Category: Performances

PARTNERING WITH THE UNIVERSE

Those in proximity to the shadowed path of the eclipse are scurrying to make Air B&B reservations, shoebox pinhole cameras and even wedding plans along the path of totality. There will be shouting, singing, and dancing as the sky darkens. It’s kind of sweet to think of so many of us celebrating together, even though anything beyond us seems accompanied with a splash of dread these days. Life and death create each other every moment. The universe birthed us and the universe will end us. Along the way, we’ll mark the passage of our moon across the sun. When he was still a cat, Yusuf Islam referenced being followed by a “moonshadow.” Moonshadow, moonshadow.

At some point this summer, as the universe decides to reveal it, there will be a less noticeable, but far more salient, event. A supernova will be visible on earth.  This once in our lifetime event will mark the dramatic death of a star that exploded 3,000 years ago.  However, the light will be reaching us this year. It is stunning to think that looking into the majesty of a clear night sky we are seeing a chronicle of our past. Even the contemporaneous events of today’s eclipse will have happened 8 minutes earlier. If we look closely enough into the stars between the stars we can see back to stars created at the start of time. And as we look up tonight much of what we see is no longer happening. This is all beyond most of our capacities to grasp, so today’s otherwise ordinary event will be interpreted in many ways depending on the diverse capabilities and aspirations of the interpreters. Some will see evidence of a godhead as others see a harbinger of doom.  Some will believe it to be a portent for good things and many will devise stories with the opposite conclusion. Is this evidence that we are not alone? Or just a momentary shadow happening in an insignificant corner of the universe?  In times before, this was a fearful and awe inspiring moment in the animal annals of our forebears. But today, in these darkening moments, we will partner with the universe.  And as cool and rare and special as the eclipse is to those in our part of the world, our interpretations of the eclipse will have more to say about ourselves than anything else. If it’s a message to us, then what of those who live beyond the shadow?

The eclipse is an event born of perspective. The moon is close to us, and so appears large enough to block the sun. It appears meaningful because it is our moon.  Yet, as above, so below. And doesn’t this celestial event beautifully depict an ordinary process in everyday life?  Buddhists don’t generally speak of heaven or hell. They speak instead of awareness or ignorance.  Buddhists  talk of “obscurations” to the clarity of understanding. The obscurations that are close to us are meaningful enough to create shadows in our understanding. There is a big wide amazing world that is blocked by this one thing we can’t look past. And because that one thing is close, like the policeman in your rear view mirror, it appears larger than it actually is.

In meditation theory, the sun is used as a depiction of awareness. The sun shines on everything equally regardless of whether it is blocked by the moon, the clouds or the turning earth. Awareness is alive and awake in the universe whether or not we are conscious of it. It is the work of the meditator to uncover the veils of self-imposed obscuration that block access to awareness. We notice thoughts that are actually quite small in the scheme, and bring our attention back to the space afforded by the breath. As we do this, we are stepping back from the thought and revealing a larger context. Our blockage might appear less significant, even humorous. Over time, these obscurations become less solid and less imbued with “meaning”. They become right-sized. Sometimes they disappear altogether. Although the significant obscurations require less force, but more patience.  Some will likely return. When that happens we are faced with the same task. Notice them as thinking, and return to the breath.   This reconnects us to space, which is perspective. It sucks that we often have to be fooled again and again but that is the work of creating access to awareness. That sunlight will, in time, permeate our experience, but there is a lot of slogging to get there.

Many of us are inspired by the idea of space travel. To many kids of my youth, astronauts displaced the firemen and soldiers of my parents’ generation. It was exciting, and to many of us, it still is. But to the astronaut, it was hours and hours of training to get to hours and hours, and maybe years and years, of sitting through endless space. Each step we take is a small step. But, as we are humans, we will likely make a big AF deal of every step. Look at me! I’m coming back to the breath! Huzzah!

In truth, we are training to be ordinary, simple and exactly who we are. And considering our outsized view of ourselves, that is remarkable. In Shambhala Buddhism they call this authentic being. Authentic being connects us to life around us without interpretation. Things are as they are and it is the work of the meditator to see that as it is. But the things that are close appear very large. The vastness of space is threatening to existence, hence the onus on survival as a hunkering down, and closing off into the safety of the cave. In this way, we hunker down in the safety of our minds, returning again and again to the bone we’ll chew.  Eventually, we need more than that bone. Humans have held to their families, beliefs,  and clans for security.  But we have eventually had to venture out, trading security for sustenance. In the coming century the first families could well be born off planet. From some perspective, this is beyond frightening. From another, it is inspiring and exciting. To those who accept the mission it will be a lot of work and routine. Some of us today are building entire fortresses over small flickers of thought. And some are returning to the breath on a journey to enlightenment.

