The Heart of Spirituality

And Someone You Can Help

Walking on this spring morning, sitting down in a field of dandelions and green grasses, everything is sparkling with light. Watching the bees, the ladybugs and the ants all traversing this wonderland, feasting on the edibles. A herd of deer pass by munching the tall grass, while overhead the whitest, cleanest, most luminous clouds hang motionless in the bluest of blue skies. Listening to the birds singing so many different songs, frogs croaking, a solitary jet passing high overhead—my heart is filled with joy, seeing God everywhere, shining forth in everything.

Now, I know the G-word is anathema for some of you, so let me clarify. For me, the word God evokes the heart of creation, the unconditional love, the awaring presence, the wholeness of life, the aliveness and wonder of everything, the openness and stillness of presence, the Heart, the germinal darkness or infinite potential birthing it all, the no-thing-ness of everything, the Zero at the core, the silence, the openness of Here-Now, unicity, the Great Mystery, what Ramana Maharshi called the Self or what Buddhism calls emptiness.

This boundless awareness or unconditional love is ever-present but often unnoticed when attention is captured by storylines and the thought-sense of being a separate, encapsulated “me.” Out of that hypnotic entrancement in the me-system, conflict, confusion and suffering arise. When that hypnotic spell is broken (not forever after, but NOW), when the whole movie of waking life (the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly) is seen from awareness, from unconditional love, from wholeness, there is a profound recognition that all is well. Awareness has space for everything to be as it is, and in this space, there is infinite possibility for something new to arise. God is another word for that spacious open awareness (Here-Now), the unconditional love beholding it all, a way of seeing in which there is acceptance, gratitude and compassion. And where is love needed most if not in the darkest places?

God is a word I resonate with—maybe because I wasn’t raised in any organized religion. My dad was a scientifically-inclined atheist with a passion for physics and engineering, and to my mom, God was another word for love and possibility. I was deeply attracted to religion from early on—avidly reading books about the world religions, inventing religions in my room during quiet time, and wandering into churches and temples wherever I went, drawn by something unnamable that I felt there. When I decided to briefly join a church at one point in my early teenage years, the youth minister said that God was another word for energy or the universe. The Jesus I encountered in the Gospels seemed to be all about love, compassion for outcasts and underdogs, and a kind of faith that was not about belief.

Decades later, when I went to Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution, I lived with a family in a barrio and accompanied them to their liberation theology Catholic church every Sunday—dogs and children ran freely up and down the aisles, people hugged each other, songs were sung, revolutionary paintings of farm workers adorned the walls—and my Spanish language skills were poor enough that I missed whatever troublesome dogma there might have been. I just felt the love, the energy and the heart.

Eventually, I was drawn to the bare, empty, elegant simplicity of zendos (Zen meditation spaces) and eventually, to the open, light-filled meditation room at Springwater Center, with its huge windows overlooking the fields. These were all places where I felt a palpable sense of openness and silence and the stillness that remains when all ideas and beliefs fall away.

So, if the word God troubles you, please just substitute another. What matters isn’t the words, but that to which they are pointing. And as I mean them, all these words are pointing to a felt-sense of spaciousness and open presence, a way of seeing and being that is awake and all-inclusive. It’s what spirituality, in my view, is really all about—not beliefs, ideas, moral codes, dogmas or any of that, but direct experiencing, here and now—opening to a dimension of being that could be called love or joy—and finding it everywhere, not just in beautiful places.

Because, as we all know, life is not always an idyllic spring day. There is plenty of heartbreak in this world, and in the course of any ordinary lifetime, many profound challenges arise. But even in the midst of what some might consider the worst bad fortune, people manage to find beauty and love. I think of Jacques Lusseyran, whose powerful book And There Was Light was one of Toni Packer’s favorites. Lusseyran was permanently blinded in a childhood accident and almost immediately saw this new way of perceiving the world as a gift rather than as a hinderance. Later, he was a leader in the French Resistance against the Nazis, and after being captured, he spent fifteen months in Buchenwald concentration camp. Even there, he managed to find the light in the darkness. I can honestly say that I feel genuine gratitude for the things in my life that I would never have chosen, things that have involved pain and loss, such as losing a hand and part of an arm, nearly dying of alcohol and drug abuse, or having a near fatal cancer that left me with an ostomy. Each of these has been a gift in many ways.

