Tempting Idea

“I was living on the bank of the Neranjara River, engaged in deep struggle, practicing meditation with all my strength in the effort to find freedom. Then Mara came up to me and started talking in words, appearing to be full of sympathy: “You are so thin and pale,” he said. “You must be nearly dead. It would be far better to live. You could do much good by leading a holy life.”

Gotama answered, “I see your troops around me, Mara, but I will proceed with the struggle. Even if the whole world cannot defeat your arms, I will destroy it with the power of wisdom just as unfired pot is smashed by stone…I know you, evil one. Do not think otherwise."

“You cannot have Buddha without Mara… Buddha is Buddha because in each moment he is conquering Mara. Mara is always there. Mara is the condition without which there could be no freedom and no path. In this sense, Mara and Buddha cannot be separated.

What happens when we do separate them? We fall into the trap of duality. Duality, both philosophically and psychologically, is this tempting idea that if only we could totally eliminate what we find unacceptable and evil, then we would be left exclusively with what we value and regard as good. This is not only naive, but dangerous. It is the kind of simplistic thinking that drives the conflicts currently bedeviling our world. It rests on the premise that you can have light with no darkness, good with no evil, Buddha with no Mara. But all these things are meaningless independent of their opposites. Our understanding of Buddha is dependent upon our understanding of Mara, just as our experience of freedom is dependent on our experience of bondage.”

~ Stephen Batchelor, Living with the Devil

Contemplative Prayer

“…Contemplative prayer helps the process of spiritual formation by grounding the entire process of awakening to God, already perfectly present, already perfectly given to us in life itself. In contemplative prayer we seek to discover at deeper and deeper levels of awareness that everything we could possibly attain from God—that God himself—has already been given by God in Christ. All is being given in the ongoing, moment by-moment mystery of creation itself, in which God is giving himself to us in and as the miracle of our very existence as persons. Contemplative prayer is a way of opening ourselves to the intimate experience Jesus spoke of in proclaiming that the coming of the Kingdom has already occurred: the kingdom of God is within us…

I was in the monastery with (Thomas) Merton in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War. The Berrigan brothers would come there to visit him, and he corresponded with people like Boris Pasternak and Bob Dylan. He was one of the Catholic intellectuals who helped fuel the peace movement. My sense is that what Merton would say today would be consistent with what he was saying then. That is, we face the individual dilemma of estrangement from contemplative experience and the preciousness of our own lives, as well as society's estrangement from this awareness. And that estrangement perpetuates violence. Therefore the task of the contemplative today is to be a prophetic witness – a nonviolent witness to the preciousness of all life, at a level that precedes and transcends all ideological positions...

Thomas Merton was the first living mystic [I encountered]. And being with him personally, with his writings, he played a major role in opening up this whole world to me. I internalized it. Then with his guidance, I started reading John of the Cross. I just thought it was so profound: we find God in passage through a dark night. The night is where God weans us off our dependencies on anything less than an infinite union with infinite love, which is the sole basis of our security and identity. And then he cries out in his poetry: "It's not fair, that you do not carry off this heart that you have stolen!” That’s so beautiful, because it was so true. From there, next for me was Meister Eckhart. Then the others: Cloud of Unknowing, Jan Van Russbroec, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Megthild of Magdeburg. But in the beginning, I’d say Merton, John of the Cross, and Eckhart.

And I’ve been reading them over and over for years. I was also introduced to Buddhism through Merton. And when I started reading Dogen, a little book called The Heart of Shobogenzo, these were his dhrama talks in the monasteries. I’ve been very moved with the dharma, and how those interface with the gospels. These have been my teachers.”

~ James Finley

Full Circle

"... When Levine woke up in a padded cell, everything hurt. His wrists were raw, his head was bruised and bloody, and he was going through forced withdrawal. For hours, he cried and yelled at the guards, and then he went quiet.

Levine had been in juvenile hall many times before, but this was different. For the first time, he saw where he was and didn’t blame anyone else—not the cops or society, not his teachers or family. He saw that he was the one hurting himself and others and that he was living the consequences. In the cell’s dim fluorescent lighting, death had seemed like the only way out of his suffering. Now he felt like even more of a loser—not only had he failed at life, he’d failed to kill himself.

A wary guard roused Levine. “Your dad’s on the phone,” he said. “You can take the call, but I have to go with you.” Into the receiver, Levine ranted about his fear and regret, and in response his father made the same suggestion he always did: Meditate. That might alleviate some of the pain. Noah’s father was Stephen Levine...

All his life, Noah had rejected his father’s “hippie shit,” but this time he said he’d give it a try. So back in his cell, on a hard plastic bed, he attempted to follow the breath. He inhaled. He exhaled. And it did help. Here and there, even if it was just for a second, he was able to feel better and forget that he was locked up...

