'Mercy has a human heart.
Pity a human face:
And Love the human form divine,
And Peace the human dress.'
~ William Blake.
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"If you cannot find the truth right where you are,
where else do you expect to find it?"
~ Dogen
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All of us human beings, need compassion and growth.
My aspiration is to wake up, open my heart and touch yours.
“We violate the oneness and wholeness of God by imagining ourself to be an individual separate from Him. This is called the ‘original sin’, which is the root cause of all misery and unhappiness. Because we can become free from this ‘original sin’ only by knowing the truth, Christ said, ‘[…] ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’ (John 8.32). The truth that we must know in order to be made free is the truth that we are nothing but the adjunctless pure consciousness ‘I am’ – that ‘I am’ which is the true form of God, as disclosed by him when he revealed his identity to Moses saying, ‘I am that I am’ (‘ ehyeh asher ehyeh’ –Exodus 3.14).
To ‘know the truth’ does not mean to know it theoretically, but to know it as a direct and immediate experience. In order to destroy the illusion that we are a limited individual consciousness, a person separate from the perfect whole which is called God, we must experience ourself as the unlimited and undivided pure consciousness ‘I am’.
Therefore, to know the truth and thereby be made free from the illusion called ‘original sin’, we must die and be born again – we must die to the flesh and be born again as the spirit. That is why Christ said, ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. […] Except a man be born of […] the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit’ (John 3.3 & 3.5-6).
That is, to experience and enter into the true state of God, we must cease to exist as a separate individual, a consciousness that identifies itself with the flesh and all the limitations of the flesh, and must rediscover ourself to be the unlimited and undivided spirit, the pure, unadulterated and infinite consciousness ‘I am’, which is the absolute reality that we call ‘God’. When we identify ourself with a body made of flesh, webecome that flesh, but when we cease to identify ourself with that flesh and know ourself to be mere spirit, we are born again as our original nature, the pure spirit or consciousness ‘I am’.
The need for us to sacrifice our individuality in order to be born anew as the spirit is a recurring theme in the teachings of Jesus Christ. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal’ (John 12.24-25). ‘Whosoever shall seek to save his lifeshall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it’ (Luke 17.33).
‘And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it’ (Matthew 10.38-39). ‘If any [man] will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ (Matthew 16.24-26, and also Mark 8.34-37 and Luke9.23-25)…
By dying on the cross and rising again from the dead, Christ gave us a powerful symbolic representation of the truth that in order to become free from the ‘original sin’ of identification with the flesh and thereby to enter the ‘kingdom of God’, we must die or cease to exist as a separate individual, and thereby rise again as the pure spirit, the infinite consciousness ‘I am’. The ‘kingdom of God’ which we can see and enter only by being born again as the spirit is not a place – something that we can find externally in the material world of time and space, or even in some celestial world called heaven. When Christ was asked when the kingdom of God would come, he answered, ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you’ (Luke 17.20-21)…
Most ordinary Christians have believed that true salvation can be attained only through the person of Jesus Christ, and that atheists, agnostics and the followers of other religions can be saved only by converting to Christianity. They have justified this unreasonable and arrogant belief by their dualistic interpretation of Christ’s saying, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me’ (John 14.6). Because of their dualistic understanding of his spiritual teachings, they interpret the words ‘I am’ and ‘me’ that he used in this passage to denote only the individual person Jesus Christ, who was born at a certain time in a certain place called Bethlehem.
However, Christ did not mistake himself to be merely an individual person whose life was limited within a certain range of time and place. He knew himself to be the real and eternal spirit ‘I am’, which is unlimited by time and place. That is why he said, ‘Before Abraham was born, I am’ (John 8.58). The person who was Jesus Christ was born long after the time of Abraham, but the spirit which is Jesus Christ exists always and everywhere, transcending the limits of time and place. Because that spirit is timeless, he did not say, ‘Before Abraham was born, I was’, but, ‘Before Abraham was born, I am’. That timeless spirit ‘I am’, which Christ thus knew to be his own real self, is the same ‘I am’ that God revealed to be his real self when he said to Moses, ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 3.14).
Therefore, though Christ appears to us to be a separate individual person, he and his Father God are in fact one and the same reality, the spirit that exists within each one of us as our fundamental consciousness ‘I am’. That is why he said, ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10.30). Therefore, when Christ said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me’ (John 14.6), by the words ‘I am’ and ‘me’ he was referring not merely to the time-bound individual called Jesus, but to the eternal spirit ‘I am’, which he knew to be his own real self. The inner meaning of his words can therefore be expressed by rephrasing them thus, ‘The spirit “I am” is the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the spirit “I am”, which is the Father or source of all things, but by this same spirit’…
Not only did Christ affirm his oneness with God, his Father, he also wanted us to become one with him. Before his arrest and crucifixion, Christ prayed for us, ‘Holy Father, […] that they may be one, as we [are]. […] that they all may be one; as thou, Father, [art] in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us […] that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one’ (John 17.11 & 21-23). That is, the aim of Christ was that we should cease to mistake ourself to be an individual separate from God and should know ourself to be the one indivisible spirit, the pure fundamental consciousness ‘I am’, which is the reality of God. Thus oneness or non-duality is the central aim of the spiritual teachings of Jesus Christ.”
~ Michael James, Happiness and the Art of Being
Image ~ Jesus appears to Mary Magedelene after his resurrection
"At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven." -- Matthew 18:1-10
Another saying referring to small children can be found in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas:
"Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) kingdom". They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom as babies?" Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].
Jesus said, "I shall choose you, one from a thousand and two from ten thousand, and they will stand as a single one.
His disciples said, "Show us the place where you are, for we must seek it."
He said to them, "Anyone here with two ears had better listen! There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark."
Jesus said, "Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye."
Art -- Christ with children by Carl Heinrich Bloch
“When Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche was teaching in Ireland several years ago, he learned how mussels are cultivated off the Irish coast. The farmers attach mussel seeds to long ropes that hang under water. Clinging to the ropes, the mussels grow until they are large enough to be eaten. Although there is nothing preventing these creatures from letting go and floating away, they remain in place until the ropes are pulled up and they are scraped off and boiled alive.
