Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

From the writing of Chogyam Trunpa: Ocean of Dharma

“When we talk about madness and about sanity, it is extremely important, and everybody should know, that there is only ONE point, rather than that you belong to either of those groups (the insane and the sane.) You don’t have to belong to one in order to become mad or another in order to become wise or liberated. You don’t have to associate yourself with either the good or the bad, but you become the one. And that one possesses both good and bad simultaneously. That’s a very important point in terms of experience. It is extremely necessary to know that.”

Posted under meditation help

The effects from the wave of uplifting energy that swept through our town when the Sound of Music played here like Obama election night. The two lead players, Marie played by Christie Aviles and Captain Von Trapp played by a local lawyer Denis McCarty, are still looking into their inner mirror with shock as the person looking back seems so much larger than it was before. Suddenly the world is full of possibilities. Life feels good, exciting and expanding.

Helping my wife build some flats in our shop, participating in the set construction at the stage, making DVD slide shows of the play for cast members, all made me feel good too. In the past when asked to participate in group projects like this there was always a sea anchor of resistance that dragged in my consciousness. Now doing my part is clean and without hesitation, and I discover that this uplifting energy of the play is my energy too. You can’t get totally wet unless you jump all the way in.

I have really come to appreciate in greater depth the magical and transformative power of the theater and why so many people are passionate about it, willing to give up their lives for it, and, yes, willing to psychologically die for it as a good actor has to do when becoming a character in a play. You have to give up that sea anchor pulling you back. You have to give up that little self that doesn’t want to let go of it’s concern about ME. A play asks only one thing of both actors and audience: you have to let go of yourself.

Let’s put it this way; every moment in our life is a scene in our personal play. Each moment asks us to jump in and let go of that sea anchor and become the action and whatever the script demands. When we resist and hold back that little slice of self that behaves like a child being dragged to its bath, our performance is lacking and we get no joy or applause from the play or the world. We learn little and when we look in the mirror, it is the same old me looking back. Nothing new here, the image says, and it wishes it had a llittle more time to just sleep in.

Posted under current events

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories, or stories have been thinking me, since the Sound of Music came to our town, or out town came to the Sound of Music. See how everything is reversable in my mind. And that’s the way stories are: an unhappy ending can also be a happy ending because every positive must have a negative and every negative cannot exist without its opposite. So our life stories—our personality plays we call ME—are constantly shifting from a smiling face to a tragic face like a clown. Our stories are where we live and we call it our history. Even the Bible is a collection of stories, and we call these God’s stories. And we read them over and over again trying to figure out what they mean.

And if you listen to people talk, which we all do, you will notice that we the people are preoccupied with our stories in the same way. “What did he mean by that? What should I do? Why didn’t I do that?” We study our stories like scriptures, perhaps hoping to find God in there, or at least some sliver of truth.

The Sound of Music is a divine story, a musical scripture if you allow that God can write plays when he’s not writing Bibles. So when we go to a play (or watch a movie) we’re putting aside our story and entering into another story that we hope will uplift us, or at least make us forget our dreary personal story for awhile. If the play is uplifting, then when we go back to our own story, its burden won’t be so heavy. We may find some music in there that we didn’t notice before. Sometimes a song will just burst through the spaces in the script of our story, and we suddenly find ourselves in a musical instead of a drama. When music breaks into our story and we find ourselves dancing for no reason, our personal story doesn’t seem so serious. Our tragedy can turn into a comedy.

In fact, when our story gets so, so tragic, tragic to the point of absurdity, like, “Okay, what else can happen? Come on God, is the the best you can do? Can’t you pile on a little more?” At some point—and God knows where that point is—our tragedy shifts into a insane comedy, as we just break out laughing. HAH!

We come to these absurd junctures more than we realize. How about when one screw up follows another, and everything we do to avoid another mistake just creates a new and unexpected mistake. At some point we just throw up our hands and fall on the floor laughing at the absurdity of the situation. (At least I do.)

These moments are the revolving doors of our stories where the negative becomes its opposite. These doors are the portals to our freedom. Look for them, encourage them, and they will find you.

Posted under meditation help

Death is for the living to heal. And sometimes death weaves a tragic yet sweet story so that even strangers can be touched by its mystery. With everything in the cosmos reduced to logic and reason, death is that last hold out. The human mind just cannot put its thought around death.

