Silence of Now

         In my personal cosmology, the origin of all is Emptiness – a creative, intelligent, loving Silence I call God.  Everything and everyone is an expression of this Silence.  It permeates all being.

         Another word for Silence is Presence.  The spiritual practice of being present – right here, right now, in this moment - opens and lubricates a doorway to Presence, to the immense Silence of God within. 

         I am enjoying Journey into Now, a book by Leonard Jacobson.  Here’s a passage I find deeply resonant:

“When you become fully present, thoughts stop and your mind is silent.  You are not trying to stop the thoughts.  It simply happens as you become present.

“But there is an even deeper level of peace and silence waiting to emerge.  As your mind becomes silent, an inner door is opened, allowing an infinite and eternal silence to emerge from the core of your Being.

“This infinite and eternal silence is the very essence of your Being.  It is your true nature.  It is the essence of all existence.  It is the eternal silent presence of pure consciousness.  It is the I AM of you.

“It is that dimension of you that exists in this moment and only this moment.  It is that dimension of you that exists in the Oneness.  It is your Buddha nature.  It is the Christ of you, which exists in Oneness with God.”  (Kindle location 197-201)

         The Kingdom of God is truly within.  We don’t have to die to get there – just practice softening to the silence of now. 

Cough Master

         Saturday afternoon, I woke from a long nap – the first time in a week I’d been able to sleep horizontal in bed.  The last 10 days have been a humbling and enlightening education for me.

         My master took the form of violent coughing spasms – wracking me from head to toe, leaving my throat raw and my voice raspy. 

         My first reaction was to minimize.  I’ve always been able to head off oncoming sickness with extra QiGong and vitamin C.  Perhaps overconfident, I went light on the QiGong this time. 

         Despite the cough’s steady advance, I did not retreat. Instead, I made every effort to attend to business as usual – skiing in the morning, going to work, staying in busy mind during the day focusing on all that needed to be done.  To relax in the evening, I tried streaming Netflix shows, sci-fi movies and a couple travelogues – all accompanied by heavy doses of Robitussin DM and a stubby, wide-brimmed glass turned spittoon.   Coughing grew ever more violent.  For most of the week, I averaged 2 – 3 hours of fitful, upright-sitting sleep per night.

         It became clear that all my activity simply made things worse and that the way I was “relaxing” wasn’t relaxing at all.  Busy-mind problem solving or viewing any kind of screen – even with me sitting in a relaxed posture – activated a subtle agitation that led to more coughing.  I’d fight the cough by holding my breath and tightening down.  Fighting, of course, only increased cough’s intensity.

         Eventually, I realized that my recovery depended on just being in the moment, doing nothing.  I also realized just how hard doing nothing is – especially when the master is wracking my chest, reminiscent of the old Zen master whacking a student meditator on the back with a stick. 

         I sat for hours gazing at my fireplace, with Tibetan bowls singing quietly in the background.  I spent more hours during sleepless nights breathing deep in the diaphragm, opening my throat in non-resistance to the master’s wracking spasms.  I tried sipping warm water through a straw as slowly as I possibly could without interrupting the flow of liquid - a soothing meditation that calmed cough.  I accepted healing touch without immediately trying to pay it back.

         I cancelled Wednesday night group, took a couple days off work (my first in years), got help from western medicine (an antibiotic to treat pneumonia) and dropped various essential oils into my diffuser.

         As recovery began taking hold, the master’s feedback became more immediate and precise.  When I sat quietly, cough alerted me to the intrusion of busy mind, like the Zen master with the stick.  Once in conversation, I made a self-derogatory remark, which cough immediately called to my attention.  Taking an unneeded second helping a couple nights ago brought on a lengthy spasm.  The feedback was amazing.

         I’m feeling much better now.  Breathing freely and sleeping horizontally are gifts I do not take for granted.  The cough master has been teaching me to listen up and listen in, to pay attention to what heals and what harms, and to enjoy the quiet peace of non-doing.

The Deep Quiet

         Minnesota, of late, has been visited by arctic conditions - temperatures double-digit below zero, vast violet-blue skies, piercing winds piling downy snow in high drifts.  There’s a stark silence about – not much movement as folks hunker down.

         This winter stillness reminds me of the deep quiet within, an inner stillness that is home to us - our birthplace, a place of refuge, renewal and re-creation.  In our spiritual-growth group a couple nights ago, I felt prompted to guide the meditation toward the deep quiet to see what we might discover.

         Spiritual authors speak about the hum of existence or the hum of the universe - a barely perceptible vibration we all share at the quiet center of being where we all meet.  I think of it as the Ohm of God – the sound/song of God within.