Almost ten years later, Levine was back at the very same juvenile hall, but this time he wasn’t a prisoner. He was teaching meditation to incarcerated youth. Grateful for the practice that had turned his life around, he wanted to share it with others."

“It was an amazing full circle to go back into that place of suffering for me,” he says. “I caused so much harm to so many people for so long, and that’s why I ended up in jail. Going back to be of service to that suffering population felt like a purification of past unwholesome actions. A lot of the teaching I’ve done has been healing for me and integral to my own path.”

Levine trained with renowned Insight Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Today, at forty-five, Levine is a fully empowered Buddhist teacher, a dharma heir of the leading Insight Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield..."

“God has abandoned you. Fear does not serve you. Your heart has betrayed you. Only the music can guide you.

Sitting still is a pain in the ass.

Waking up is not a selfish pursuit of happiness, it is a revolutionary stance, from the inside out, for the benefit of all beings in existence.

It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world; it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment.

The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution.

The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart.”

― Noah Levine

Spiritual Marriage

“Request of your deepest self a relationship through which you can enlighten yourself and serve the light of the world. These kinds of prayers that are in harmony with the Whole are sure to be answered!”

David and Maha http://esotericpathofmarriage.com/

Spiritual Liberation

"... Why do you characterize the United States as undergoing a spiritual crisis?
I think a spiritual crisis is essentially a crisis of identity. We’re at the heart of a crisis about who America is. Who does it belong to? Who made it? What will the country look like going forward? We’re really grappling with who we are.

A spiritual crisis is how we shed things that we’ve taken on that we never asked for. When we have a spiritual crisis in an appropriate container, we have a sense of trust—a willingness to step into the darkness that is a part of transformation. So we can shed an old identity, much like a caterpillar will shed its skin and step into the darkness of a chrysalis in order to transform. But when we don’t know how all this will turn out, it’s very disruptive to the fundamental nature of how the system has kept itself together—especially in a colonialist country with a patriarchal and capitalist system that is organized around having everything in order and controlled to keep the masses at bay.

What that sounds like is democracy: we shouldn’t know how it’s going to turn out!

That’s in some ways our crisis: that we’re beginning to engender some kind of actual democracy. That’s really disruptive to the myth—or the lie—of democracy that we’ve held onto for so long. “All men are created equal” was never true, was never intended to be “all men” in the sense of all human beings. People are demanding what’s always been promised, but that promise was never was meant to be fulfilled.

It must be hard to stand in front of a room of white people and tell them that they’re racist. Do you find that the dharma’s emphasis on basic goodness, as opposed to a Western emphasis on original sin, helps that message be more palatable?

That I believe in basic goodness helps indirectly, in that it guides the expression of my my co-existing beliefs that all white folks are racist and that we all have basic goodness, even though I don’t tag on explicitly “and we have basic goodness.” I marvel at it all the time, like, “I just stood in a room with a thousand white people and they heard me say they’re all racist, and nobody passed out!”

It’s something of the times. I think there’s a readiness [to speak frankly about race] that is really beyond me. I set out knowing this was a conversation we needed to have. I knew it needed to happen within dharma communities because it’s such a juxtaposition, and such a crime, to have a teaching so profoundly positioned to set people onto the path of liberation beset by the illnesses of racism and white supremacy.

Is the dharma’s focus on liberation what positions Buddhist communities to take this project on?
I’m using people’s attachment to their identity as Buddhists, yogis, and meditators to say, “If you want to be that, then you’re about liberation.”

Dharma positions itself well to be a container, but it needs to be directed, because it’s been here [in America for more than 150 years] without positioning itself toward liberation from racism, whiteness, and white supremacy as constructs. It’s insufficient to just have dharma. There’s a preciousness: people are like, “Oh the Buddha didn’t talk about that, that’s not Buddhist”—picking and choosing what is convenient or to avoid discomfort. 

Have you experienced resistance from white workshop attendees?
White folks, colored folks, all kinds of resistance. And it’s totally expected and understood. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more!

What are people rejecting? They’re rejecting the pain! They’re rejecting the exposure. When you’ve been acculturated into needing a sense of control, coming undone is not cool. But if you say to people, “You’re going to come undone, and here’s a way to start working with that,” then you’ve got something. Then the basic goodness that is everyone’s birthright simply emerges and does its own work.

What does liberation look like for you?
To be engaged in the face of choice, and to take responsibility for my choices. That’s liberation.

What about living with joy amid all the suffering in the world?
Joy in the midst of suffering is, for me, one of those gnarly Zen things. We do the work to create the opportunity for joy—to be silly, to have a good drink, to make love, and figure out the craziness of life. If we don’t live in that joy, then what are we doing this for?