Yesterday April Cox came in to have a special picture made in my photography studio. Her three year-old son, Isaiah Spivey,  had been accidentally run over in the driveway by his grandfather seven years ago, but his kidney, small as it was, had been given to April Poindexter, a 28year-old woman dying of kidney failure. This week April died of breast cancer. Death, blocked at the front door, seemed to have come around through the back door, determined to have its way.

“I’m taking this picture to April’s family, said April (how appropriate they had the same name), her face bright with the idea of giving something that will help heal them. She was holding a year-old little girl on her hip. “At least my son gave her seven more years. She was such a beautiful person.”

“Just think of all the choices and people she helped in those six years, thanks to your son, so in a way he still lives on in the ripples those actions have created and are still going on,” I said, caught up in this special ripple in her story.

As I write this piece this morning, I’m thinking that acts of love never die. Even death takes a bow to love as it realizes that of the two, love is the greater mystery. Perhaps Death and Love are just the two sides of one mysterious face, since you can’t have one without the other. In order to love, one must first let go.

Posted under current events

The Sound of Music (joy) came to Blackstone this weekend and a thousand people wiped their eyes in three shows at the Middle School auditorium where the Broadway style sets and local actors gave life to a story of transformation and redemption that occurred to an Austrian family in Hitler’s Europe.

While we all know the play through the movie with Julie Andrews and have heard the music that has now become part of our culture’s heart song—who doesn’t spontaneously start singing the “hills are alive with the sound of music” when life suddenly begins to leap with joy—I was powerfully pierced by the depth of this story, having enjoyed watching two performances this weekend, and now I feel like a bursting grape ready to share the wine of this communion.

The play has three levels where the conflicts between the stifling discipline of the mind (ideology) and freedom of the heart (love, music) work their way to resolution and liberation. First you have the oppressive rituals and rules of the abbey (religion), then you have the no-fun dictatorship of the strict father, and finally on the social level, the suffocation of liberty by fascism. Maria (the feminine principle of the heart) pierced each one of these levels like a moonbeam through the dark. She melts the first two levels and escapes the third. This is the perennial formula of the teachings of Jesus and the elemental recipe for joy in this life. We must let go of the fearful mind’s dominion and release our heart to the moment.

But this play was more than a wet Kleenex. Both actors who play Maria and the Captain felt the power of this music. Christy Aviles,  who played Maria had been performing on Broadway when the planes hit the towers. She and her husband left NYC in search of in search of a new life. By coincidence and perhaps design they ended up in a house in Blackstone, and finally the leading role in this play, where like Maria she used the sound of music to find the song in her heart once more.

And the actor, Denis McCarthy, who played the heart-dead Captain Von Trapp, discovered that he could dance, be romantic, and authoritative all in the same body. Passion—although just for the play—could be felt throughout the theater.

And my wife, Tilly, who has been dreaming and working, often in vain, for a renaissance of the theater arts here in Blackstone ever since she returned to her home town in 1981, cried on stage when the cast showered her with flowers and applause for the stunning job she did not only directing but building the sets as well. “This is a fulfillment of all my dreams,” she said between dabs of wet Kleenex.

Posted under current events

Life is always pushing up through the earth of our karma like a green tongue testing the temperature to see if it is spring. This moment that you and I are in (as I write and as you read) is our karma—the sum total of all our choices and the choices of the whole cosmos from the big bang (and before) up to this second. This moment could not be other than what it is. Not one thing could be altered. Everything is as it should be because this moment can’t be other than what it is. What’s real is what is. What is is what is, and that’s it. If you don’t accept what is, then you accept what is not—and that’s crazy.

So when I pray that I be led from the unreal to the real, I am asking that I see what is and accept it; that I be able rest in what is without complaint. To complain about what is is crazy because then you’re wanting what is to be different from what is, and, of course, as we have noticed, reality can’t be other than what it is.

If I don’t accept what is, what is real, then, guess what? I’m not real. And when I’m not real, I feel that I lack something, that I’m not complete—and that’s the truth because I’m not completely being here. When I accept what is without resistance, then I accept myself as I am this moment. And when you get right down to it, that’s all there is. I am this moment. I am what is.You are this moment, and that’s all there is.