         To help us travel to this quiet, we used a large seven-metal Tibetan bowl I brought back from Nepal last year.  Once struck, the bowl sings a complex harmony of tones for nearly 3 minutes, gradually becoming the faintest sound that hearing can register.  Its diminishing tone guided us toward stillness. 

         We also experimented with following the exhalation of breath into the quiet. 

         The quiet, we discovered, rests beneath the sounds or movements/vibrations within – far beneath the gurgling of stomachs and the ringing in our ears, beneath the sounds or vibrations of breath, heartbeat and blood flow. 

         The quiet resides more in the body than in the head.  It’s more felt than heard.

         The quiet is elusive.  When we grasp for it or strain to experience it, it slips away.  When we release effort and allow a natural gravitation to happen, we are gifted by visitations – often brief, sometimes longer.  The quiet comes to us, perhaps more than we come to it.

         To connect with the deep quiet is a grace, not an achievement.  Practice helps us become more comfortable and familiar with the journey, more fluent with the quiet and more available to its graceful presence.

         The journey is peaceful and restorative.  It offers safety and vitality.  We return renewed.

         And, from my experience, embedded in the deep quiet is a subtle, sweet smile of unconditional love.

Sunshine Love

    Several times over the last few weeks, I’ve wakened to the tune and lyrics from the chorus of one of my favorite Bee Gees songs:  “You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know what it’s like, baby, to love somebody, to love somebody the way I love you.”

         What a sweet good-morning message!  The divine within is telling me how loved I am.  Mornings later, when it kept happening, I decided to listen a little deeper.  Maybe there’s more to this message. 

         Sure enough.  “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody….the way I love you.”   Oh.  That’s humbling.  And it makes sense.

         I’ve been a life-long student of love.  And now, life is saying: “James, there’s more for you to learn” – a timely message, I guess, since I have recently re-entered the classroom of a new love relationship.

         I believe God/Life/Universe loves us like the sun shines.  The sun makes no judgments about our worthiness to receive light.  It doesn’t withhold its rays if we offend it somehow or don’t give it enough of what it wants.  It doesn’t bargain with us.  It doesn’t try to control us.  It simply radiates because that’s its nature.  It has its own internal radiance system.

         I wonder about taking lessons from the sun.  Just like the sun, the radiance of our love does not depend on the objects of our affection.  It’s about opening to the flow of universal love within and through us and letting that radiance shine forth with ever greater freedom and extravagance – without expectations - as a natural expression of who we are.  As spiritual teacher, Leonard Jacobson says: “I love you, because I am love.”

         Of course, we see and appreciate the beauty and goodness of our loved ones.  Our hearts warm in response to them.  However, when we view the positive qualities in the other as the source of our love, our love becomes conditional – dependent on how lovable the other is.  It waxes and wanes with how gratified we feel and how loved we think we are.

         Our loving nature is sourced in the infinite ocean of love that is this universe.  As we flow with this energy, we are never empty and never unworthy – never unlovable and always love-able.  The more we radiate, the more we are replenished.  The more we allow ourselves to receive, the more we’re able to radiate.

         The theory course on unconditional love is relatively simple. The lab, here on earth, is where the challenge lies.  Here, we meet our hungers and vulnerabilities, our tendencies toward self-absorption and self-protection and the various ways we limit ourselves.  Here, through trial and error, triumphs and mishaps, stumbling and picking ourselves up, experimenting and practicing, we come to learn about our true love-nature.

         We learn to radiate like the sun.

Spirituality in Sensuality

      Sitting down at the dinner table last night, half an hour before the start of a spiritual group that meets weekly in my home, I dipped my fork into a one-pan concoction of sautéed jalapenos, quinoa, eggs and sharp cheddar cheese – all mixed together, fried crispy on the outside and moist on the inside.

         Just after that first, scrumptious bite, I opened The Radiance Sutras, by Lorin Roche, a translation of the sacred Hindu text, Vijnana Bhairava Tantra – a text we’re using as a guide for our gathering this winter/spring.  I opened to a random spot near the middle of the book.  On the pages facing me I found these two Sutras: 

         Sutra 49

Tasting dark chocolate,

A ripe apricot,

A luscious elixir –

Savor the expanding joy in your body.

Nature is offering herself to you.

How astonishing

To realize this world can taste so good.

When sipping some ambrosia,

Raise your glass,

Close your eyes,

Toast the universe.

The Sun and Moon and Earth

Danced together

To bring you this delight.

Receive the nectar on your tongue

As a kiss of the divine.

         Sutra 50

All around you, in every moment,

The world is offering a feast for your senses.

Songs are playing,

Tasty food is on the table,

Fragrances are in the air,

Colors fill the eyes with light.

You who long for union,

Attend this banquet with loving focus.

The outer and inner worlds

Open to each other.

Oneness of vision, oneness of heart.