For Rinpoche, this story illustrates the basic misunderstanding that rules our lives, causing every form of unhappiness and suffering that we experience. Just as the mussels hold tightly to their fatal rope, so too do we hold on desperately to our self, this all-important being we call me. Hearing about the mussels, Rinpoche said, made him “sad and curious…”
The only way to obtain the peace, joy, and fulfillment that all of us long for is by releasing our tight hold on me and turning our attention to the welfare of others. These complementary aims can be achieved through the transformative practice of tonglen, also known as the exchange of self and other… Because the exchange of self and other goes against the grain of our habitual self-centeredness, we put up many levels of resistance, from gross to subtle…”
~ JOSEPH WAXMAN _________________________
“Simon, the mussel farmer, held up infographics explaining the process of raising mussels. It takes approximately 4-5 weeks for shellfish eggs to develop into larvae. The gray buoys floating in the water held large ropes. Larvae attach themselves to the ropes, remaining there until they become fully-grown–a two year process. In use for eighteen years, the ropes were thick with mud and grime. I could picture tiny larvae attaching themselves to the threads of the rope to finish the rest of their development.
Inviting us to gather around, he went to the small cabin of the boat, flipping a switch. Out of the water came a series of ropes, completely filled with fully grown mussels. He detached one and brought it over to the machine, turning it on. Simon raked several mussels off the ropes to demonstrate how the machine worked, mussels spinning through brushes before dumping out into a large bin.
Every morning Simon harvests one ton of mussels. If Simon is feeling unsure about the water, he will do a taste test of the mussels himself to make sure that he isn’t selling tainted shellfish to his customers, whom would become sick upon consumption. We were all shocked when he shared this, as he said that a few times he had gotten sick when completing his quality control check. I can’t think of higher commitment to serving quality shellfish than putting your health at risk to make your customers happy.
After learning about harvesting shellfish, we climbed back into the boat and returned to shore, where Simon’s wife and fellow shellfish lover, Kate, had prepared mussels for us. A bowl of bright orange mussels sat before me. Having never tried one before, I was hesitant. Some others in the group showed me the “ropes” of eating mussels. I dived in, not to be disappointed.”
~ Emily, Greener Ireland
"The police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, showed no mercy to Jon Kabat-Zinn in May 1970. The man now considered the godfather of modern mindfulness was a graduate student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an anti-Vietnam-war protester, agitating alongside the Black Panthers and the French playwright Jean Genet.
“I got my entire face battered in,” he recalls. “They put this instrument on my wrist called the claw, which they tightened to generate enormous amounts of pain without leaving any marks. But they certainly left a lot of marks on my face. They pulled me into the back of the police station and beat the shit out of me.”
Today, at 73, Kabat-Zinn’s restful, lined face shows no scars from that protest outside a police station, when a trip canvassing support for a nationwide university strike boiled over into violence,leaving him with stitches.
He sits beneath the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on Parliament Square in London taking a breather after going straight from an overnight flight out of Boston into a 90-minute talk to a gathering of international parliamentarians about how he thinks mindfulness could – to put it bluntly – change the world.
The once “very macho” anti-war activist who raged against MIT’s role in nuclear weapons research is the catalyst behind the west’s mushrooming interest in mindfulness meditation, having reimagined Buddhist contemplation practices for a secular age almost 40 years ago.
With others, he pioneered an eight-week mindfulness-based stress-reduction course at the University of Massachusetts Medical School for patients with chronic pain, harnessing the fundamentals of mindfulness meditation as taught by the Buddha, but with the Buddhism taken out. “I bent over backwards to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, new age, eastern mysticism or just plain flakey,”
Kabat-Zinn had been meditating since 1965, but had no compunction in playing the Buddhism right down. “I got into this through the Zen door which is a very irreverent approach to Buddhism,” he says. He talks a lot about dharma, the term for the Buddha’s teaching, but he’s not a Buddhist and remarks that to insist mindfulness meditation is Buddhist is like saying gravity is English because it was identified by Sir Isaac Newton.
The UMass Stress Reduction Clinic opened its doors in 1979 and taught people with chronic back pain, victims of industrial accidents, cancer patients and sometimes paraplegics. Kabat-Zinn has defined mindfulness meditation as “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”. By focusing on the breath, the idea is to cultivate attention on the body and mind as it is moment to moment, and so help with pain, both physical and emotional.
“It often results in apprehending the constantly changing nature of sensations, even highly unpleasant ones, and thus their impermanence,” he says. “It also gives rise to the direct experience that ‘the pain is not me’.” As a result, some of his patients found ways “to be in a different relationship with their pain” while others felt it diminish. The title of his 1990 bestseller about the clinic captures his approach to accepting whatever life throws at you: Full Catastrophe Living.
Now, in 2017, Kabat-Zinn vibrates with an urgent belief that meditation is the “radical act of love and sanity” we need in the age of Trump, accelerating climate change and disasters such as the Grenfell Tower fire.
He has a platform to build on. Mindfulness courses ultimately derived from his work are now being rolled out in the UK to school pupils, convicts, civil servants and even politicians. It is prescribed on the NHS in some areas to prevent recurrent depression, with 2,256 people completing eight-week courses last year. The course reduces the likelihood of relapse by almost a third, according to an analysis of nine trials. In the US, the NBA basketball champions, Golden State Warriors, are the latest poster boys for the practice after their coach, Steve Kerr, made mindfulness one of the team’s core values.
“He is Mr Mindfulness in relation to the secular strand,” says Lokadhi Lloyd, a meditation teacher in London who has been on courses led by Kabat-Zinn. “Without him, I don’t think mindfulness would have risen to the prominence it has.”
Supporters such as Willem Kuyken, a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University, even suggest that Kabat-Zinn’s pioneering work could one day see him mentioned in the same breath as Darwin and Einstein. “What they did for biology and physics, Jon has done for a new frontier: the science of the human mind and heart,” says Kuyken.
South African children at Rosewood Primary school take part in a free meditation class, in Bonteheuwel, a Cape Town suburb with significant gang problems. Photograph: Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images
But mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn figures, must now be harnessed in a bigger way than so far seen, to do nothing less than challenge the way the world is run. This latest mission is why he has flown into London to speak to parliamentarians from 15 countries about how to act more wisely.
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“If this is another fad, I don’t want to have any part of it,” he says. “If in the past 50 years I had found something more meaningful, more healing, more transformative and with more potential social impact, I would be doing that.”
There are signs many others agree with its potential. Globally, 18 million people subscribe to the Headspace app, practising mindfulness meditations through their headphones.
In the shops, ranges of mindfulness clothing – not least “drop of mindfulness” tights (the only thing mindful seems to be the brand name) – colouring books and even dot-to-dot puzzles testify to the idea’s growing ubiquity – even if Kabat-Zinn derides much of this as “McMindfulness”.
His work has attracted its share of sceptics, such as Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, authors of The Buddha Pill, who caution that mindfulness is no cure-all and warn of a dark side if not taught correctly.
Wikholm, a clinical psychologist, has said that “the fact that meditation was primarily designed not to make us happier, but to destroy our sense of individual self – who we feel and think we are most of the time – is often overlooked in the science and media stories about it”.