If I want to be someplace else in the future where I believe I’ll be happier than I am right now, then I have divided myself into being here and being there in the future, and I am not complete. I am resisting what is. I am avoiding life.  I am not what is.

This moment is complete, and it is the only thing that is complete. You can’t divide this moment no matter how hard you try. But my mind can separate me from this moment by wanting to be in another moment where I think I’ll feel complete. But when I get there, guess what? I’m still not complete because I’m still here in this moment. This moment never changes. It always is what is right now. This non-acceptance of what is is being trapped in Karma—the wheel of suffering. We’re always chasing completeness, but never arriving, like the hamster on a wheel.

Completeness is always right here! What a joke. And if you every realize this, completely, you’ll just wake up laughing. Hah!

Posted under meditation help

Meditation in the morning is like taking anti-thought pills. Meditation kills thought like an anti-biotic kills a virus. Thinking doesn’t die, mind you, but it just begins to heel like a trained dog.

Without meditation, the mind is like a puppy running here and there, getting into poop and spilling things. You can’t rest with a puppy lose in the house. But with training—here sit in this corner for an hour—the puppy begins to calm down and wait for a use, like a mature sled dog waiting for the master.

But, to train the puppy you have to be persistent. The puppy will resist in the begining, and it’s all too easy to say, “Oh, what the hell. Go ahead and pee on the floor. Go ahead an worry about everything. Go ahead an sniff every doubt and piece of guilt you can find. You win.”

So if you want to clean up your mind, take your medicine and go sit in a corner.

Posted under meditation help

With the economy in the tank, we in Main Street would like to know what really put us there, and it isn’t easy to find understanding during the war of words over whether to free trade or not, or find some middle ground. Yesterday I got the clearest picture of what’s happening around the globe on Air America’s interview with an economist (can’t spell his Indian name). Basically is this: free trade increased production of goods and decreased wages. But this creates an imbalance with too many goods and not enough consumers who can afford the goods, so we go into debt trying to keep up. This works for a while until the debt it too large to bear, and that’s where we are now. The honeymoon that lasted 40 years is over. Now the godfather wants his payment.

Remember The Graduate, that classic movie where the businessman told the college grade to get into “plastic.” He didn’t mean plastic credit cards, but that’s what we got seduced by. Credit cards became our godfather, and whenever we need a little something that we can’t afford, we ask our godfather for a little loan. “Sure,” he says, you just be sure to pay me back. “No problem, godfather, just give me the card.”

Posted under current events

“Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” Jesus. JOHN 8:34

“People compelled by craving crawl like snared rabbits.’ Buddha DHAMMAPADA 24.9

Putting the teachings of Jesus next to Buddha reveals the psychological depth of Buddhism. In Christianity sin is breaking a moral commandment, but why does one break the commandment? Craving or desire, says the Buddha. So smoking is a sin? Well, it certainly makes us crawl like a snared rabbit. In Christianity, the moral code is set by an external God; in Buddhism, the moral code is the natural ground of our being, our original nature. Both Jesus and Buddha get to the same place: freedom from slavery to the uninvestigated mind.

Religion on the other hand uses sin as a snare to catch converts and keep them. Many enter religion in order to avoid the snare of sin, never realizing that they are stepping on another snare, the craving to be right. Life is getting free from one rabbit snare after another. Only meditation can release the snare.

Posted under meditation help

My friend’s laptop died, and he has the same Mac Pro like mine, the one I’m writing on right now. The sudden death of this “cousin” makes me aware that the same fate might befall me. One creates a bond with a laptop and it stretches the imagination to think of it suddenly falling ill and dying. What would I do? We like to personalize our machines. My daughter named her car Sandy, so now she and Sandy are coming next weekend for a visit. I love my laptop but I haven’t named it yet.

There must be a child hidden in the corner of our minds that animates the toys or machines in our world, names them fondly, and never dreams that one day they will break down, die or get stolen. Our inner child is what makes life meaningful and difficult; one minute there is joy, the next we are acting out, stamping our foot when we don’t get our way. Without our inner child we live in a cold barren universe, a black and white land without color.

Posted under current events