Right here, in the midst of it all,

Mount that elation, ascend with it,

Become identical        

With the ecstatic essence

Embracing both worlds.

         What a powerful invitation to return to my senses – to slow down, to savor this meal, to feel the warmth radiating from my fireplace, to let the chant playing on my sound system replace the noise of busy thoughts.

         I was raised in a religious tradition that mistrusted the body and frowned on sensuality – a masculine approach to spirituality that favored the abstract/intellectual and instructed the mind to dominate and disregard the body. 

         I now see how sensuality and sensual awareness ground us in Presence. This grounding connects us, opens us to the flow of life and leads us to the divine - within us and around us.

         Mary Oliver, a wonderful poet who was keenly connected to the natural world, died today.  She wrote one of my favorite lines in all of poetry: “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

         The Sutras and Mary’s passing invite me to listen deeply to my body, to enjoy its sensual nature, to honor its wisdom and to trust it as one pathway to Allness.

         Six years ago, I posted Happy New Moment.  As I enter my 73^rd year with excitement and renewed energy, as identity shifts toward fewer words and more being, as fading memory power makes room for originality in the moment, and as other writings percolate, I’m drawn to re-issue this older/younger piece.  I send it with love and good wishes for your health and happiness.

Happy New Moment

       Prone to habit, we attach to repetitive patterns of thought and action, holding them as if they are real.  They become our story, oft-repeated conclusions about ourselves and the world.  Forgetting the creative possibilities in each new moment, we hang on to the familiar – even when it no longer serves us.

       In Present Moment Wonderful Moment, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:  "We can practice beginning anew at any moment of our lives. To be born is to begin anew.  When you are three years old you can begin anew, when you are sixty years old you can begin anew, and when you are about to die, you can still begin anew."

       Adventure's afoot. 

       Happy New Year.  Happy New Moment!

Third Day of Christmas

         It’s the third day of Christmas and, finally, there’s fresh snow on the ground in central Minnesota.  December’s been a hectic and wonderful time of travel - in New Zealand for much of the month and a whirlwind of celebrations with family and loved ones these last few days.

         For me, Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of Christ Consciousness, the realization that, along with our uniqueness, we are all one - each of us is inseparable from God, from each other and the entire universe.  Oneness, along with the invitation to love, is central to the teaching of Jesus. 

         I don’t know when Jesus came to the realization of oneness or when the idea integrated so deeply into his being that it informed his identity and his view of us.  I assume he wasn’t born with it.  And so, for me, the days after Christmas are especially important.  The day itself reminds us we are one.  The following days invite us to realize that beautiful idea, to make it real, to let it sink into the marrow of our bones and into the lives we live.

         When oneness is real, and not just an abstraction, we know in our hearts that no one goes hungry, no one is denied safe asylum, no one is harmed in any way without each of us being hurt.  So, too, every act of love on this planet lifts each of us.

         On this third day of Christmas, I'm invited to deepen my care - to enlarge my sense of family and to enlarge my heart.

         I wish you each a merry and joyful Christmas, all year long.

Softening to Mystery:

A Story of Us

         Niels Bohr, one of many leading-edge quantum physicists who also speak metaphysically, has concluded that there are two kinds of truth – small truth and great truth.  He said, “You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood.  The opposite of a great truth is another truth.”  I’ve come to agree that great truth is paradoxical in nature.  It exists in the realm of mystery and is so big that, while it may be apprehended in the heart, it cannot be captured conceptually.  Words fail us here.  At best, they convey only part of the story.

         Here’s a cosmological story – a piece I wrote many years ago and recently revised.  It roams in the murky waters of mystery, where truths intertwine. It invites us to soften to the mystery of who we are.

         Softening to mystery means saying “yes” to apparently contradictory things, accepting paradox, living with an ambiguity that does not allow us to pin life down or to pin ourselves down.  It means opening to darkness and light, the infinite and the infinitesimal.  We cannot be easily sized or sized up.  In this story, we humans exist on three levels:  Personality, Individual Soul and God-Soul.  All are true of us.  None is only true.

         The level of personality includes the material body with all its physical attributes and chemical quirks, the mind with its habits and patterns, and the ego identity with all its characteristics and attachments.  Even at the level of personality, where we are the most obvious and observable, we are quite the mystery.  Biological and social scientists spend their lives trying to make sense of us at this all-too-human level.  With our many contradictions, our weirdness and goofiness, our capacity for the heroic and horrific, there is one constant:  we are finite beings.  The ego is going to die – and it knows it. 

         While the personality is unique and temporary, the individual soul is timeless.  It is the uniqueness of us that transcends time.  God speaks creation in the eternal now.  Each of us can be viewed as a word in God’s vocabulary – all interconnected, part of one lexicon, each distinct.  At the level of individual soul, we are unique, eternal, and many.