But whether we are journeying through outer space, or the space of our minds, we are partnering with the universe. And, while we are likely not as special as we’d care to believe, we have the possibility of forging a sacred bond with the great unfolding of life. Awareness is our power. And though ego and self-importance provide all the obscurations we think we need, we might develop the power to be released from the “bondage of self” and see through space to the truth beyond.

To the universe, this is a blink of her eye. But for us, it’s a long process. One we travel one breath at a time. All the while followed by our moonshadow, moonshadow.

The great farce played upon our thinking is the uninvestigated assumption that we exist. Or more specifically, that we believe ourselves to be a permanent, independent being. Despite evidence that life is unpredictable, we act as though this was not the case. We just assume we are as we think we are. And that assumption leads to the greatest folly of all – we believe we are in control. We believe we are the bozo driving the bus, despite our GPS being disconnected.

I tend to live life from one project to the next, believing that -despite all prior experience- this time I will get it right. This diet, this financial plan, this meditation, this love. Especially this love. True Love. That’s the one that gets me. Each love I fall into becomes my center of being. I have always failed to see that my relationship to loving has all the hallmarks of classic addiction. In his masterwork, The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm defined “true love” as two people who were both ready for the same thing at the same time. He specifically nudged the reader away from the idea that we were part of something special. But, despite the slight-of-hand of hormonal urges, true love is not destiny. True love, like life itself, is a random occurrence that happened to succeed. Life is opportunistic. Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. It seems, even a thinker as profoundly creative as Albert still searched for the occasional guarantee. If the universe doesn’t play dice it may be because dice only has 36 outcomes. The perplexing game of Go that has kept humans intrigued for 4,000 years, has less than 11,000 possible outcomes. If the universe is playing with us, It is using a much more vast and complex system than any game our brains can presently conjure. And, yet, within that ocean of possibility, we find that apple trees always breed apple trees. This interesting paradox is central to our existential being. Life is random and there are repetitive patterns throughout.

So perhaps there is a pattern to the chaos? So far in our development, humans have always bred humans. But the configuration of any human psychology is a mix of recognizable patterns and random occurrence. In general, we will cling to familiar patterns and ignore possibility. In fact, strangely, we will cling to painful patterns rather than look to an undiscovered alternative. Or even, a newer pattern that brings relief from the pain. It has been said that the mind needs 90 days to fully change a pattern. And this, all the while knowing we must change. We could be killing ourselves and yet our survival instinct, as powerful as it is, is hijacked by some nefarious conditioned need. When we are enthralled in the euphoria of addiction, crawling down the mole hole in fear, or habitually trying to milk pleasure from stones, we are blinded to the alternatives. We mistake the moment for the fantasy, as we compulsively perform the same experiment again and again. And we know what Albert said about that.

Perhaps, God is playing a shell game. Despite astronomical odds of being, once life occurs, it believes itself to be the center of all things. In our small part of the universe,  once conceived, we created an uberbeing fashioned after ourselves – replete with similar attributes, gender and political affiliations. Then we knew we were at the center of the universe and that everything was going according to plan. Ironically, feeling we were the center of all things, separated us from each other and the universe altogether. You see, when we believe we are the center of the universe, our life, or our family, then everything around us is only a projection. We see what we believe, which is to say, we see nothing but ourselves. And on some basic level this is very lonely. On some basic level, below all the games we play to keep us occupied, we are naked, cold and lonely.  Because of this, we cling to all the tangible things that we feel provide us surety.  And as we can reach out and touch these things, we feel to be in control, and so we never look beyond ourselves. We never see that if we were the center of anything it was the “vicious wheel of quivering meat conception” as Kerouac called samsara. We believe that the next thing we grasp will be the real thing and, although we’ve reached for that very thing time and time again, next time we’ll get there.

But, it’s our choice isn’t it? I mean it’s my life, I can run in circles if I like.