There have also been 20 published case reports or observational studies where people’s experiences of meditation were distressing enough to warrant further treatment, according to a recent study. They include “meditation-induced” psychosis, mania, depersonalisation, anxiety, panic and re-experiencing traumatic memories.
Kabat-Zinn and other highly experienced teachers point out that these are rare incidents and mostly relate to intensive retreats rather than the routine courses where meditators practise for perhaps half an hour a day. But he also admits that “90% of the research [into the positive impacts] is subpar”, with major studies still needed.
Kabat-Zinn’s decision to pour his energy into trying to inject mindfulness into global politics should come as no surprise. In the political tumult at MIT in the late 1960s, he helped establish the Science Action Coordinating Committee to campaign against the university’s work with the Department of Defense, including research into multiple-warhead nuclear missiles.
Kabat-Zinn: ‘I found ways to speak about it that avoided the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, new age, eastern mysticism or just plain flakey.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian His activities regularly made the front page of the student paper, The Tech, as he appeared on platforms with Noam Chomsky, supported the Viet Cong and on one occasion translated the radical French playwright Jean Genet’s call for revolution. They meditated before actions, but one week, it reported how he and others stormed a meeting of the MIT Corporation chanting: “Kick the ass of the ruling class – end war research!” and “Power to the people.”
In 1969, he told a meeting: “We are approaching a critical unique point in history. We are approaching an ego disaster of major proportions – overpopulation, pollution of every conceivable kind including mental.”
When I read that back to Kabat-Zinn in Parliament Square, his response is urgent. “We’re worried about that right now, too,” he says. “Trump is crazier than anything we have ever seen ... This is our work at the moment, to see if we can maintain a degree of sanity and recognition of the fears and concerns of those who do not see the world the way we do. The temptation is to fall into camps where you dehumanise the other, and no matter what they do, they are wrong, and no matter what we do, we are right.” Trump’s threats to annihilate North Korea are one example of a people “losing their minds”, as is the lead poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Michigan. This month he’s travelling there to speak at a benefit for some of the victims of the 2014 decision to replace the supply with undertreated water. “The human mind, when it doesn’t do the work of mindfulness, winds up becoming a prisoner of its myopic perspectives that puts ‘me’ above everything else,” he says. “We are so caught up in the dualistic perspectives of ‘us’ and ‘them’. But ultimately there is no ‘them’. That’s what we need to wake up to.”
Kabat-Zinn has just written a paper arguing that amid “the ascendancy of Trump and the forces and values he represents”, “endemic racism and police violence” and “persistent social and economic injustices … this may indeed be a pivotal moment for our species to come to our senses ... mobilising in the mainstream world ... the power of mindfulness”.
He is at the House of Commons to make his case, but first he must get past the guards at the airport-style security system. While everyone else unpacks their laptops for the scanner, Kabat-Zinn produces a pair of ancient-looking copper meditation chimes, to the complete bemusement of the guard, who tries to confiscate them. When Kabat-Zinn explains they are for meditation, the puzzlement only deepens, as security staff gather to assess the threat. Finally, when he mentions it is for mindfulness, there is a flash of recognition and he is waved through. It is a moment of satisfaction for Kabat-Zinn: if a security guard knows the score, it must be catching on.
Meditation is the “radical act of love and sanity” that can help manage the fear and aversion he believes underpin so many of the world’s problems. The Grenfell Tower disaster that claimed around 80 lives was partly down to an absence of mindfulness – “deep and authentic listening” – by decision makers who clearly felt an aversion to the complaints of residents.
“There were many indications and pleas to take a look at the safety of that building with the cheaper cladding. People were saying: ‘This a fire trap,’” he says. “And because those people were without means or political significance, I think they were systematically unattended to. They thought: ‘It is not my job to attend to that.’ Everyone says: ‘Why didn’t we do something?’, but the reason is nobody said: ‘Let’s pay attention to what this is calling out for.’”
Kabat-Zinn was born into a non-practising Jewish family and raised in upper Manhattan, near where his father worked as a scientist at Columbia University. It was rough and tough on the streets around Washington Heights and he jokes he is “the world’s most improbable meditator – a street kid from New York”.
He started meditating while studying molecular biology at MIT in 1965 when a talk by Zen Buddhist Philip Kapleau “took the top off my head”. In 1979, married with children and working at the University of Massachusetts medical school, he had a 10-second “vision” on a meditation retreat in the woods 80 miles west of Boston. “I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the long-term implications,” he says.
Kabat-Zinn foresaw mindfulness clinics spreading to hospitals and clinics with thousands of practitioners earning a living in a good cause. “Because it was so weird, I hardly ever mentioned this experience to others,” he says. “But it was so compelling I decided to take it on whole-heartedly as best I could.”
Corps of Cadet Recruits train in transcendental meditation to prevent PTSD by providing coping tools before exposure to combat or stressful situations. Photograph: Kayana Szymczak/Boston Globe via Getty Images Anyone who has tried to meditate knows how hard it is when the mind keeps wandering into thoughts, sometimes trivial, sometimes not. The difficulty people in chronic pain must have faced in embracing the elusive quality of attentiveness cannot be overestimated. But in Kabat-Zinn they had an experienced teacher. For more than 30 years, “every morning at five o’clock”, he would do yoga and then sit on his cushion and meditate. He stayed with his eight-week stress-reduction programme until 2000, spreading its influence through books, guided meditation CDs, teaching at retreats and endless conferences.
In 2002, Welsh psychologist Mark Williams worked with colleagues at Cambridge and in Toronto to combine the US programme with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to form an eight-week mindfulness-based CBT course that, in 2004, was recommended for prescription on the NHS for recurrent depression. Williams taught mindfulness to the comedian Ruby Wax at Oxford University when she was looking to tackle her depression. She then popularised it through her 2013 book Sane New World.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) has been shown to be at least as effective as antidepressants at preventing relapse and, in a two-year trial by Willem Kuyken’s team, 44% of the MBCT cohort relapsed compared with 47% on pills. In one trial of 173 people, it was also found to reduce the severity of current depression, with an average 37% reduction in symptoms. It is being taught widely in the private sector with qualified MBCT teachers delivering courses in parish halls, workplaces and beyond.
“The science of meditation is in its infancy,” Kabat-Zinn says. “We need decades more study. People talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning, but we haven’t scratched the surface of what human intelligence is really all about.”
