A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
My own strategy is to keep cultivating the witness, that part of me that
notices how I’m doing it—cultivate the quiet place in me that watches
the process of needing approval, of the smile on the face, of the false
humility, of all the horrible creepy little psychological things that
are just my humanity. And watching them occur again and again and again.
There
is far more love available to us in any given moment than we might be
aware. And there is much, much more love in our hearts than we as adults
have been conditioned to believe is appropriate to express.
To truly connect with other human beings, we must dare to present ourselves in ways that depict the true variety and complexity of our human experience. Without honesty there is no real bond between us, and without connection, nothing else really matters.
At some point awakening begins. The awakening happens with trauma or it
happens when somebody you love dies. In sexuality you transcend
separateness. It can be drugs, it can be meditation, it can be a hymn,
it can be a leaf falling, it can be lying under the stars, it can be
trying to solve a problem where your mind gets so one-pointed it goes
through the veil. Whatever it is, you open up into other planes of
consciousness that have been there in all of the splendor all the time.
Something remarkable happens when we go on sitting through all the but’s,
through all the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that we would so
like to oust. Gradually they begin to feel less alien, less like
obstacles in the way, rocks in the path. Our deepening awareness becomes
a kind of dew, falling on everything equally, allowing everything to
sparkle.
Don’t
worry about the future; don’t worry about the past. Stay right here.
Ultimately you get so that you can’t say that you’re going forward, you
can’t say that you’re going back, you can’t say that you’re staying in
place. There’s nothing to be attached to.
The
principle of karmic retribution—cause and effect—works with perfect
clarity right before our eyes. Even the smallest, most minor evils are
consumed in this fire, burning like dim stars in the night.
If
we really want to go beyond the surface of things to the deeply hidden,
actual experience of being alive (as spiritual practice encourages us
to do), we need imagination as an ally. The senses, reason, even our
moral and emotional faculties are not enough.
We inhabit a land of deep samskaras, karmic imprints that demand even deeper purification to dissipate. It is also a land where some of us are lucky to possess conditions for practice: sufficient food, good people, serious teachers and students, and, above all, a reason.
Two
important things about true giving: First, it requires some sacrifice
on the part of the giver. To give away something that one doesn’t need
is not dana. Second, the act must not be condescending but must
show respect to the one who receives the gift. In fact, one is grateful
to the recipient who makes the act of giving possible.
I am pretty sure I know now when my fall from grace began… It involved the NASA Space Program and a summer church camp.
Let me explain.
From the very beginning, the space launches were very much part of my psyche - and still are.
In those days the world stopped every time an astronaut was sent into space. Like most kids my age, I begged my parents to buy me the plastic models of each rocket and spent countless hours in my bedroom gluing pieces together and patently applying paint and decals to each model... Mercury, Gemini and then a huge almost 1m high Saturn V, with a tiny little LM that you could detach and connect to the Apollo spaceship. Later I made Enterprises and Jupiter spaceships to mess around with in my own little universe. When I left the USA, I still had that Saturn V in a box, it went to the estate sale, I hope someone is taking great care of it.
It was an age of promise with a few air raid drills (mostly 2nd and 3rd grade) in between. Moonshots, atomic menace, giant monsters on the 4 o´clock KTVU after school movie. Our games on long summer evenings with kids on the block were hide n seek plus duck n cover.
In 6th grade my family uprooted us from San José and moved to my father´s boyhood town of Grants Pass, Oregon. It was my first experience with travel, adventure and new friends, new beginnings. We were closer to Grandmother, Aunts and Uncles on the ranch in Northern California, and soon my parents would send my sister and I on the Greyhound for long weekends…
Neighbors got new tv´s, big things in fancy consoles – with hi fidelity record players with the TV in front. Once, a neighbor invited everyone over to see the Wizard of Oz in color. My students and my own kids think I am crazy, but it WAS a big deal.