Trungpa Rinpoche called this the “myth of freedom.” Spinning on the wheel of samsara can be exhilarating.  It can keep us so occupied we never have to see how naked, alone or frightened we really are. But, what happens when the wheel stops? One of the most frightening things, existentially speaking, is space. But just as “Steamboat Willie” is comforting to us, they are an imaginary narrative based on quickly flickering frames. Moving pictures move so quickly we believe it’s actually happening.  Movies create the illusion of life by flickering 23 still-images a second, too fast for our eyes to see the s p a c e between each frame. But that space provides a glimpse into the possibility beyond. And that space is a crack in the belief systems we establish to prove we exist. In this way, our anxiety drives us relentlessly forward. Flickering images create the illusion that we are steering the ship.

In the same way, we believe we must steer the ship, lest we fall in and drown. But we may be holding the wheel so tightly, we never see that the ocean we’re steering across is an endless sea of undefinable change.

HEALING THE BROKEN PLACES

The child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth.

– African proverb

In a culture conditioned to a linear understanding of causes and conditions we assign blame to a problem, focusing our ire on the object of blame. In extreme cases, we might describe a perpetrator as inhuman, animalistic, or assign them superhuman attributes such as being “pure evil” or “monstrous.” In any case, we are protected from implicating ourselves in the problem.

When emotions run high, the fear mind takes over and latches onto simple answers. And naturally, we believe we are right. This feeling of righteousness wants retribution and dismisses the inclusion of societal and familial issues as pandering snowflakery. The Buddha spoke of Karma as the law of cause and effect. He also spoke of the interdependence of every event to all else. Despite conditioned tendencies toward black and white binaries, the Buddha saw that the causes of any event are myriad and nuanced. This would seem frustrating to the raging defensive mind latching onto rightandwrong. But a reactive mind is generally devoid of nuance or compassion. Compassion doesn’t mean kindness to those who’ve caused harm. It means understanding those who cause harm.

When we assign blame, we are forcing reality into a binary. A binary which has ourselves and our value systems as the prime arbiter. This is good and evil from the way we see it. And the angrier we become the narrower our focus. This might be a factor in why people of color are incarcerated at higher rates than whites in our predominantly white culture. When we are seeing it our way, what of those who don’t conform? But is this willed ignorance only creating time bombs? What are we missing when we push some aside? And are those shadowed voices so needing to be heard that they will grow in ire until they erupt in violence?  The Buddhist teachings on compassion are unequivocal in their directives that we see beyond our parochial beliefs and begin to understand others.  Are we able to step back and see those we demonize? Only recently, a court found the parents of a son accused of gun violence as culpable. Was this a groundbreaking step in widening perspective or was it just shifting the binary? Looking at the home, looking at the school, looking at the community and looking at the gun communities and legislation tied to the influence of economic pressure are all ways that violence is interconnected. So, as the Buddha taught, Karma is complicated.  Then how do we manage the overwhelming preponderance of information that is karmic cause and condition?

What can we do?

Blame is not doing. Nor are platitudes. Nor are promises. How do we begin right here right now? We all have a child, either in our family or in our heart, who needs care and support. But are we listening? Or are we shunting the child aside as we are consumed by our busy lives? Are we in fact ashamed of the child? Are we embarrassed by the snowflakery of caring for an inner child? All too often in our society and our heart we are pushing the children away. Ignoring the most potent and important part of the village. In many indigenous cultures, villages cared for their children. This not only created homecare for stressed parents, but also allowed a wider perspective for the child to grow. This wider perspective also helped to moderate any neurosis the caregiver might pass on the child. A village based on community is self-healing and co-supportive. In this way the child can grow with freedom to become healthy versions of themselves, not reactive copies of a copy of their parents. In some cultures, criminals and those with mental illness were taken into counsel with the elders of the community. This is a healing circle. The view is that connection is healing and isolation, whether by social ostracism or mental evasion, encourages infirmity. The places we hide in our mind may be protective. But they are also places we fail to grow. They are the burning children of our hearts waiting to be heard, held, and understood.

A view of compassion may be that we have the capacity to be our own village. And maybe we can extend our view outward and see others as ourselves. We are all hurting and unheard. Maybe by awareness we can begin to see and heal the places within ourselves that are keeping us in darkness. And maybe we can learn to give expression to the wounded children that so desperately need our love. One way to illuminate the darkness is to burn the village. Another way is to touch the heart and allow that child to be accepted as they are before that happens. Perhaps the flames of anger can be softened into the warmth of compassion.

Compassion can be seen as the transformation of hatred into empathy. We don’t have to fear the flames. We can hold them and allow their rage to soften into warmth.

The picture is from photo sessions for the album WAR by U2.