quality of an object "out there." It is a quality of the mood "in here." Attentiveness is one thing, and a very important thing. One attends closely to the objects and people painted on the inside of one's head, if one is wise. Beauty, on the other hand, is created by one's mood - a mood which seeks to bestow enrichments upon the life one is, in the continuous present. This mood comes upon one only if one moves slowly. "Busyness" is always the thief of beauty, an opaque screen obscuring life.

My Body

It is unsettling enough to discover that there is no soul or self to be an “identity.” Then comes the perception that "my body" is, in fact, “contained” within a quite arbitrary and imaginary line, drawn around a cloud of whirling energy, which is actually changing constantly and which extends outward to include “all that is”, whatever that means. Awareness can truly be a bother.

Awareness

Perceptions are being electronically created constantly in the brain; but, they are not awareness. They are “that of which awareness is aware.” Thoughts usually inhibit awareness, and thoughts are constantly created by the whirling electronic cloud called the brain. As long as “you” feel these thoughts are “you”, they proliferate like a fungus. That is why Zen says, “when thoughts arise, take note of them, and then let them go.” Thoughts will keep happening; it is awareness which must avoid attachment. Just as you need not control your intestine, neither need you control your brain. Attach yourself to your thoughts and awareness will miss the butterfly.

Fear

The belief that one is one’s story provokes, among many other desires, the desperate desire that it be the best conceivable story; the belief is a “clinging” to an imagined future. The emotion produced by this is an incessant fear - fear that one will not have sufficient food; fear that one will be attacked; fear that if one does not attack first (preemptive violence) one’s story may end with “losing.” This identification with a story is probably the cause of most suffering.

Science

Science is the most mystical and the most tentative of religions. It’s leap of faith is the belief that there is a “real” world out there which may only be guessed at, constantly, because there are no “facts” nor “truth”. Truth is merely a tentative hypothesis which will not be the same from one instant to the next, if the faithful are loyal practitioners. Science is a faith which believes that nothing can be “proven”, and one which forsakes the rational for the mystical and experiential. Other faiths have a very difficult time dealing with its mysticism, as well as with the passion of its adherents.

Atheism

To the classical Greeks, this was the condition of an injured or missing relationship with the gods. Only in modern times has it taken on the meaning of a belief that no gods exist. This belief is a leap of faith, which makes Atheism a religion.

Theism

Theism is a religious conviction based upon a leap of faith that there exists a being, or force, or spirit, which has been, and is, in some way actively concerned with, and active within, the universe we imagine. This Theos (God) is imagined as a super human being. Theists will sometimes generate elaborate and ornate language to avoid anthropomorphism, but this is relatively futile, and they almost always lapse into "Him"” and "Her" and "God's left hand" and "God's will." Theism is derived from the classical Greek, but its usage is surprisingly recent in western civilization, no earlier than the 16th century.

Imagination

Electrical data in a human brain is crafted into sounds, colors, odors, flavors, tactile touches, memories, ideas, hopes, dreams, emotions, beliefs, bawdy jokes, mystical experiences and music. Imagination is the term used to designate the faculty which creates these images. It works on its own, thankfully, just as one does not need to direct one’s heart to beat. In spite of this, "we" like to take credit for all of this and brag about it. Ah, well.

Beliefs

Beliefs are certainties which are neither chosen nor proven. Someone asks me, “Do you believe that, at this moment, a giraffe is at the North Pole singing an aria?” I glance at the inside of my skull and reply, “No.” “Will you believe it if I give you $500,000 dollars?” “No, I can’t.” “If I threaten you with death if you don’t?” “No. I can lie, but I simply don’t believe it. Not at this moment.”

Agnosticism

Agnosticism is a position which holds that one does not know with certainty whether a god exists or not. All humans are agnostics, because the position has to do with knowledge, certainty, irrefutability. It is a buzz word. Theism and Atheism have to do with belief, which is quite a different kettle of chile. They are great, unchosen, kangaroo leaps of faith. To live is to constantly bounce.

Hate and Love

The whirling positive and negative and neutral nothingnesses which paint a world inside our head can suddenly be painted in such a way as to undeniably persuade our imaginations of the reality of the “outside.” That outside can confirm the unworthiness of parts of ourselves which we despise, or explode with confirmation of a grandeur within us sealed now in majestic identity with the “loved” - a wife, a child, a river, a mountain, an iguana, the victimized, or a universe itself. These words are used so recklessly and carelessly they eat up their meanings.