So now, Kabat-Zinn travels the globe. He is fascinated by teaching in China where he has detected a rebirth in the country’s contemplative traditions as a way of tackling its challenges. He leads intensive five-day retreats in the US, runs courses in Austria, Korea and Japan. Lately, he has been talking with David Simas, a former White House adviser and now chief executive of the Obama Foundation, who was inspired to take up mindfulness meditation by Kabat-Zinn. “I feel it’s my responsibility, since to a large degree people blame me for starting this whole ball rolling to participate in whatever way I can,” he says. “This is, in some sense, the fruition of that 10-second vision I had in 1979.”
"So now, Kabat-Zinn travels the globe. He is fascinated by teaching in China where he has detected a rebirth in the country’s contemplative traditions as a way of tackling its challenges. He leads intensive five-day retreats in the US, runs courses in Austria, Korea and Japan. Lately, he has been talking with David Simas, a former White House adviser and now chief executive of the Obama Foundation, who was inspired to take up mindfulness meditation by Kabat-Zinn. “I feel it’s my responsibility, since to a large degree people blame me for starting this whole ball rolling to participate in whatever way I can,” he says. “This is, in some sense, the fruition of that 10-second vision I had in 1979.”
"So, in a sense, it’s about getting past “Buddhism?”
"I don’t know that it’s about getting past it so much as it is about going back to the beginning. If it’s really all about mindfulness and suffering and the potential to relieve suffering and even the full cessation of suffering—liberation and deep understanding of the nature of mind—then if the “Buddhism” piece of it, which is very highly culturally-conditioned, gets in the way, that doesn’t serve the purposes of the Four Noble Truths. So the pathway I chose was to bring the essence or the heart of Buddhist meditation to mainstream of medicine in a way that would be so commonsensical that people would say, “Well, of course! Why didn’t I know this fifty years ago?” It was meant as a skillful means, not the complete Abhidharma or the complete essence of everything—because that essence is beyond words, and flowers in its own way in every single individual. From that point of view, we see our patients as Buddhas to begin with. It’s a question of them allowing the obscurations to fall away and becoming more familiar with their original nature, so to speak...
Actually, many Buddhist teachers who come observe what we do in MBSR say, “My God…these people are better students in some ways because they don’t know anything. They don’t have the baggage of everything they know about and want from Buddhism. They just come with suffering, and the purity of that.” They’re just in pain and suffering, and paying attention to where we most don’t want to look: where it hurts. Then they ask deep questions like, “Who’s aware of this hurt? Who’s aware of this suffering? Who’s thinking?” This opens up those hidden dimensions of experience, and they realize, “Hey, my pain isn’t exactly me. A lot of it is thought-based and emotionally reactive. What if I uncouple the sensory experience of discomfort from all of the talk about how it’s killing me and ruining my life—all the affect and emotion about it?” We’ve had thirty-one years of experience now doing this and it has spread around the world. So when I talk at the benefit, it’s really aimed at offering these kinds of practices within the context of modern medicine and healthcare and psychology because this is something that you can do for yourself that is supremely important when you’re faced with your life taking a turn that you never, ever imagined or wished on anybody.
“How do I work with this?” you might ask. Our message is: it is workable, as long as you’re willing to do the work."
-- Danny Fisher interviews Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2010
"If you don't want to become God, you've missed the boat. If you're too humble to think you could become God, if you think you're not worthy, that's a false humility, because it's not yours to decide."
-- Fr. Thomas Keating
“I LOVE YOU, my Dear Beloved Reader. This may seem an odd way to begin. But it is true. And ever since my Awakening, I can only speak the truth. You could say this is a love letter directly to you, My Beloved. When I say I love you, you must know the love I speak of. This love has no conditions. It is incapable of discriminating or judging. It knows no gender, no age, no race. It sees neither beauty nor ugliness, but only your absolute holy perfection. It does not care what you have done or what you will do, but only what you are. And you are this same perfect love I feel right now as I write this love letter to you, My Beloved. This love I speak of is very simple. It knows only love. And it knows love completely.
Simple as it is, this love is the most powerful force in the universe. It heals the sick and brings the spiritually dead back to life. Unlike everything we perceive in this world, love is unchanging, limitless, infinite and eternal. And this is the love I feel for you. By my loving you in this way, you are free to feel this unconditional love for yourself. And this is how the world is healed.
You may wonder how I can love you when I don’t even know you. And that would be true – except that I do know you. I know you intimately. I know you as well as I know my own self. I know every secret, fear, doubt and judgment you are now holding in your heart. And still I love you utterly, completely and unconditionally. You see, you and I are not unalike. We are not strangers: far from it. If you look deep into your heart you will find that we share the same heart, My Beloved. We are One. I know you may find this hard to believe now. But before you finish this book, you will discover it is true. There is only One Heart. It is not yours personally. Nor is it mine. It is one shared Heart. One Love. And it sings One Heart Song.
It is so glorious. It is singing right now in these pages. It is traveling to you through these words. This book is much more than paper and ink. It is more than words, sentences and paragraphs. You might say this book itself is love. Right now you are holding love in your hands. Each word is love. The paper and ink are infused with love. Each word carries the magical perfume of love. Read deeply. Let the words wash over you, removing all doubts and fears, revealing the infinite and eternal love that is right now humming in your breast and bringing life to every cell. This love is the most powerful force in the universe. It is infinite. It is eternal. And it is right here in this book, singing in the spaces between each word, each sentence, each paragraph. Can you hear it? It is your Heart Song. And that is why right now it is speaking to you. It is traveling to you through these very words.
You might, for just a moment, stop reading now and simply hold this up to your heart. Close your eyes. Now listen. Can you hear your Heart Song? It is the same as mine. This is a Song we all share. There is only one Heart Song. Listen. Feel it reverberate in your Heart. Please know that it has always been here. It was here in your mother’s womb, and even before that. This Song we share is older than time itself. It is more vast than space. Listen. Can you hear it? It may now sound like only the faintest whisper. But trust me, My Love, it is louder than all sounds combined. For in every molecule that has ever existed, this same Heart Song is singing. Listen. I know you can hear it if you truly listen.
You may experience it as an expanding in your chest, a tingling, an excitement in your body’s cells. You might even hear a sound, but more likely it will be a feeling. And this feeling is universal. There is no human who has not felt this Song of the Heart. And this Heart Song, this love, is Enlightenment. It is God. For so long, humans have searched for Enlightenment. For so long we have longed to experience God. And here all along, singing in our very own Heart, was everything we have ever searched for.