We allow the fact of injustice to mean that it beats us.
We give in and we abdicate our right to joy, our right to live and thrive in the face of it. But if we choose joy over and over again, the suffering is transmuted into something that is generative, that we can use to live in a bigger way.

Nelson Mandela is such a great expression of this. He used a long period of suffering [in prison] to live in such a big and dynamic way. He was always a powerful figure, but in his post-jail time, he transmuted suffering. He found the joy.

One more thing: I think that the thing that a Buddhist philosophical outlook brings into view is systems. A Buddhist philosophical view prepares us to navigate systems if we are willing to take the lens of the dharma and move it outside of privilege, rather than holding it on the inside of privilege looking out. If we’re willing to include our privilege, patriarchy, every aspect of beingness in that lens, then that systemic take unveils the truth.

On privilege, I certainly don’t get the sense that most white people in America feel liberated. Even straight white men.
They weren’t designed to feel liberated. They’re designed to present as if they are. But the rates of suicide and drug use are telling a different story about the anxiety, the pressure, the burden.

Not to mention the reactionary impulse to prevent folks who aren’t a part of that group from asserting their joie de vivre.
That’s right. It’s a real plague to live inside that place of lack. Capitalism intensely contributes to this, patriarchy adds to it, and race just allows one to shift the blame until the point at which it can’t be shifted anymore.

And even power dynamics among groups aside, the way mass communication—social media, TV, magazines, and especially advertising—seems to work is that we’ve all accepted this low level of messaging that you’re not doing OK. Of course no one feels OK!
It’s the most effective form of control. Forget the stuff we have. If we felt OK about who we are, the system would just come apart, because it requires us to not feel OK. But can I draw my sense of OK-ness from the just-as-I-am-ness? That would be terribly disruptive."

- Zen priest angel Kyodo williams invites practitioners to face questions of systemic injustice head-on.

By Sammy Feldblum, JUN 08, 2017

All is Well

"Here is the Place where Bare Consciousness, losing its innocence, shoots up like a great multi-coloured firework, sinister as well as glorious, from the dark depths of Unconsciousness. As the one I LOOK LIKE – as the man you see, as the right-way-up second or third person who’s pictured in my passport, head and all, all of me well above that Bottom Line – I’m held responsible only for what I get up to and not what you get up to. In law and in common sense it must be so. Society would be impossible any other way.

But as the one I AM, as the decapitated and nameless and upside-down one I SEE, my Bottom Line cancels the head which isn’t only my identity card but also my certificate of no-blame. Here I let poor old Douglas Harding off. Here I take responsibility for him, as for all others above the Line. Here I am responsible for all I give rise to. Right here and right now I have to face the awesome fact that as First Person Singular I am guilty of this world and all the deeds done and the pains endured in it. To ignore that fact is as unwise as it’s stress-building.

This isn’t merely how it looks but how it feels. When I really attend, when I’m honest with myself, I find it impossible to wash my hands of the wickedest or stupidest or most contemptible or saddest creature in the world. It is not a case of ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’ but of ‘There go I – into the prison cell, into the psychiatric ward, on to the scaffold, no less than happier places’ – for the simple but truly devastating reason that Who I really, really am is what you and all others really, really are. We don’t sport a Bottom Line apiece.

There’s only one World’s Beginning and World’s End and Ground of Being, and the sooner I firmly take my stand on it the sooner is my guilt assuaged. Only when I see that I am totally to blame am I totally forgiven, and the stress of guilt goes the way of all toxic and superfluous stress. It is up-ended and tipped over the Edge into the Dump of Nowhere and Nowhen. Here, the guilty One and the forgiving One and the forgiven One are One and the same. The One who is to blame for the world is its Saviour. Don’t our hearts, undaunted by the mystery and paradox and terror of it all, tell us that this is the only way, that this is the truth, that this is wisdom, and that ultimately all is well?"

~ Douglas Harding

Soul

"The word "soul" is important to me. But it's a word I hold lightly because it points to a mystery known by many names, for which no one has the true name...

Secular humanists call it "identity and integrity." Hasidic Jews call it "the spark of the divine in every being." Thomas Merton called it "true self." Quakers call it "the inner light." Buddhists call it "Big Self" and "No-Self." If there’s a universal word for it, perhaps it’s the “being” in “human being.”

WHAT you call it doesn’t matter. But THAT you call it something matters a lot, I think. If we fail to name it, we are more likely to treat each other like objects to be manipulated, or raw material to be formed in ways that meet market needs, or empty vessels to be filled with someone else's agenda for our lives.

We need to do whatever we can to remind ourselves of the sacred center in ALL of our brothers and sisters—especially at a time when that simple principle is being violated day in and day out by ordinary people and the Powers That Be..."

~ Wislawa Szymborska, the revered Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature