A Multitude of Approaches

to Waking Up Here and Now

As many of you know, I’ve had a very diverse and varied spiritual background, and my writing can at times seem to contradict itself. As I said to a friend recently, this diversity of perspectives often leaves me feeling like I don’t know what’s most true, most useful or most liberating. For a long time, I was actually trying to figure that out, trying to determine which approach was the best or most advanced, since I wanted to be on the winning team putting forward the highest and most enlightened perspective. I’d like to say this folly of trying to nail down the The Highest Way has completely fallen away, and most of it has, but I still find myself at times feeling like I wish I could just settle on One Way or One View and stay put there, as so many others seem to do. But maybe I just can’t see myself (or my work) as others see it. From the inside it often feels topsy-turvy and messy, while from the outside, maybe it looks more coherent and consistent. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just consistently inconsistent.

Anyway, one person whose work I’m very fond of is Barry Magid, a Zen teacher in NYC who is also a medical doctor and a psychoanalyst. He is a dharma heir of one of my teachers, (Charlotte) Joko Beck. Barry is at one extreme of my diverse range of perspectives, what I might call the bare-bones Zen side, and my resonance with Nisargadatta, Ramana, Mooji, Rupert, and others in the Advaita camp is at the other extreme, and I am forever whirling back and forth. Of course, that over-simplifies it quite a bit, since I resonate with many other diverse and different-from-one-another Buddhist teachers besides Barry and Joko (e.g., John Tarrant, Anam Thubten and Steve Hagen have all had a big impact on me), and I love various radical nondualists (Darryl Bailey being the clearest and cleanest in my opinion, but Tony Parsons also had a big effect on me back in the early 2000s), and the contemporary Christian mystic John Butler touches me deeply. And, of course, there was my main teacher, Toni Packer, an ex-Zen teacher who left the tradition, the dogma and the hierarchy of formal Zen behind to work in a more open way, an approach often described as a marriage of bare-bones Zen and J. Krishnamurti. One of my top favorites of all time is Alan Watts, who had a tremendous impact on me, and I have also greatly appreciated Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Gangaji, Peter Brown, and many others along the way. And let’s not forget the iconoclasts, Robert Saltzman and Shiv Sengupta, who have both challenged me in recent years in ways I deeply appreciate. In short, I’ve drunk deeply from many diverse wells and found the truth of each one in my own direct experience. Indeed, reality seems multi-dimensional, multi-faceted and impossible to pin down in any one way.

But getting back to Barry Magid, he says that, “Zen offers us a perspective that is fundamentally nondualistic, anti-essentialist, and anti-transcendent,” in which we discover that, “This very moment is our true self.” Barry challenges our "curative fantasies" of transcendence or depth, in which we endeavor to find some kind of unchanging ground of being either below the surface or above it all. Instead, he points to being just this moment, being aware of our thoughts and all the ways we imagine separation and resist what is, discovering the impermanence and interdependence of life, and living an ordinary human life of "engaged, whole-hearted functioning." For him, Zen is not about detaching from life, purifying oneself, or being some kind of unchanging awareness impervious to the vulnerability and messiness of life. He speaks of Zen as a religious practice, and to him, religious means “moment to moment reverence and awe, and the kind of attention that treats ordinary things as extraordinary and worthy of that kind of attention.” Instead of trying to fix ourselves or transcend our humanity, Barry invites us to be just as we are in this moment, finding the absolute in the relative, the wholeness in the particular, and the perfection in the seemingly imperfect.

That sounds a lot like my approach, but I’m obviously a bit more open to the transcendent than Barry is, or perhaps just more seduced by it, but I do have a strong feeling for being present and for the experiential realization (NOW) of seamless impersonal presence, wholeness, and the open space of boundless awareness. I even resonate with the word God. All things considered, I’m probably more on the Zen side than the Advaita side of the nondual divide (how’s that for an oxymoron?), but in my saner moments, I recognize that there’s a place for everything in nonduality, and that I can’t really land anywhere and don’t need to. As they say in Zen, not knowing is most intimate. Being just this moment. Being what we cannot not be. And as I’ve realized, trying to pin this living reality down is like trying to nail down water or grab hold of clouds. Better to enjoy the beauty in all of it, take what resonates in the moment, and leave the rest aside. And there’s really no “me” doing any of this—it’s all happening by itself.

Anyway, here are two recent talks Barry gave that I liked a lot and thought I’d share with all of you: 

Enjoy!

All for now. Happy Solstice and much love to all.