For you see, Beloved, it is the very same love that you have felt. The same love that you have touched that is not only the path to God, to Enlightenment, but God Itself. It is the map, the journey and the completion of the journey. It is the beginning, the middle and the end all rolled into one. And never, not for one blessed instant, have you ever been apart from it. Amazing, isn’t it? What you have searched for in vain, lifetime after lifetime, was always as close as that familiar tug on your heartstrings when you gazed into the eyes of a baby, cried during a romantic movie, or sank into the deep kiss of your Beloved for the very first time. Yes, right here all this time was God. You have never for a moment not been Enlightened. You just didn’t know. You were not aware. You forgot. You thought love was something else. Yes, it felt good. Sometimes you chased it, craved it, longed for it. But you never really understood the profound nature of what love really is. You thought it was something precious, limited, in short supply. You thought only the very lucky or beautiful experienced it. But this cannot be so, Beloved. For right now already your heart is beginning to sing, beginning to remember. What you are remembering is who you are. For you yourself are love. And not just the limited thing you had thought was love. You are Real Love. You are Divine Love, infinite and eternal. Nothing can harm or lessen this love even a micro-millimeter. It is permanent and unchanging.
It may be surprising to learn, with all these stories of divorce and perhaps your own experience, but love never changes. It is impossible to lose it. It is impossible to have less or more love. It is impossible for it to fade. You only believe or experience this because you don’t yet understand what love is or what you are. As I have said, love is infinite and eternal. And this bears repeating until you understand. There is no place that love is not. And some say, and this is what I experience: only love is real. In all of this incredible world filled with seeming variety – war and peace, wealth and poverty, good and bad, beauty and ugliness – all that actually exists is love. And that is the reason why I say that I love you. For nothing else that I say can be true. I call you my Dearest Love because you are that to me. Even now I see you as you read these lines. And not only that: I feel you right here in my own Heart, this Heart that holds the entire world within it, this same Heart that has never known anything but love. And so when I say that I love you, this is the truest thing I can ever say. And perhaps someday or even right now, this very moment, you can say this too. You can feel this One Heart beating in your own chest. You can feel it resonating in this enormous, infinite field of love. Can you feel it right now?
If not now, do not worry. It will come. It must, because trust me, My Dearest One, it is right here. Even now, in the midst of your suffering, your sorrow, your dark night, this flame of love is burning brightly. If you can sense just a spark of it, just one glowing ember, do not worry. Let this spark grow. Let this ember glow brighter. Let a small blaze begin. And let this blaze grow and continue growing until you feel a mighty fire of love. And let this Heart Fire burn away all the sorrow, suffering and pain of this imagined life. For I tell you that no matter what you have experienced so far in your life, only love is real. Let me say that again. Only Love Is Real.”
~ Peter Cutler https://www.facebook.com/FallingInLoveWithLove?ref=br_rs, The Zen of Love – Discover Your Own Awakened Heart Peter fully awakened when he was only twenty-two years old. After ten days living in this awakened consciousness, he promptly fell back into the dream of separation. This began a forty-year spiritual search that finally flowered as the lasting state of awakened consciousness it is today. The Zen of Love is a love letter that awakens the infinite unconditional love that lies deep within your heart. It will heal and transform all your relationships, especially the one you have with yourself.
"A popular legend claims that the Rule of Saint Benedict contains the following passage:
If any pilgrim monk come from distant parts, if he wish as a guest to dwell in the monastery, and will be content with the customs which he finds in the place, and do not perchance by his lavishness disturb the monastery, but is simply content with what he finds: he shall be received, for as long a time as he desires.If, indeed, he find fault with anything, or expose it, reasonably, and with the humility of charity, the Abbot shall discuss it prudently, lest perchance God had sent [him] for this very thing.But if he have been found "gossipy and contumacious" in the time of his sojourn as guest, not only ought he not to be joined to the body of the monastery, but also it shall be said to him, honestly, that he must depart. "If he does not go, let two stout monks, in the name of God, explain the matter to him."
Photo ~ "Catholic monks have been brewing beer for over 1,500 years.The Monks of Norcia at the monastery of St. Benedict have a 13th century cloister built over St. Benedict’s birthplace in the Italian city of Norcia, near Rome. The monastery was reopened in Great Jubilee Year of 2000. They follow their founder’s rule of Ora et Labora (Prayer and Work). In 2012 the monks of Norcia began brewing their own line of beer. 12 of the 18 monks who now live in St. Benedict’s monastery come from the United States. Thus they also ship bottles of their beers to North America. The in the sixth century, Benedict of Norcia, the patron of Europe and founder of Western monasticism, wrote a guide for monastic life called “The Rule of St. Benedict.” This book of seventy-three chapters explain how to run a monastery. In medieval times beer was safer to drink than water contaminated by sewage. Known as “liquid bread,” beer also helped the monks through periods of fasting. Fr. Benedict Nivakoff, from Connecticut, the director of the brewery, says there is a supernatural” part to their work. “People see that for us it’s not just a job,” he said. “Our job is to do something which, by the standards of the secular world, is pretty useless: to pray.” “There’s a comparison with beer, because in a sense, [beer] is useless, it’s not something that you have to have to survive,” he said. “But it’s something you can enjoy and it makes life better, like God.” It’s designed to fulfill a two-fold goal of self-sufficiency and evangelization, because, Davoren said, beer-making is a great ice-breaker, and conversation often moves from ale to faith. They make more than 13,000 gallons of beer per year which is brewed during days which begin at 4 a.m.. “We’re seeking God above all,” Davoren added. “The focus of our day is God. We work to support ourselves, but also for the glory of God: The beer helps support the monastery, so that the monastery can support his work in the world.” ~ birranursia dot com
“A quick thought experiment for you:
You can take a pill to extend your own life by six months. Alternatively you can give the pill to a stranger who is similar to you and add five years to their life. Which would you choose in this hypothetical test of generosity?
This question was posed to a number of groups, including Tibetan Buddhist monks, non-religious Americans, American Christians, ordinary Buddhists in Bhutan, and Hindus in India. You’d think that becoming a Buddhist monk would make people particularly compassionate and generous, but it turned out that this wasn’t the case, and that the monastic Buddhists were less willing than any of the other groups to give the pill to a stranger.
I’m stunned. The Tibetan monastics were more likely than any of the others involved in the study to embrace the idea that the self is not fixed. The study was in fact intended to find out whether embracing this Buddhist teaching would affect the fear of death. It seems it did, but in the wrong direction, making monastics more attached to living and more afraid to dying, to the point where they would choose to live at someone else’s expense.
I’m a bit disturbed by this, although it was pointed out that these were novice monks and not people who’d been meditating for years. But this point remains that these monks were less ethical than average Buddhists with far less practice under their belts. It makes me wonder about who is attracted to monasticism in the first place. Could it be that it attracts people who are more self-centered than average? Or does being a monk make you more selfish, perhaps because of the status involved?