Life

“Life” is a word used to designate the awareness of perceptions. While one knows only one’s own, it is probable that awareness is everywhere, in everything, on all levels - that rocks are aware, and trees, and each leaf, and my liver, and Mars. The illusory reality pieced together from that awareness must be infinitely complex and varied. The reality a rock pieces together must be quite different from my own, but comfortably adequate and rather pleasant for the rock. I wonder what electrons think.

Death

This is a concept purporting to describe a state or condition which no known human being has ever experienced. “Is there life after death?” This is a favorite spooky question asked again and again. It can not be answered for the same reason that one can not answer, “Is there death before life?” Human beings experience only life. Everything is life. These questions are nonsense questions. If one could experience death, one would need to be living to do so. “All life is experienced as suffering,” is alleged to be the First Noble Truth of the legendary Siddartha. One might well say, with the vaudeville comedian, “As long as you’re hurting, friend, you know for certain that you’re still alive.”

Space

Invisible, whirling, subatomic phenomena are pieced together into an instantly created mural of height, and breadth, and length, and mountains, and oceans, and a planet, and galaxies. Ponder the dimensions of which we know nothing, the way an instant would be perceived had we the 38 or 97 or 348 senses not included in the limited moments of a pitifully short-lived homo sapiens sapiens subspecies.

Time

Time exists only as a theory. The present is permanent. The past and future are imagined, the first to explain, and the last to justify, a “self” imagined to be in some kind of transit. The present requires no more explanation nor justification than is required of the oak, its roots and tendrils expanding to absorb the sun, the oceans and the earth. and the thrush which sings upon its branch.

Illusory Dangers

Given the nonexistent and illusory nature of the "self" or "atman", when taken anywhere it is wiser if the destination is "with a grain of salt" rather than "seriously." The latter imaginary kingdom is noted for mandated crowns, robes, degrees, clerical serapes, titles, wars and genocides.

Rainbows

Rainbows are sheer illusions, as is the self. If you pierce them, you will find nothing there. It is important to know that rainbows, and flowers, and birds, and selves are illusory. It is also important to embrace and enjoy all illusions. Otherwise one will miss out on rainbows, and flowers, and birds, and selves, and will become what has been called a “stone Buddha." As well, one will be experienced by the illusions around one as a silly person. Or even be run over by a car.

Foregrounds and Backgrounds

Listening to music requires that it be shifted into foreground. All else is background against which it may be defined. It recedes to background when needed to define the food or work or rainbows drawn now into foreground. This awareness is always defined by unawareness; the miraculous requires the mundane, and the two are a single one.

Rebirth of the No-Self! Wow!

As best as a human brain can imagine, a present happens instantly and goes to be replaced by another. The new is shaped by, and comes from, the present which preceded it. Restricted by merely five paltry senses of perhaps thousands, trapped in three dimensions of perhaps ten thousands, the brain imagines its visions to be “how it really is”; the truth. It is doubtful that a snail imagines Harvard library, or the Rocky Mountains. Like us, it is reborn with each present and rediscovers that snails have the truly true word. And there the snail is, another piece of “me.” How splendid! No death, no rebirth, only life and rainbows.

Sitting

If and when Siddartha Gautama spoke to groups of people, the people would have been seated on the ground cross-legged. That was how they sat all of the time. Their robes were very coarse, everyday work clothes, and they could afford no cushions. For someone to duplicate this today she would put on her grubbiest Levi's and plump her bottom on a hard wooden chair and try not to fidget if she were too far to hear clearly. If she couldn't hear or got bored and stared at the sky or birds, she would have invented "zazen."

Whoop

“Human brains” appear to be sensory organs which can sense the invisible sparks snapping across synapses - empty spaces - between nerves. “Imagination” is the word for the compulsive sorting and piecing of these sensations, correctly or incorrectly, rather like someone doing a jigsaw puzzle. There are the same kind of whoop moments when suddenly the image worked on changes from a bear into an elk and the pieces suddenly fall into place. Because "enlightenment" and "satori" and "nirvana" have become terribly popular buzzwords, from here on they will all be replaced by the word "whoop." Whoop is neither mystical nor exotic nor spooky; it is merely that when it happens it destroys one imagined universe and replaces it with quite another.

