Reflections

 See the fowls of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they? (Mathhew 6:26) Like one in water crying I thirst (Hakuin; Chant in Praise ofZazen) There’s a leak in the roof and a crack in the foundation.   You’re single and alone with no money and two kids to feed.   You have no idea what you’re going to do.   It’s a disaster and you just want to die. There are two things I’ve found helpful in these kinds of situations.    The first is to expect that things will get worse before they get better.   I am not sure why this is but, when you expect that things can’t possibly get any worse, they usually do.   It’s a bit like when you’re in a heat wave and the forecast keeps promising thunderstorms to break the oppressive humidity but the rain never comes and the air just keeps getting heavier and heavier.   As the days go by...

 It’s not hard to find the truth.  What’s hard is not running away from it once you’ve found it. ~ anonymous     “This is not a social occasion!” barked the old man as he gripped his nyoi* .  I had just fumbled through the ritual of closing the door and bowing to him while nearly decapitating his cat.  The cat had wanted to come into the room and I was not sure if this was Zen protocol so I hesitated before I firmly shut the door, nearly taking his poor head off.  This was the first time I had ever entered dokusan and I was nervous to meet the teacher.  I wanted him to help me with my practice but was told that I must don the robes and bow to him before seeking his counsel.  I complied out of necessity.  When my new teacher mistook my embarrassed smile for an attempt to recover social decorum, I felt deeply humiliated.  I just wanted to get on with the interview and get enlightened.  If this Zen moment ha...

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.  I will meet you there. ~ Rumi How do you know that you’re right? There is the “right” of righteousness, of being aligned with what is good.  This engenders feelings of superiority, of wanting to assert one’s moral authority. There is the “right” of knowing, of being aligned with what is true.  This engenders feelings of humility, of wanting to serve what is true. The first flatters the ego but is often blind to its own self-indulgence.  This is why righteousness can turn violent.  My race, religion, politics, beliefs, etc. being the “right” ones, justify my imposing them on you. The second empowers in a different sense.  There is no need to impose the truth on anyone or anything because it is between you and the world, a fit that requires no external validation.  There is peace, and a kind of grace. To be right in the moral sense belongs to the sphe...

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. ~ James Thurber Sad that connection is sought at the expense of conversation, sad because it fills us up in little sips but never satisfies. Connection is autistic but conversation a form of intercourse weaving two-into-one. The first may be pleasurable, titillating; the second may be questionably pleasurable though, when it works, what bliss! I do not think we seek connection over conversation as a quick fix or security blanket that we keep “always-on/always-on-you” as a transitional love object substituting for the real thing. In connection, we aren’t seeking to fill the void (I don’t think) but seeking to avoid it. We are all lonely and desire relationship. When we reach for connection instead of conversation I think it’s because reaching deeper into ourselves is too painful and what we find too shameful to share. To converse you have to unravel the threads, come undone. It’s...

A person can hardly be said to have a religious attitude who treats a teacup carefully, almost piously, simply because it is expensive, yet who feels nothing in treating people roughly. ~Kosho Uchiyama Roshi I love mankind, it's people I can't stand. ~Charles M. Schulz One of the things I've noticed about spiritual practice is that it inspires expansive feelings. It makes you grateful for the smallest of things. At first, this enhances your relationships. You become more sensitive to random acts of kindness. Subtle gestures like a smile or kind word move you more deeply than they used to.  Self-observation improves and, as it does, you begin to notice the role you play in conflict because of your monkey mind. You become more tolerant of others and more critical of yourself. Overall, you become a kinder, gentler person and feel more compassionate toward others. But then, as you cultivate even deeper awareness, you start to feel hypersensitive to ...

All that glitters is not gold ~ Shakespeare An article called Broken Gold was recently published in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. In it various students of the dharma reflect upon their disillusionment with their teachers and/or sanghas. The individual contributors are very insightful about their experiences and the article as a whole is a thoughtful contribution to the subject. It details how three people who have been betrayed by their teacher or sangha face their personal “struggle with the story”. This is Buddhist-speak for the persuasive narrative that seduces us into self-pity or adversarial thinking, as in its- me-against-the-world. The moral of the story seems to be one about personal accountability. As the editor writes in her eloquent introduction: … at a certain point what matters most is not so much what shattered one’s trust and scattered one’s sangha, but the question: What heals? And in a way, this is true: what matters is not who-did-what-to-whom and why,...

Knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity ~ Miguel de Cervantes Recently, a friend of mine laughed about the piety he observed at his local dharma center. “True self is no self,” he mused, “yet here we are trying to sit the right way, bow the right way, give the right answers and get enlightened. Before meditation we were just full of ourselves. But now the mask of righteousness hides us from ourselves.” His observations on the quest for no-self reminded me of Rousseau's comment about freedom born free but found everywhere in chains . Spiritual practice can definitely serve as a mask that hides us from ourselves. This is particularly true when the self is weak. The weaker we are, the more prone we are to narcissistic defenses that compensate for our feeling naked and exposed. They are inversely proportional to ego strength. In our “culture of narcissism” (as Christopher Lasch once called it), hiding from ourselves has become the rule rather than the exception. And s...