In a different part of the Buddhist world, a western monk, Sravasti Dhammika, pointed out that the “excessive reverence surrounding monks” in the Theravadin world tended to make many of them “complacent and proud.” Monks in Burma have been complicit in genocide against the Rohingya people, and monks in Sri Lanka have advocated violence against the Hindu Tamil population. Things can get ugly.
Anyway, I do find this study fascinating and rather disturbing. One of my social media friends said that it shows that becoming a monk doesn’t automatically make you a better person, but the problem is that it appears that in some respects it might make you less ethical!
As for myself, I think of what it would be like to live for six months knowing that I had deprived someone of five years of life. I’d rather not have that experience. You’re welcome to my pill!
But also, there are definitely times that my practice has made me more selfish and uncaring. Sometimes the notion of having a “higher” calling can lead you to neglect important relationships, and the idea of “non-attachment” can also become an excuse for unkindness.
The main lesson I take from this study is the reminder to keep checking that I’m being kind. ________________________________________ PS. I wrote an email to one of the leaders of the study, suggesting another possible interpretation of the results. Here’s what I wrote:
Dear Dr. Garfield. As a Buddhist I’m very open to the possibility that at times Buddhist practice may make us more selfish — I think many of us have misused teachings on “non-attachment” in ways that have hurt others — but I have a sincere question about the “Death and the Self” study.
I gather that the monks were novices, and my question is, given that novices may have recently (how recently in this case I don’t know) left home and entered a community of which they are the lowliest members, might your findings actually be measuring the effect of what may have been a deeply unsettling change in their social connections? I can imagine that such a change might provoke an anxiety that might overwhelm impulses to generosity. I’m assuming that the other groups were not selected on the basis of having recently gone through such a profound dislocation in their lives.
Of course I may be misinterpreting the term “novice.” Perhaps these monks have been living in a monastic context for years. Anyway, I thought I should ask the question. Thanks for your time. Sincerely yours, Bodhipaksa ________________________________________ And here’s the reply I received:
Dear Bodhipaksa, Our group included novices and fully ordained monks with a range of years in robes. And we didn’t see any effect of length of time in robes or age. The interesting question in my mind is still, what happens when we look at seriously long-term meditators; I expect a reversal of the effect. Yours as ever, J”
~ “I (Bodhipaksa) was born and brought up in Scotland, although I now live in the US. For three years, I was the director of Dhanakosa retreat center, in the Highlands of Scotland, and after that I ran the Edinburgh Buddhist center. For three years, I taught Buddhist meditation in the Religious Studies department at the University of Montana, before moving to New Hampshire.
I love teaching meditation. It’s had a tremendously positive effect on my own life, and I’ve seen it have an equally large effect on the lives of my students. Over and over again, students have told me how learning to meditate has changed their lives. For many years I’ve been excited by the potential for bringing the benefits of meditation to millions of people over the Internet. That enthusiasm is what led to me setting up Wildmind dot org”
"Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginning-less, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something."
"If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such or so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing."
"I may talk Non-duality to some of the people who come here. That is not for you and you should not pay any attention to what I am telling others. The book of my conversations [I Am That] should not be taken as the last word on my teachings. I had given some answers to questions of certain individuals. Those answers were intended for those people and not for all. Instruction can be on an individual basis only. The same medicine cannot be prescribed for all.
Nowadays people are full of intellectual conceit. They have no faith in the ancient traditional practices leading up to Self-Knowledge. They want everything served to them on a platter. The path of Knowledge makes sense to them and because of that they may want to practice it. They will then find that it requires more concentration than they can muster and, slowly becoming humble, they will finally take up easier practices like repetition of a mantra or worship of a form. Slowly the belief in a Power greater than themselves will dawn on them and a taste for devotion will sprout in their heart. Then only will it be possible for them to attain purity of mind and concentration."
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897 – 1981) was a spiritual teacher of nonduality, who lived and taught in Bombay, India. He was very much admired for his direct and informal teaching. He is most famous for the work I Am That.
"Buddha said: "I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated ones as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons."
~ 101st Zen Koan from the Shaseki-shu (Collection of Stone and Sand), written late in the thirteenth century by the Japanese Zen teacher Muju (the "non-dweller"), and from anecdotes of Zen monks taken from various books published in Japan around the turn of the 20th century.
Art ~ The Masque of the Four Seasons by Walter Crane
"It is said that towards the end of his life Buddha was transfigured on Mount Pandava, in Ceylon. Suddenly a flame of light descended upon him, and encircled the crown of his head with a circle of light. His body became 'glorious as a bright, golden image,' and shone as the brightness of the Sun and moon
"At the death of Buddha, the earth trembled, the rocks were split and phantoms and spirits appeared. He descended into hell and preached to the spirits of the damned.
"When Buddha was buried, the coverings of his body unrolled themselves, the lid of his coffin was opened by supernatural powers, and he ascended bodily to the celestial regions."
"The Buddha is said to have been twice transfigured, at the moment of his enlightenment and at the moment of his death." -- Wikipedia
"Life will continually body slam us until we are down on our knees in Final Surrender. Not surrender to this or that, a concept or some abstract deity, but a complete surrender to the living moment no matter what form it takes, as it has to be and must be the highest possible truth."
"To rest or abide as awareness means to feel what awareness feels like. Of course, awareness is not itself a feeling, but it elicits a particular feeling tone or presence. It is a bit like asking someone what the sun feels like on their skin. The sun is not itself a feeling but it gives off warmth that you can feel. In the same manner, awareness elicits subtle feeling tones in and around the body that are sometimes called presence, openness, stillness, silence, or intimacy. To abide as awareness means to take note of these subtle feeling tones of awareness, to rest in the feeling and experience of them. This can draw you more deeply into the core of your being, the realization of which can only come by grace, which means spontaneously." ~ Adyashanti
Photo ~ "Sudanese model Nyakim Gatwech was bullied for her dark skin growing up, but now she's become an international sensation thanks to her stunning look and teachings about self-love. The 24-year-old first made headlines back in March after she revealed an Uber driver offered her $10,000 to bleach her skin, insinuating that her complexion was something to be ashamed of. While most would be enraged by this, Gatwech simply laughed it off. "Why on earth would I ever bleach this beautiful melanin God [blessed] me with," she shared on Instagram. "You won't believe the kind of questions I get and the kind of looks I get for having this skin."