Meditation

Meditation is a perspective, all too easily sought for - desired - in fashionable silent sitting or walking. Maintained as a discipline, rather than sought, this perspective is sustained in the practices of grocery shopping, writing checks, driving, mowing grass, cooking, playing with children, arguing with adolescents, clipping toenails, emptying trash, or battling through a mall. Zen gardens are for gardening, not for yearnings.

Joy

Joy is a quality exploding out of a shift in perception which reveals suffering, desire, and illusions to be as fitting and appropriate to this imagined present as are dandelions, horses, breezes or sunsets. When this shift takes place, it reveals joy and despair to be the wings of a single butterfly, and “enlightenment” to be an hilarious buzzword.

Wisdom

Primary wisdom is silence - or speech, or writing, or action. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.” This sentence has been written and spoken many times, and so it is not the true Tao. Wisdom is merely how the unenlightened perceive the varied words and writings and actions of the enlightened. The enlightened do not perceive wisdom, for it is ordinary. Watch cats.

Friendship

All of these invisible, whirling quarks and protons and neutrons and their antimatter equivalents paint mental images perceived as human beings. In the immediate present of the enlightened, they are intriguing, and are both noticed and attended to. This is a characteristic recognized as friendship, where listening increasingly transcends speaking. In a state of suffering, on the other hand, these images are hardly noticed, or they are ignored, or they are totally absent, unless they seem of some utility or advantage.

Patience

There is only the present. Impatience can only be experienced if something is “yet to happen.” That something is in a “future.” It is a dream which can never happen, for as much as it is pursued, it remains a vision which is an imaginary, frustrating goal to which the impatient cling. Only the impatient can perceive, and long for, patience as an achievement to seek. Patience is a quality which merely proceeds from the enlightened.

Compassion

As is true of all of the Buddhist virtues, compassion is never a pathway toward, nor a strategy for obtaining, the gradual achievement of enlightenment. Enlightenment is never gradual but, rather, instantaneous. A flash of lightening. Once enlightenment happens, compassion then proceeds, as does the scent from a fully bloomed lilac tree, or as the cries of the starving. Compassion is "feeling with." This contrasts with "feeling sorry for" the suffering of others. It is feeling with, for there is no more "other."

Humor

Humor almost always involves a sudden shift of perception, looking at something from an entirely different perspective. It is an effect of enlightenment, and it is a cause of enlightenment, and it is enlightenment. Laughter is the sound of letting go. It can not happen if the "self" is taken seriously.

Serenity

Serenity is a product of enlightenment, not a path to it. The same is true of joy, wisdom, equanimity, compassion, friendship, humor, and patience. Enlightenment does not come as a product of some discipline or path or duty. Such a position has been compared with one that polishing a stone long enough will produce a mirror.

No Self

There is no self. There is a self which observes the no self, and that self is also not a self. Being a frail tool of an incredibly young species, limited to five senses and completely frozen between an imaginary past and an imaginary future, it is not surprising that language can never express any but the most narrow, simplistic, and contradictory "reality." Perhaps it does so best with humor.

Illusions

To be both simplistic and blunt, such whirling phenomena as electrons, protons, quarks and other peculiarities paint a picture of your present universe on the inside of your brain. It is from these that you "imagine" a model which you call "out there." It is this illusionary character of "out there" which creates the illusion of an out-there, in-here duality - that "you" are different from "out-there." That is why, mythically, the Buddhists said the Buddha's mother was named "Maya" - "illusion" - and she died in giving birth to Siddartha. It was a witty play on words, but instructive.

Stories

You are not your story. Your story is something you make up for the moment. You make up one story for your father, a different story for your daughter, and a different story yet for your employer. Here in the present, you make up yet a different story for yourself with each new present. When you suddenly step back and laugh at yourself, the self that is laughing is laughing at the self which is the story. Both "selves" are illusory and imagined.

Beginnings

We imagine ourselves living constantly between an imagined past and and imagined future. We rarely stop to perceive that the nowhere, the razor edge, upon which we live is imagined as well.