Psychology, work, spirituality:

One Whole Awakening

When the eternal and the human meet, that’s where love is born―not through escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into transcendence, but through finding that place where they come into union.

—Adyashanti

The importance of relationship, everyday life and psychological healing

My friend and teacher Toni Packer considered everyday life—relationships and work—and psychological healing, all crucial parts of “the work of this moment,” the work (or play) of awakening.

In her view, meditation was one’s whole life. It wasn’t just about silent retreats and meditating on a cushion. It was also about meditating in action—seeing, as it happens, how we get triggered in relationships of all kinds—at work, at home—how we judge and defend, oppose and assert, how we close down and withdraw, how we manipulate. Meditation was about seeing the anger, the fear, the sorrow, feeling them in the body, feeling into what is underneath them, coming in touch with all of this in an open, nonjudgmental way. It was about learning to listen openly to others, especially when we disagree with them, or when they trigger us in some way.

Toni and another teacher of mine, Charlotte Joko Beck, were pioneers in bringing the psychological realm and everyday life (family and work) into Zen practice and emphasizing the koan of everyday life instead of the usual mysterious old koans from the tradition. They were both sometimes criticized for deviating from the “purity” of “real” Zen, but what they both realized was that it’s precisely our psychological patterns, the smog of emotion-thought, what Eckhart Tolle has called the pain-body, that obscures the simplicity of presence and pulls us into confusion and suffering. They were both brilliant at illuminating these patterns. As Toni said of her work:

The essence [of this work] is to come upon a profound kind of listening and openness that reveals the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas—not just individually but collectively—and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves.

The other aspect of this listening is to come upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.

– Toni Packer

In other words, it’s not either/or—either transcendence or intimacy with everyday life—it’s both/and. They are inseparable, one whole happening. This is why I feel that psychotherapy and spirituality go hand in hand, and why awakening is about our whole life, not just sitting in silence.

Yes, there can be a place for leaving the psychological behind, for recognizing that in the absolute sense, all the differences make no difference, that nothing substantial is actually happening, that this is an inconceivable, dream-like appearance, but doing that prematurely when a great deal of mental confusion and emotional reactivity still prevail can prove unsatisfying and may easily be a form of delusion and spiritual bypassing. In such cases, it’s usually more about belief than deep experiential realization. That belief can provide comfort for a time, but when the shit hits the fan, it tends to crumble. Belief is always shadowed by doubt.

Eckhart Tolle is another teacher who has been brilliant in both opening people to the aware presence that has no center, no boundary, no inside or outside, while also illuminating how the me-system and what he calls the pain-body—habitual egoic patterns—take us over, captivate the attention, and create suffering. Like Toni and Joko Beck, Eckhart understands the need to see and see through the me-system if we are truly to be free.

So awakening isn’t only about transcendence. It’s equally about total intimacy with everyday life and with our humanity. And it’s not just about what happens to us as individuals. It’s also about relationship and about touching and being touched by the whole universe.

In one sense, relationship is all there is, and we are always in relationship—with the air, with space, with the furniture, with other people, with other animals, with the food we eat, with the computer and the phone, with everything we see and hear and touch and taste. We are never not in relationship. This is what the Buddhists call interdependence or interbeing—nothing exists independently of the whole, and nothing can be pulled out of the whole.

But in another sense, there really are no separate things to be in relationship with other separate things. This is what the Buddhists call impermanence, and impermanence is realized to be so thoroughgoing that no "things" ever actually form or persist to even be impermanent. So the ultimate understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence. Impermanence and unicity are one and the same!

Everything is an indivisible, seamless whole. And yet, this seamless unicity is showing up as infinite diversity, in infinitely unique and unrepeatable ways. And unicity is not a "thing," but simply the no-thing-ness that is showing up as multiplicity and diversity. The person we are and the world are not separate. It is one whole indivisible happening.

Joko Beck used to say that the best thing for your Zen practice besides retreats was a job in a busy office or an intimate relationship. Why? Because both of these would push all your buttons. Joko was all for discovering our edge, rather than retreating into comfortable safety. She herself had a job in a busy office while raising her children as a single working mother. That, to her, was Zen.

Relationship and caring for the world in solitude

What about people who live alone or work in solitude? Relationship can be with anything and everything we encounter—the food we’re eating, the dishes we are washing, the trees and flowers, the roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, our ostomy bag (if we have one), our chairs and tables. And caring for the world doesn’t necessarily mean being outwardly engaged—it could mean being a solitary, as two contemporary Christian contemplatives both tell us, one of them an Anglican solitary monastic named Maggie Ross, and the other a contemplative activist and Episcopal priest named Adam Bucko.