“Benedict of Nursia was born in the year 480. As a student in Rome, he tired of the decadent culture around him and left it to live a simple spiritual life as a hermit in the countryside of Subiaco, about thirty miles away. It wasn’t long, however, before he was discovered both by the people of the area and disciples who were themselves looking for a more meaningful way of life. Out of these associations sprang the monastic life that would eventually cover Europe. We do not know much more than that about the life of Benedict of Nursia but we know enough about the history of the times to know in what ways his Rule departed from it, gave the world fresh eyes and called people to live life with a new heart…
The Rule of Benedict is direct; it is clear; it is a relatively uncomplicated text that uses simple language to make simple references to simple things… To readers who have inherited the mysticism of the Middle Ages, the treatises of the scholastic philosophers, and the theology texts of centuries of church life, it is almost incomprehensible that this brief document, almost 1,500-years old, is now enshrined as one of the greatest spiritual handbooks of all time. Volumes have been written about it but the small, unassuming text itself is almost bound to be disappointing to a culture that likes things to sound impressive and to look slick…
The Rule of Benedict is not concerned with a single time and place, a single view of church, a single set of devotions or a single ministry. The Rule of Benedict is concerned with life: what it’s about, what it demands, how to live it. ..
“Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from one who loves you; welcome it and faithfully put it into practice. The labor of obedience will bring you back to God from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for Jesus, the Christ.”
Life is a teacher of universal truths. That may be the reason why the religious readings of so many nations speak of the same situations and fasten on the same insights. The Rule of Benedict, too, is a wisdom literature that sounds life’s themes. It deals with answers to the great questions of the human condition: the presence of God, the foundation of relationships, the nature of self-development, the place of purpose. To the wise, it seems, life is not a series of events to be controlled. Life is a way of walking through the universe whole and holy…
Benedict says, “Listen.” Pay attention to the instructions in this Rule and attend to the important things in life. Let nothing go by without being open to being nourished by the inner meaning of that event in life. There is an Oriental proverb that teaches, “Take from death before it takes from thee.” If we do not live life consciously, in other words, we may not be living at all. If we want to have a spiritual life, we will have to concentrate on doing so. Spirituality does not come by breathing. It comes by listening to this Rule and to its insights into life “with the ear of the heart,” with feeling, with more than an academic interest.
One part of spirituality, then, is learning to be aware of what is going on around us and allowing ourselves to feel its effects. If we live in an environment of corporate greed or personal violence, we can’t grow from it spiritually until we allow ourselves to recognize it. The other part of spirituality, the Prologue makes quite clear, is learning to hear what God wants in any given situation and being quick to respond to that, to “welcome it and faithfully put it into practice.” To see the greed or sense the violence without asking what the Gospel expects in such a situation is not spirituality. It is piety at best…
This Rule is not being written by a spiritual taskmaster who will bully us or beat us down in a counterfeit claim to growing us up but by someone who loves us and will, if we allow it, carry us along to fullness of life. It is an announcement of profound importance. No one grows simply by doing what someone else forces us to do. We begin to grow when we finally want to grow. All the rigid fathers and demanding mothers and disapproving teachers in the world cannot make up for our own decision to become what we can by doing what we must…
Benedict is setting out the importance of not allowing ourselves to become our own guides, our own gods. Obedience, Benedict says—the willingness to listen for the voice of God in life—is what will wrench us out of the limitations of our own landscape. We are being called to something outside of ourselves, something greater than ourselves, something beyond ourselves. We will need someone to show us the way: the Christ, a loving spiritual model, this Rule.
“First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to God most earnestly to bring it to perfection. In God’s goodness, we are already counted as God’s own, and therefore we should never grieve the Holy One by our evil actions. With the good gifts which are in us, we must obey God at all times, that God may never become the angry parent who disinherits us, nor the dreaded one, enraged by our sins, who punishes us forever as worthless servants for refusing to follow the way to glory.”
The person who prays for the presence of God is, ironically, already in the presence of God. The person who seeks God has already found God to some extent. “We are already counted as God’s own,” the Rule reminds us. Benedict knows this and clearly wants us to know it as well. A dull, mundane life stays a dull, mundane life, no matter how intent we become on developing spiritually. No amount of churchgoing will change that. What attention to the spiritual life does change is our appreciation for the presence of God in our dull, mundane lives. We come to realize that we did not find God; God finally got our attention. The spiritual life is a grace with which we must cooperate, not a prize to be captured or a trophy to be won.
But, the Rule implies, we have been given a grace that is volatile. To feel it and ignore it, to receive it but reject it, the paragraph suggests, is to be in a worse situation than if we had never paid any attention to the spiritual life at all. For disregard of God’s good gifts, Benedict says, for refusing to use the resources we have for the upbuilding of the reign of God, for beginning what we do not intend to complete, the price is high. We are disinherited. We lose what is ours for the taking. We miss out on the life we are meant to have. We are dealt with, not as children of the owner who know instinctively that they are meant to grow into new and deeper levels of relationship here, but as hired help in the house, as people who look like they are part of the family but who never reap its real benefits or know its real nature. In failing to respond to God everywhere God is around us, we may lose the power of God that is in us.
The words were not idle metaphors in sixth-century Italy. To be a member of a Roman family, the family whose structures Benedict understood, was to be under the religious, financial, and disciplinary power of the father until he died, whatever the age of the children. To be disinherited by the father was to be stranded in a culture in which paid employment was looked down upon. To be punished by him was to lose the security of family, outside of which there was no security at all. To lose relationship with the father was then, literally, to lose one’s life.
And who has not known the truth of it? Who of us has not been failed by all the other things besides God—money, status, security, work, people—that we have clung to and been disappointed by in our cleaving? Whose life has not been warped by a series of twisted hopes, the roots of which were sunk in the shale of false promises and empty treasures that could not satisfy? Benedict is begging us here to realize that God is the only lifeline that life guarantees us. We have been loved to life by God, and now we must love God back with our whole lives or forever live a living death.
“Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say, “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” (Rom. 13:11). Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from the heavens that every day calls out this charge: “If you hear God’s voice today, do not harden your hearts” (Ps. 95:8). And again: “You that have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev. 2:7). And what does the Spirit say? “Come and listen to me; I will teach you to reverence God” (Ps. 34:12). “Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you” (John 12:35).”
The paragraph is an insistent one, full of intensity, full of urgency. We put off so much in life—visiting relatives, writing letters, going back to school, finding a new job. But one thing stays with us always, present whether pursued or not, and that is the call to the center of ourselves where the God we are seeking is seeking us. Benedict says, Listen today. Start now. Begin immediately to direct your life to that small, clear voice within.”
~ Joan Chittister, Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century Joan Chittister has been one of the Catholic church’s key visionary voices and spiritual leaders for more than thirty years. A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania, Sister Joan is an international lecturer and award-winning author of more than 40 books.
