The Big Questions

Okay, so I’m just a guy contemplating, meditating and digging for information about the big questions— questions like:

• What is the essential nature of physical reality?
• Is everything a form of conscious spirit as the eastern philosophies and American indigenous cultures have intuited?
• Or is it all just a series of random happenstances that created a dog-eat-dog cosmos that is already dead in essence— reactive, mechanical, where any sense of deeper meaning is the result of wishful thinking
• Just as important: Is the average Joe capable of deep lasting happiness without destroying, one’s fellow beings and oneself in the attempt.
• Is the average Joe capable of perceiving a reality that transcends the electro-chemical nuero-firings of the old grey matter like Rumi and Krishnamurti and other ecstatic aesthetics whose names end in a small “I” have claimed?

Big questions and, like I said, I’m just a guy. I don’t have any advanced degrees like Ken Wilbur or Deepak Chopra or Stephen Hawking. But then again if that were a requirement then only bishops could determine anything pertinent about the sphere of the spirit and Jesus and Buddha would have been arrested for contemplation without a license.

But if, as some say. the spirit indwells us all, well, that and a public library, a world-wide web and some committed mindfulness and maybe some good discussions with like-intentioned fellow inquirers should yield up some big answers. Or at least some big inferences.

And, in fact, they have. There’s incredibly good news— good enough to make a lifelong skeptic jump for joy.
Enough to lift the heart of a committed curmudgeon? Of course, not. Because as the Buddha said, “With your thoughts you make the world.” — especially with your projections of the world. But anyone capable of honest, open-minded and determined delving will find excellent prospects for immeasurable joy and eternal gratitude.

These scribblings are not only an argument for such a vision, but also an exploration of the practices required to see through old thought habits to that infinite luminosity waiting just beyond those habits. These notes are also a celebration of the great gift of this existence. It is an e-sangha for the spirit. Emaho! Give and partake! Ain’t life grand?

Of course, being the bearer of good tidings is not a job for wimps. Everyone is understandably suspicious. They’re asking themselves, “What’s this guy smokin’?” What cult has brainwashed all his critical thinking skills down the drain? Don’t get me wrong. I’m painfully aware of the ubiquitous tragedy that forever characterizes “the real world”. Greed, hatred and ignorance have blinded most to the glorious spectacle of the unveiled here and now and of the vast potential good snoozing in every person.

But we’re not here to point out the obvious. We’ll leave that for a gazillion other blogs. We’re here to highlight the subtle but all-pervasive fact of a benevolent universe existing just beyond the nightmare of Greed, Hatred and Ignorance (G.H.I.). We’re here to point out the fact that since time immemorial people in power have tried to convince the minions that G.H.I. is the dark star around which existence forever orbits so we’d better face the fact that it’s us against them and that a major part of the human endeavor will always be devoted to building arms and dying to defend ourselves from people who” hate our freedom.” Blah, blah, blah. What a momentous crock.

But people are still falling for that age-old wheeze. It’s happening as we speak. Terrorists are the new communists under the bed. Self-anointed “independent thinkers” are mouthing the Cant of Can’t exactly as they’ve been instructed and they don’t even know it.

Don’t confuse being dour with being grounded. “Grounded” also refers to crippled aircraft that are incapable of flight.As Annie Philpott once wrote, “The world is a miraculous garden waiting patiently for us to awaken to its splendors.” Sometimes the best way to end a nightmare is to wake up.

The Practice of Loving Life

Life is simple, really. We’ve been given an assignment on this Earth — to love as much as you possibly can while learning the lessons that make you a better lover knowing the most devoted lover loves to pay close attention to the object of her affection. And so lovers of life love to take in the scenery that is their beloved. How fortunate to always be surrounded by the things you love— namely everything.

Of course, to truly appreciate life, you have to learn to enjoy the more embarrassing prickly ego-popping parts of it. When I find myself continually rehashing an exchange I’ve had with a friend that could have gone better and my self-absorbed side worries that I’ve been irrevocably misunderstood and frets about what it will do to my reputation (blah-blah-blah), I can continue in this cycle, siphoning off my energy toward ludicrous and wasteful mental habits, or I can interrupt the pattern with the amused laughter of recognition. “God luv ya, you’re doing it again. Forgetting that there is no “you” to defend or worry about." As Buddha pointed out, “I” is just a convention— a very, very arbitrary convention. It’s nothing but a collection of perceptions and impressions morphed into an ever-shifting semblance of an identity by a crazed combo of genetics and conditioning. What’s the real “you”? Getting to know you is getting to “no you”.

Every sit-com needs a running gag; Frasier has his boorish snobbery, Will and Grace, their fragile self-esteem. Occasionally trying to second guess what people might be thinking about me is one of my old patterns. Busted again. Smile. You’re on candid camera.” The best running gags generally grow out of a character’s more persistent peccadilloes.