This is Maggie Ross speaking of her vocation as a solitary:

I just live my life. I aim at being nonresult-oriented. It's a way of being, and it's a fairly aimless way of being...

Being a solitary means going to the heart of the world's sin and pain... it's a life of exposure... It's a very curious phenomenon that the more solitary you are, the more in touch you are with the world...

Everyone is afraid of solitude because in solitude you meet death. You meet your own illusions, the sham you are, the con artist you are, what you are trying to sell the world...

There is a reality to living out, living through what seems to be total despair, total emptiness, total meaninglessness. But you fall through despair into the hand of God...

It becomes more and more simple. You begin to know that just the fact that you're alive is prayer...

Our knowledge of God is unfolding all the time, just as we are...

AIDS doesn't have anything to do with God's judgment of homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or purple-spotted ducks. And AIDS is certainly not punishment from God... What is a certainty is that God whose nature is to love and suffer with us, who dwells within us, has AIDS.

—Maggie Ross, Anglican solitary, from a book of photographs and text called Body and Soul: Ten American Women by Carolyn Coman and Judy Dater, published in 1988 during the AIDS epidemic.

Adam Bucko is a Christian contemplative activist in New York originally from Poland. He has spent many years working with poor and dispossessed people and working for social and environmental justice. He began working with people who were poor and dying in India as a young man, and then after fifteen years of working with homeless and LGBTQ youth in NYC, he was ordained as an Episcopal priest. He currently serves as a director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination in Garden City, NY. He is married to Kaira Jewel Lingo, a former Buddhist nun with Thich Nhat Hanh's order, and she and Adam often work together. Adam’s approach to Christianity and religion is very open-minded and open-hearted. His own teachers have included Hindus, Sufis and Hasidic Jews.

I first encountered Adam through a moving talk he gave in which he said that the biggest challenge he faces in his ministry is showing up at those times when grace doesn't seem to be present, when it seems to him that he has nothing to offer. His greatest challenge, he said, is showing up anyway, trusting that somehow God will show up too. He paraphrased Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest and author, saying that, “The spiritual leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in the world with nothing to offer but his or her own broken and vulnerable self.” Adam is a man who walks his talk, who goes deep, who is definitely the real deal. A rare being. He is the author of Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide, The New Monasticism, and Occupy Spirituality.

I stumbled upon this video of him recently, and was very deeply moved by it. He talks a lot about activism and service, which has been his own focus, but at the very end, he also says that this can include being a solitary recluse and touching the world only through prayer and meditation, and he says this can be just as powerful as working outwardly in the world. I highly recommend this video:

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A ramble about my attraction to Christianity

Yes, I do have a Christian streak. I wasn’t raised in any religion. My father was an atheist and my mother said simply, “God is love.” I got actively involved in Christianity as a young teenager and joined a progressive church. The minister said God was like energy. I felt a deep connection with Jesus and the way he befriended working people and outcasts, as well as his message of love, compassion and forgiveness. I was moved by his humanity, his suffering, his open heart. I felt the presence of God. I loved going into empty churches and cathedrals—these places felt alive with a deep sacred presence. I had a secret fantasy of becoming a monk. Christianity has a warmth, a heart quality, that has always drawn me, along with the way it embraces both transcendence and our everyday humanity.

In later years, after I left the radical anti-imperialist left, I was drawn to liberation theology, priests and nuns in the Catholic Church in South and Central America working to liberate the poor from oppressive regimes. I loved the liberation theology church in the barrio where I stayed in Nicaragua after the revolution.

Many years after that, I spent a short time on a solo retreat at the Camaldolese Monastery in Big Sur. I loved joining the monks for worship and participating in the Mass. Even after I became an adult, I often still imagined myself as a Catholic monk, knowing of course that it would never actually work out. I was the wrong sex to be a monk, and I could never swallow all the dogma and backward ideas of the church. But so many Catholic monks that I met in person or encountered through their books and talks were nothing like those old and often backward dogmas and ideas. Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, described God as “emptiness containing infinite possibilities” or “absolute Nothingness.” David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who connected a lot with interfaith work and with Zen Buddhists, describes the vocation of a monk as “being entirely present in the given moment… being alive in the Now.”