         There is only one God-Soul – and we all share It.  In this story, when God speaks creation in the eternal now, God is sharing God.  At this level of being, which I believe is at our core, we are one with each other and one with God.  Mystics in every spiritual tradition speak of this oneness.  Here, we are infinite, divine, and one.

         Softening to mystery invites us to include and integrate all of who we are.  In this story, each level of being is true of us.  Each has its unique reality.  And all three are woven together in seamless wholeness.  There is oneness in this “three-ness”.

         We humans are so tempted to exclude rather than include.  We are tempted to deny what we don’t understand and dismiss what we don’t like.  “Either/or” is simpler than “both/and”.  Judging and controlling feels safer than acceptance, appreciation and awe. 

         While we have some choice about what parts of ourselves we nurture and cultivate, we don’t have choice about what parts of us exist.  For example, at the level of personality, we are wired for fight and flight.  That wiring is built into our nervous systems. Millennia ago, this wiring was adaptive.  It helped us survive.  However, if we continue to operate out of our fearful and cantankerous tendencies, our prospects for long-range survival seem bleak.  The question becomes how do we work constructively and respectfully with ourselves, accepting how we’re built, rather than work against ourselves, trying to suppress or deny what is.  We can invite the personality to grow and we can’t eliminate it.

         We can’t eliminate the divine part of us either.  We can fail to see it in ourselves, in others, and in all that is – but we can’t make it not be there.  In this story, God is unavoidable, eternally and inextricably woven into the fabric of who we are. 

          There’s an often-told Zen story about a monastery that was floundering.  Membership was dwindling in a climate of bitterness and back-biting.  Somehow, a rumor began spreading that one of the monks was Buddha reincarnated.  There was much speculation about who that person might be.  Soon, the monks started treating each other with new gentleness and care.  After all, no one wanted mistreat the Buddha.   The monastery grew to be a center of joy.  It flourished, attracting new members from miles away.

         In grade school, I remember being taught that we are children of God.  Many religious traditions and spiritual practices invite us to cultivate an awareness of our divine origin and connection.  As we soften to this aspect of the mystery, a reverence for ourselves and others grows quite naturally.  We may even remember that, at the level of soul, we are deeply in love with each other and always have been.

         In this story, no matter how hatefully we behave, we still have a divine spark.  No matter how holy and evolved we become, we’re still goofy.  In us, both the sublime and the ridiculous find a home.  Softening to the mystery of the human condition invites reverence and compassion, humility and humor.

         So, enjoy the mystery.  Experience it with gusto.  Just don’t expect to solve it.

Two Thanksgiving Poems

Happy Thanksgiving

A grateful heart is a soft heart,

A soft heart that opens us to abundance,

To the flow of love and joy.

Heartfelt gratitude is a gateway to abundant life.

As we see more abundantly what we have,

We more abundantly have what we see.

Gratitude is its own gift.

"See the gifts you have," it says.

"See the gift you are."

Happiness and thanksgiving go together.

Happy Thanksgiving is not only my wish for you,

It's a declaration of what is.

Thanks-Giving

Thank-Fullness

Gratitude is a gift

We give ourselves

And others -

Thanks-giving.

Each moment

We see life’s gift

We feel abundance –

Thank-fullness.

Give thanks

Have fullness

Happy thanks-giving

Happy thank-fullness.

Cultivating Emotions

         In friendship with ourselves, we honor and make room for every feeling, even the painful ones we like to avoid.  Along with this spaciousness - in a spirit of loving-kindness with ourselves - we can cultivate emotional states that energize and uplift us: happiness, joy, peace, contentment and gratitude. 

         Spring Forest QiGong teaches that each of these feelings connects with an organ system in a way that integrates physical, psychological and spiritual health.  Here are five steps in a practice I enjoy.

1.     Breathe happiness into the liver (located above the right side of the stomach) and exhale fear.

2.   Breathe joy into the heart; exhale bitterness.

3.   Breathe peace into the stomach; exhale worry.

4.   Breathe contentment into the lungs; exhale depression.

5.   Breathe gratitude into the kidneys; exhale fear.

         More often, lately, I’ve focused primarily on the positive emotional states - inhaling each positive energy and moving ever more deeply into the emotion, as I exhale.

         I suggest doing this practice first thing in the morning and last thing at night, with several (or more) breaths at each step.  Some days, rather than doing all five steps, you might want to concentrate on one or two.

         Please note: this practice is not designed to totally control our emotional lives or rid ourselves of uncomfortable feelings. The attitude we take with ourselves is gently inviting, not forceful or coercive. 

         We’re like organic gardeners of the spirit – cultivating nutritious food for body and soul.