Even the tragic-comic nature of the ego can give us something to enjoy in this life we love so well. When we realize the laughs are not really at our expense (since there’s no you) it’s easier to join in the merriment. We should feel happy when we become cognizant of our thought pattern’s machinations. Another feather in our Karma cap to tickle ourselves with when we need it. The first fruit of mindfulness is recognition. Practice is not changing the habit per se. It’s watching how it works. The watching itself will mutate the behavior more deeply than rigid abstinence from the pattern. If it’s done earnestly with commitment watching alone can change our lives. Like I said, life is simple. Love the watching and get over yourself and it’s a beautiful thing, worthy of wonder and worship as is anything beloved.

I love the image of the Beloved that is an ancient reference in Sufi and Hindu spiritual literature. The miraculous cosmos you exist in is your beloved. Your relationship is all-embracing cerebral, visceral, motherly, child-like, spousal, orgasmic — a symbiotic matrix of completely integrated circuitry culminating in The-Great-All-Everything.

Our job is to open to this realization by clearing a space between our incessant thoughts — the mental reactivity that creates the arbitrary divisions between whatever and whatever — always impeding our union with the now and forever. The Beloved, though often veiled, is always with us — waiting patiently, yet eagerly for us to rip the veils away and be dazzled by her full - on radiance. If that's my assignment while I'm here, I'm all over it.

Ah, Life… what’s not to love?

Imagine.

Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” G.B. Shaw wrote “People see things the way they are and ask “Why?”. I see them the way they never were and ask “Why not?”. Who knows what things might be if our imaginations had been encouraged a little more?

I remember babysitting my two nieces a couple of years ago— two Waldorf kids— smart, affectionate, positive, caring. The six-year-old riding her little purple bike with the training wheels— the ten-year-old practicing on her unicycle for the school circus. She had it down. It’s interesting to think there are members of the younger generation that can do things I can’t do. I guess I’d better start getting used to it. She can also play the clarinet and read music. I should have gone to Waldorf.

But the girls’ confidence and accomplishments merely enhance their finer qualities. Their bright and gentle natures, easy laughter, simple happiness. Always a song on their lips. Their chatter quickly fading into rhythms of pretend. The older one hides behind a tree from the younger. The younger sees her and asks, “What are you doing?” the older says “I’m a squirrel.”

Younger yells, “Get out of my garden!”

Older. “I’m climbing up the tree.”

Younger. “I’m a dog. I’m chasing you up that tree!” Later the younger one takes some mail out of the mailbox and riding around on her little bike becomes the mailman. She stops in front of me and shows me a letter. “Pardon me. Is this your name?” The envelope is addressed to Alliance Benefit.

“Why, yes.” I intone. “But you can call me A.B.”

It strikes me that unselfconscious pretending could be a pretty good replacement for small talk. Instead of feigning interest in things we can’t do anything about like the weather or our corporate job with its infantile boss, we should break into a little street theatre more often. Stop playing the part of “you” all the time and play “someone else” once in a while or you’ll typecast yourself and never be allowed to play anyone but who you think you are. Besides polishing your acting skills, a regular regime of pretend practice might even help you in that corporate job with that infantile boss.

Later inside the house, my nieces start pulling clothes out of various closets. Suddenly they become pirates, kings, witches and elves. They act out their little skits for me with elaborate gestures and grandiose speeches. A big hulli balloo as they tickle themselves with pillows full of silliness.

It’s instructive being around this curious, endlessly amused energy. Why not laugh and smile at the littlest thing? What’s the use of qualifying every little joy? We say to ourselves “Oh, yes, your momentary exhileration is all very fine as far as it goes but don’t forget, [1.] you have to go to work tomorrow, [2.] you could lose a few pounds and… what else? Oh, yeah, you’re going to DIE SOMEDAY!!!) Self-absorbsion can be so exhausting. We need some new thoughts. Pretend a little everyday. I’m grateful to my nieces for reminding me of this essential credo. As Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the man.”

Like the hats and scarves in our parent’s closet, we need to try on new paradigms, flex and stretch our stiffening belief systems. When did we become so brittle about who we were and who we could be? Babes babbling in the cradle can utter every sound ever required by any language. But a long habit of monolingual monotony can erode our linguistic potential irrevocably. Likewise dropping into a single calcified mindset while foreswearing alternative modes of being will put such a crick in our necks, we’ll only be able to stare straight ahead at the place our fhought-habits have pointed us toward as though it were the only place left to go. We are doomed to fate only when we become imprisoned in inertia.

Pretend you have a crowbar. Pretend you’re using it to bust yourself out of your pretend soul cage. Try some sound effects as you do it. “Pop. Crick. Cr-r-r-rack. Clink. Clank.” Good. Now laugh triumphantly, “Ha-ha! I’m free! Free! Free of me! Free to be... anything!” Good. Good. It’s a start.