Many times I’ve longed to be part of a church, and periodically I join one briefly, but it never seems to last—it always feels like I’m trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, even though all the churches I’ve joined have been progressive and open-minded in every way. But something always seems to be missing—the deep shared presence I felt at the Zen Center and at Springwater, the retreat center that Toni Packer founded where I lived for five years on staff. Maybe it’s because at the Zen Center and Springwater, no one is there just to meet friends, make business connections, meet social expectations, expose their children to religion, or follow a habitual family tradition, as seems sometimes to be the case with Sunday church goers—and also, Zen and Springwater included so much silence and stillness. I love music, but the church hymns often left me cold. At the Camaldolese monastery it was different. No one was there to socialize or make connections or meet social expectations. There was deep presence and stillness. And when the monks sang the psalms, it was beautiful.

And speaking of the Psalms, I remember Jewish Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer writing about his experience visiting a Trappist monastery. As he listened to the Psalms that the monks were chanting, he says, “I was astonished at the violence, passion, and bitterness that was expressed… it seemed almost impossible to believe that intoning those disturbing and distancing words could be the basis for a satisfying religious practice.” In response, the monks told him that suffering is part of life, that it is a doorway to God. Norman was moved by this experience to eventually write “a Zen-inspired translation of the Psalms” called Opening to You. In the introduction to that book, he writes: “The Psalms make it clear that suffering is not to be escaped or bypassed.” And this too is part of my attraction to Christianity.

The primary symbol of Christianity is a torture instrument, the cross, with God himself in human form nailed to it. The whole story of how Jesus was betrayed, arrested, tortured and killed—and then how he rose from the dead—which I take symbolically, not literally, or we could say, spiritually, not physically—is a profound message of how we move through suffering to redemption and joy.

As I wrote in response to someone in the comments to my last post, for me, God is another word for awareness, presence, unconditional love, wholeness, unicity, intelligence-energy, being and becoming, the Heart, Here-Now, radiance, light, the dazzling darkness, the zero on which all other numbers depend, the Tao, the Self of Advaita, the germinal dark, pure potentiality. No words can capture it.

I know the word God is easily misunderstood and can be triggering for survivors of oppressive religions, and I know it can mean different things to different people, but I love the word God and sometimes can't help myself from using it, because it feels both personal and infinite, and it resonates and comes from deep in my heart and arises naturally here. It captures the mystery of “not one, not two” — lover and beloved, personal and impersonal, form and emptiness.

Well, enough about my love affair with Christianity, which has probably been upsetting or off-putting to some of you. I realize many people are survivors of the worst aspects of organized and fundamentalist religion. Luckily, I am not burdened in that way. But I can appreciate how for some of you, this little ramble is not going to resonate, and that’s fine.

I draw from many religious traditions and non-traditional approaches, each of which seems to illuminate a different aspect of this living reality and a different dimension or flavor of spirituality. I don’t get too caught up in trying to reconcile the different and sometimes seemingly contradictory ways in which they each conceptualize or map what they have discovered. No map is the territory, and different maps can be useful in different ways, at different times. What really matters is the heart, the presence, the aliveness—our own immediate direct experiencing—and in this, there is no map and no path.

Conclusion:

We don’t exist in isolation. Our ancestors and all of human history and the entire evolutionary history of the cosmos are within each of us. Here-Now contains all of time and space. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel or reject the jewels of insight that our sacred traditions contain. We can reject the dogma, the fundamentalism, the out-dated ideas, and the parts that don’t work for us, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Toni Packer left the ritual, the hierarchy and the dogmatic aspects of Zen behind when she founded Springwater Center. She wanted to work in an open way, without external authority and final answers, in a place close to the natural world. But at Springwater, we discovered that the desire for an authority to tell us what to do, or the urge to be an authority, or the tendency toward dogmatism and fundamentalism can all be found inside each of us. It turns out that it’s not as simple as just leaving the outward forms behind.

Once again, the awakening journey requires a willingness to see “the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas—not just individually but collectively—and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves.” This ongoing discovery goes hand in hand with opening up to the “spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.” We need both aspects to be truly free, and both are an ongoing, moment-to-moment waking up, not some once-and-for-all accomplishment. There is no end to waking up, no end to this unfolding that we are.

Waking up is a continuing process. No one wakes up once and for all. There is no limit to wakefulness, just as there is no limit to aliveness....The surprise within the surprise of every new discovery is that there is ever more to be discovered.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast

We can’t land in any one-sided view and be truly liberated. This world is both real and unreal. Nothing matters and everything matters. Not one, not two.

And liberation doesn’t mean always feeling happy. Being betrayed by all your friends and nailed to a cross just isn’t a whole lot of fun no matter how much enlightenment there is. But perhaps, with grace, we might come, as Jesus did, to the place of surrender, the place of “Thy will be done,” which is the gateway to resurrection, otherwise known as a new beginning in each and every moment, or more accurately, in this moment, right here, right now.

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Love to all…