Stormy Weather

Enjoying the ride

There is nothing I dislike.

—Linji

I have come to realize that our work is to love the world just as it is.

—Katherine Thanas

Love is the ability to see every circumstance and every being as perfect just as they are.

—Anam Thubten

At some point, the heart may open to the totally indefinable, unpredictable, and often unwanted movement that life is. Love is that openness of heart.

— Darryl Bailey

There’s a lot of uncertainty and worry afoot these days, and I haven’t been immune from it myself. But it may be possible to meet the stormy weather in a more enjoyable way. We might find there is beauty even in darkness and that joy isn’t dependent on circumstances. I often think of those musicians on board the Titanic who played music on the deck as the ship sank. They found a way to express beauty and joy even in the face of imminent death.

Conflict, turbulence, uncertainty, violence, deprivation and upset are nothing new. During the time when Chan (early Zen) Buddhism was developing in China, when Linji was alive, during one decade, two-thirds of the population died from war, famine or plague. During the lifetime of the great nineteenth and twentieth century Advaita sage Ramana Maharshi, who spent most of his life in silence, doing nothing and simply being present, there were two world wars, the rise of Hitler, the holocaust, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Spanish Civil War, a global pandemic (the Spanish flu), the creation of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, the independence of India and the partition of that country into India and Pakistan, a division that also involved violence, conflict, mass displacement and death. The human world has always been filled with disagreements, power struggles, violence, persecution, plagues, famines, injustices and wars. Empires have come and gone, millions have died.

People have responded to this in many different ways. Nondual traditions such as Zen and Advaita are two of those responses. Social service work and political organizing are another. I think of Zen and Advaita as being akin to those musicians on the Titanic, and I see political and social service work as being more like those trying to save the ship or ready the lifeboats. All these actions have their place.

No two of us sees “the world” or “what’s happening” in exactly the same way. Each of us sees (or dreams, or imagines) a world based on our unique mix of biology and conditioning—genetics, neurochemistry, hormone levels, childhood experiences, lifetime experiences, social and economic status, location in history and geography, age, race, gender, sexual preferences, diet, information intake, education, and so on. No two of us are exactly the same, and no two of us are seeing the same world or the same movie of waking life. That we manage to cooperate, communicate and coexist at all, and that we haven’t yet blown ourselves up, is something of a miracle.

I spent many years in my youth trying to change the world through political activism, and I still at times fall into a Sisyphean effort to change people’s minds, to make them see the world the way I do. Why does it bother me when they don’t? That’s a great question to feel into and explore.

I don’t regret all the political work I did. I marched for Civil Rights and against the war in Vietnam. I organized and marched for women’s rights, LGBT rights, the rights of people with disabilities. I worked in solidarity with the revolutions in Central America, and I worked to expose and end US imperialism, colonialism, racism, and other injustices. I continue to care deeply about many of these issues and about the environment and the humane treatment of animals as well. I wanted an egalitarian, cooperative, socialist-leaning world where racism, sexism, heterosexism and all other forms of bigotry, inequality, prejudice and oppression would be gone forever.

But I noticed that there was often a lot of self-righteous judgment, anger, divisiveness and “other-ing” in political work. I saw many well-intended and idealistic progressive revolutions turn into something far from the ideal, and I saw many troubling things in the internal dynamics and outward actions of organizations for change, including those I was in. And then when I took up meditation, I saw all these unsavory tendencies in myself as well, in my own mind and my own behavior. I realized the world isn’t as simple, and the issues not as black and white, as I once imagined. And that led me to the deeper calling I’d felt since childhood.

At the time, it felt downright counter-revolutionary and scary to leave political work and go in a spiritual direction. The left mostly tended to view religion as “the opium of the masses,” and meditation was seen as white bourgeois navel gazing. Part of me believed all that, and another part of me knew it wasn’t true. The radical far left organization I was in was my whole life, and leaving it was like leaving my family. It was painful. Initially, I did other progressive political work for a while, until finally that, too, fell away. I remained (and still consider myself) essentially a left-leaning progressive, although I’ve disagreed strongly with some of the directions and positions much of the left has taken in recent years.

Back in the days when I was moving away from political activism, liberation theology and engaged Buddhism provided a helpful transition from the political to the spiritual. I had a foot in both worlds. But eventually, the activism fell away and I found myself living at a Zen Center and then being on the residential staff at a rural, nontraditional meditation retreat center. That was where I wrote my first book, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life. In the prologue to that book, published some thirty years ago, I wrote this:

As I see it, meditation is not merely a quest for personal peace of mind or self-improvement. In involves an exploration of the roots of our present global suffering and the discovery of an alternative way of living. Meditation is seeing the nature of thought, how thought constantly creates images about ourselves and others, how we impose a conceptual grid on reality and then mistake the map for the territory itself…

Meditation is listening. Listening to everything. To the world, to nature, to the body, the mind, the heart, the rain, the traffic, the wind, the thoughts, the silence before sound. It is about questioning our frantic efforts to do something and become somebody, and allowing ourselves to simply be…

Meditation is a powerful antidote to our purposeful, growth-oriented, war-mongering, speed-driven, ever-productive consumer civilization, which is rapidly devouring the earth. We retreat in meditation not from reality, but from our habitual escapes from reality. Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize. But meditation is much more (and much less) than all of this. Meditation is not knowing what meditation is.

I continue to take an interest in national and global events, but after spending decades in a leftist bubble feeding my confirmation bias, I now read and listen to diverse views and perspectives. This has been eye-opening and transformative, but it has also left me feeling politically homeless, not entirely fitting in anywhere.