So it was that Mrs. Olsen, who lived next door and brought us her homemade Swedish pastries every Saturday morning, invited us to watch the launch of Apollo 11 with her and on her TV. Though it was 50 years ago today, I remember sitting on the rug and counting down with almost everyone in the world as the rocket motors engaged and the thing took off. Everyone was proud and listened to every last communication, I had followed every step of the program since it began, I was a nerd, and this was religious. Soon we were going to have moon and Mars bases. 2001 had come out, and I was going to work in space for sure!
By accident, I was headed to a Church Camp, the next day or so.
I was so anxious to see them land, and a couple of us snuck up to the camp counselor´s house to look in the window. Yet the owners of the camp shooed us away from their window while watching the landing themselves.
And, that was the beginning of the end of my Christianity.
To this very day, I can´t for the life of me understand why the reverend couldn´t have moved his tv to the window of his house and allowed all off us to watch something so massively mind-bendingly world changing. The reverend could have used that as topic for his evening campfire sermons and had me forever in his congregation. Nope.
That week away, though was also the first time I developed a crush on a guy, a kid from Medford, dark Italian features… don´t remember his name. He looked great in his swimsuit, and me a gangly skinny kid he invited me with two girls he knew to make out in one of the abandoned cabins. He and his girl on one bed, me the other on another bed. Nothing more than kissing, I wouldn´t have known n what to do anyway at that stage. I remember that the young lady and I got shushed by the other couple, as were giggling hysterically with fear that our braces would get caught. Nothing really happened, but it was my first make out session, and also my wondering began as to what was so great about it. I mean I liked girls as people, still do, the other stuff not so much. In those days no one knew anything about LGBTQ anything.
So it was that 50 years ago my first questioning of organized religion and sexuality happened (it wasn´t until 25 or so years later, a series of uncomfortable relationships with good women, trying to like heterosex while not knowing what was gay sex, marriage that ended in a train wreck with an extraordinary son) that I discovered what was bugging me.
So, both spiritually and sexually - a giant 30 story Saturn V rocket and its phallic representation and all - this is how and why I have such deep appreciation for NASA and for everything that is good in my life.
Freud explica tudo...
P.S. just as I was shutting down my computer I heard whisps of the Blue Danube playing somewhere...
Mindful
consumption requires us to pay attention to the whole multitude of
causes and effects that result from our lives as consumers. It asks us
to learn about the issues, inform ourselves, and adjust our behavior
accordingly.
—Interview with Allan Hunt Badiner by Peter Alsop, “Spending Wisely”
Consciousness exists on two levels: as seeds and as manifestations of these seeds. Suppose we have a seed of anger in us. When conditions are favorable, that seed may manifest as a zone of energy called anger. It is burning, and it makes us suffer a lot. It is very difficult for us to be joyful at the moment the seed of anger manifests. Every time a seed has an occasion to manifest itself, it produces new seeds of the same kind. If we are angry for five minutes, new seeds of anger are produced and deposited in the soil of our unconscious mind during those five minutes. That is why we have to be careful in selecting the kind of life we lead and the emotions we express. When I smile, the seeds of smiling and joy have come up. As long as they manifest, new seeds of smiling and joy are planted. But if I don’t practice smiling for a number of years, that seed will weaken, and I may not be able to smile anymore.
The interesting question is, "How do you put yourself in a position so that you can allow ‘what is’ to be?" The enemy turns out to be the creation of mind. Because when you are just in the moment, doing what you are doing, there is no fear. The fear is when you stand back to think about it. The fear is not in the actions. The fear is in the thought about the actions.
Buddhism is a practice of penetrating and accepting the here and now—not only the bliss of meditation, but the irritations of mundane human interaction and the pain in the morning paper. Just as the lotus needs muddy water to live, the pain of the world can inspire compassionate and effective action.
Emptiness refers to the absence of something that, for some reason, one expects to find—as when we say a glass, normally used to hold liquids, is empty even though it is full of air. The point is not that there is nothing there at all, but rather that what is there differs from your expectations.