She is the founder and executive director of Benetvision (benetvision.org) a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality located in Erie. Currently she serves as co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a partner organization of the UN, facilitating a worldwide network of women peace builders, particularly in Israel and Palestine.
"Jetsun Pema’s autobiography opens with her carefree and happy life in Lhasa, where she was “born with a silver spoon in my mouth.” (5) Even though her family started as an ordinary peasant family, they became the most important family in Tibet as there were three reincarnations in her family, her eldest brother was reincarnated as the head of the monastery of Kumbum, her older was reincarnated as The Dalai Lama and her younger brother, was the reincarnation of Ngari Rinpoche, a close friend of the thirteenth Dalai Lama. As the sister of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Jetsun Pema knew little discord. True to the Karmic virtue of reward, she had a loving and attentive Amala (mother) and Pala (father), she lived in a 60 room home, full of her extended family, servants and, at times, hermits, and she delighted in playing games in her magnificent gardens and going to school with her cousins. The influence of Buddhism in her life, like that of most Tibetan, was present from early childhood on and completely permeated her life with its notion of tolerance, respect, generosity, and kindness. Even those people who did not understand the fundamentals of the religion, had an inner awareness of Buddhism. Her Amalya was her first lama/guru of compassion, generosity and kindness, and she along with her brothers taught Jetsun the importance of respect. Tolerance on the other hand, was instilled in her, yet the impact of this virtue was soon to be tested.
In 1949, at the age of 10, Jetsun Pema’s life was about to change dramatically. Her family decided that she was to accompany her sister to India so that her sister could receive medical treatment. They also decided that she would be schooled at the Loreto covent, where she would learn, among other things, the old and new testament, how to read and write English, and analytical problem solving. Even if Jetsun Pema was reciting a “hail mary” in a catholic chapel, she did not have any inward conflict because “I knew where I came from and who I was.” (49) The influence of Buddhism had permeated her being was present in all of her action. Even at an early age Jetsun Pema understood herself and knew how to live at peace with herself, without fear of the future.
While Jetsun Pema was in school at the Loreto covent, things started to deteriorate in Tibet. By the Winter of 1950/1951, the Chinese invaded part of country and were occupying Amdo, resulting in the Dalai Lama assuming state responsibility as the spiritual and temporal leader for the Tibetan state at the premature age of 16. It was clear by 1956 that the Chinese Communist goal was to control Tibet and its culture. Despite the brutal violence, the attacks on monks and monasteries, and the all-out gorilla warfare, Jetsun Pema knew that salvation could only come through faith and maintained her belief in Buddhism. After the 1959 uprising in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama escaped Tibet and sought refuge in India. His thoughts did not dwell on the past, and he believed, as he still does today “that a solution exists for all difficulties.” (65) Part of that solution was the education of the Tibetan refugee children, as eduction was the hope for Tibet’s future. Jetsun Pema would ultimately take the lead for that future. She embraced what the Dalai lama said that the crisis was part of the collective karma of the Tibetan people and the resolution had to come from the Tibetans.
After finishing her schooling in Switzerland and England, Jetsun Pema worked relentlessly to assure the success of the Tibetan Children’s Village. In order to establish a base in exile, Jetsun Pema knew that she had to educate the children in a way that preserved the Tibetan language, culture, religion and identity because this was the only way to prepare for their eventual return to Tibet. Despite the constant influx of sick, malnourished children who crossed the Himalayan mountain range, Jetsun Pema found a way to wake them from their walking nightmares. Her thoughts did not dwell on the past, only the future. She found a way to foster the development of the thousands of refugee children by creating a modern educational system grounded in Tibetan culture and religion, and making them proud of their roots and religion.
In 1980, Jetsun Pema returned to Tibet as part of a delegation tasked with evaluating the educational system in Tibet. Once there she learned of the totality of the atrocities that have been perpetrated on the Tibetan people. Even though “the Tibetans live in Tibet like animal” and have “lost their families, identities, religion, houses, and monasteries,” (153), Jetsun Pema remained optimistic about the future of Tibet. In spite of all the suffering that she witnessed, she did not lose confidence that one day Tibet would be free and that she and the Tibetans in exile would return. She embraced the Dalai Lama's sentiment that it is merely a question of time as to when Tibet will be free, and said “however long it takes the day will come when we will return with dignity to a country that will once again be free.” (183) She knew that the illumination of the path towards a free and reunited Tibet depended on the education of the refugee children, and she had to continue preparing the children to take on their responsibilities in this movement.
Once Jetsun Pema returned to India she reaffirmed her belief that “both individuals and Tibetans must recognize their responsibilities to Tibet, to the 1,200,000 Tibetans who died and those who still suffer,” (182) and such responsibility entails preparing for the future of Tibet. She considered herself fortunate to live in India because in this host country, Tibetans were free people, they could prepare for our country’s future. When she heard her native language spoken in India, a foreign country, she new a “very distinctive atmosphere of our nation survived.” (133) While waiting for the ultimate return to Tibet, Jetsun Pema does not rest. She has not yielded to the force of the conqueror or resigned. Instead, she is dealing with the situation in a nonviolent way. She is preparing the children in exile for the return, instilling peace in the minds of the young and garnering support from the international community,
Jetsun Pema certainly earned the name Virtuous Lotus that her brother, the Dalai Lama, bestowed upon her. Like the Lotus, Jetsun Pema continues to rise and bloom above the murky waters towards enlightenment. She gave all of herself in her work for the children of Tibet. In recounting her people’s story, Jetsun Pema generates a sense of hope that someday Tibet will be at peace and have its autonomy from China, and that the hundreds of thousands of Tibetans cast into the diaspora can return from exile into their native land."
-- "Tibet My Story An Autobiography, was written by Jetsun Pema with the aid of Giles Van Grasdorf and was published in 1996 by Editions Ramsay. Jetsun Pema is the sister of the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and is one of the most important women in modern Tibetan history. This book demonstrates Jetsun Pema’s unwavering faith to serve all of the Tibetan people, both those in exile and those held captive in their native land. Tibet My Story chronicles Pema’s early life in Lhasa prior to Chinese occupation, her exile from Tibet, and her subsequent work as a member of the Tibetan government in exile establishing the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala, India. Pema wants her story to transcend just the narrative of her life and serve as the voice of the Tibetan people recounting the story of the suffering endured by an entire generation. Pema’s story is still incredibly relevant today; it has been over twenty years since the publication of Tibet My Story An Autobiography, yet the state of the Tibetan people has barely improved. In reading this book about her life and the struggle of the Tibetan people, Pema wants us to focus on the message of hope, and ultimately this narrative sows the seeds of an optimistic future."
-- Corin Bronsther, Columbia University