When I was solidly on the left, there was a sense of belonging. We would all commiserate together, share our collective outrage, and self-righteously reinforce the shared narratives we all believed were true. That kind of self-confirming activity feels good superficially, and the absence of it has felt uncomfortable and lonely at times. But I’m convinced that one of the greatest threats to genuine democracy and our ability to co-exist and cooperate as human beings is the now hyper-polarized way we all tend to be in opposing tribal groups and separate media silos that cater to, confirm and never challenge what we already believe.

I no longer feel like I know how the world “should” be. Through meditation and nondual exploration and discovery, I’ve realized that I don’t even know how “the world” is. In fact, there really is no substantial, observer-independent, objectively existing “world” that is “out there,” or that ever holds still or resolves into any persisting form that can be pinned down. “My world” doesn’t stay the same for even an instant and is no more real than last night’s dream, although I often still think it is.

My friend John Butler, a contemporary Christian mystic now in his eighties, was one of the first organic farmers in the UK. As a young man, he went off to South America to save the world, a mission which he came to realize was a kind of folly. And it was there that this message came to him from the depths of his being: "To make whole, be whole." That message has guided his life ever since. Ramana Maharshi had a similar message: “Your own Self-realization is the greatest service you can give to the world.” Like Ramana, John spends much of his time in silent meditation or prayer. Some will say this is useless and does nothing for the world, but what world are we talking about? If we really see the illusory nature of separation and substantial forms, we will perhaps appreciate what Ramana and John are dissolving into and inviting.

I’m not saying there’s no place for social justice work or political activism. If you’re called to that, that’s fine. It has its place. And some of you will no doubt engage in both spirituality and activism, a combination which also has its place, as in liberation theology and engaged Buddhism. Activism that is rooted in meditative insight into the mind, and that is in touch with wholeness and grounded in love is way more powerful in my experience than activism fueled by fear, self-righteous anger and divisiveness.

But at the level of individuality and thought-dominated living, humans will always have disagreements and conflicts, and each of us will inevitably see things differently. Whereas in unbound, formless presence-awareness, there is no division, only wholeness, only unicity. Awareness is another word for unconditional love—it accepts and illuminates everything and clings to nothing. So perhaps giving attention to wholeness rather than to division might actually be the greatest gift we can offer the world. We’d see (or imagine) a different world, we’d see from unconditional love, and we’d respond in a different, perhaps more wholesome way.

When people try to change the world without getting to the roots of conflict, and without a sense of the whole, and without understanding impermanence, interdependence and the unresolvable, dream-like nature of reality, their efforts often don’t go as planned, as we’ve seen in many political revolutions that began with wonderful aspirations and ended in gulags and other disappointments.

My deepest calling and aspiration involves simply being awake in this one bottomless moment here and now, without a conceptual overlay, recognizing the radiance and the sacred in every appearance, realizing the indivisible wholeness of what is, letting go of my certainties and holding my opinions ever more lightly. And yes, I often fail and will no doubt continue to fail again and again. This Joan character has a quick temper, and sometimes, when she’s identified as the little me, feeling threatened and taking the dream too seriously, she can get defensive, offensive, oppositional, identified with certain positions, and lacking in basic kindness. The heart closes down. It happens.

And yes, all of that is also “what is,” and as I have often pointed out, whatever appears is “no-thing at all,” “just another passing dream,” and “simply another shape this radiant presence or intelligence-energy is momentarily taking,” and that can be a very liberating realization as long as we don’t pick it up and use it merely as a comforting ideology to gloss over the heartbreak in life and avoid the vulnerability that being alive as a human being entails. And indeed, “loving the world as it is” includes loving ourselves with all our messy human flaws and shortcomings. “There is nothing I dislike.” Not even myself!

That can be quite the challenging koan, to love everything as it is, and yet, once we let go, it is so easy, so relieving, so healing. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t or won’t act. Actually, we can’t not act, whether that action is “doing nothing” or “doing something,” meditating or demonstrating in the streets. In every moment, we each do what life moves us to do, and none of it can be other than exactly how it is.

Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.

– Agnes Martin, from Writings

I always hope my writing will emerge from and invite something other than philosophical thinking or the entertainment of interesting ideas. I hope it will invite and encourage contemplative listening, awake presence and direct exploration of life itself.

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A word about the comment section:

I welcome sincere comments, sharings and questions as long as they relate to the article one is commenting on. I appreciate it when people read the article in its entirety before commenting. I would prefer that the comment section not be used to engage in partisan discussions about specific political leaders or current events. I’m trying to avoid getting entangled in political discussions on social media and your help would be appreciated.

I do think there’s a place for genuine open dialog about the political issues of the day, but I believe that such dialog is best done in person, not in online comments or on social media. To be truly valuable and constructive, I think dialog about political issues should happen in a spirit of open listening and vulnerability, giving attention both to what others are saying and also to our own triggered reactions and emotions as they arise. Even after years of meditation, I’m still a beginner at that, often failing entirely. Constructive dialog with open, deep listening and real presence is a great art. And in my view, the comment section on my substack is not the best venue for it.

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A Word about Nothing to Grasp:

My book Nothing to Grasp is currently undergoing a transition from one publisher (New Harbinger) to another (New Sarum). I believe NS will be a better fit for the book. The new edition will be the same text with a new cover, and once it’s released, the kindle will once again be available, and the price of the paperback will come down from where it’s been and be much more affordable. I’ll let you all know when the new edition is out, but meanwhile, for a short time, the book might be less available. Stay tuned.

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Gratitude:

Thank you all for being here, and a very big thank you to all of you who send in donations. These are greatly appreciated and help to keep me afloat and able to do what I do. Thank you! 🙏

(If anyone would like to donate, there is a “donate” link on my Substack home page and a donate button on my website home page.)

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Love to all…