I also know that one of the things many of us dread most as we age is getting some form of dementia, especially one of the more grueling varieties. And that brings me to one of the reasons I’m sending out this newsletter. A much loved Bay Area meditation teacher and author, someone whose writings I have enjoyed over many decades, is facing exactly that.

You Can Help Wes “Scoop” Nisker

Buddhist insight meditation teacher and author Wes “Scoop” Nisker is now living with Lewy Body Dementia, a really tough diagnosis. A GoFundMe has been set up, and if you are so moved, you can contribute.

I first encountered Wes Nisker in San Francisco in the early 1970's on the radio, when I was a wild drunk and he was doing the news on then rock-station KSAN. He’d always end his news reports by saying, "And remember, if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

In subsequent years, Wes became a meditation teacher, author, performer, and co-founder and co-editor of the excellent Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind. I’ve loved all his books. He is always refreshingly real and open, has a great sense of humor and freely admits that he doesn't know how the universe works. He has always been open to new discoveries, and he has offered a very practical, down-to-earth path rooted in awareness, scientific curiosity and an ability to laugh. His books include Being Nature (originally published as Buddha's Nature: A Practical Guide to Discovering Your Place in the Cosmos); Essential Crazy Wisdom; Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again; and The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom: The Spiritual Experiments of My Generation. I very highly recommend them all!

Here's an excerpt from the GoFundMe message:

Now our Scoop needs some help. He’s encountered increasing health challenges and is navigating a diagnosis of Lewy Body Dementia. Amidst it all, he’s still his rascally, sweet self and the philosophical musings and quips are going strong, but he is needing more support with everyday tasks and has recently moved to a community where he is getting the necessary care.

The important work Scoop has done in this world was never the kind to bring in significant funds and now this decades-long Bay Area resident and icon needs assistance to afford the high cost of aging and elder care in the Bay Area, particularly with a debilitating illness.

We are grateful for any amount you might be able to offer to help support his increasing care needs. We also welcome messages of love and support to pass along to him as he transitions into this new phase of life.

Please also spread the word if you can! As you might imagine, it’s not the easiest thing to share this diagnosis, and Scoop hopes sharing his news might also help to destigmatize this disease—one that affects so many of our elders.

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Closing Words

God (presence, spirit, unconditional love, open awareness, or whatever word resonates with you) is not something to believe or not believe in. It is not an idea to debate. It is a palpable reality right here now. It’s a way of seeing and being that is experiential, discoverable, and yes, cultivatable. Of course, cultivating and practicing are always paradoxical, because what is being cultivated is always already fully here. It’s never absent. And yet, it’s so close, so intimate, so all-inclusive that it’s easy to overlook. Imagining its absence, we become like the proverbial fish searching for water. When attention is caught in the thought-sense of separation and encapsulation, this is exactly what happens—we imagine ourselves as a lost and deficient little somebody searching for wholeness (or happiness, or love, or peace), imagining it is “out there” somewhere. By looking for it, we overlook it. So, what to do? Toni Packer (taking wisdom from the traffic signs) used to say: Stop. Look. Listen.

Wake up. Right Now. Right Here. Smell the flowers. Feel the presence. And maybe send a gift to a fellow-traveller whose route has taken a very challenging turn. That undesirable turn (Lewy Body Dementia) brings to mind something Zen teacher Katagiri Roshi once said, which I’ll paraphrase as best I can recall it: “Enlightenment,” he said, “is not dying a good death; enlightenment is not needing to die a good death.” And by “a good death,” I assume he meant either a painless one, or else one of those exemplary ones in Zen legends where the dying Master is totally calm, uttering a pithy Zen poem just before expiring, a blissful smile on the lips—but definitely not screaming in pain or lost in some terrifying hallucination. Karagiri is telling us that a truly good death (or a truly good life) is not our ideas and ideals of how we think we or it ought to be. Life is always reliably how it is, not how we think it should be. And whatever shows up is, at that moment, the only possible. What Katagiri said applies equally to living, not just to dying, and I suspect that living and dying are fundamentally the same.

As I’ve discovered, spiritual awakening, like both living and dying, is a great stripping process, and we’re not in control of any of it. From the perspective of the little “me,” that sounds dreadful, but the realization of it (and the dissolution of that imaginary separation) is enormously relaxing.

Thank you all for being here.