Last One For Now Anyway

Until a very few moments ago, I didn't know how much relief I would feel when I finished my last assignment. I still have one warrior' exam, but as I added the final sentence to my script for the podcast, I felt such relief. Unlike Bret the day after Thanksgiving, I did not give in to the weather and spent the whole day at my computer writing papers. I spent my whole holiday except for Thursday (5 days off) writing papers and asssignments. Today I also realized I am half-way through my course work if I can keep up the pace. It seems a relief to realize there are only 3 more semesters of this intensity that seems almost unbearable at times.

I love my courses and am very grateful for the insights that come from them. But the price is very high. As I get older, life is increasingly more precious and sometimes it feels like I have given up 3 years of this precious life to create a hopefully new precious life. I believe it is worth it. I hope I am right.

Magic

It seems lately I am surrounded by magic. "The Healing Wisdom of Africa" is all about magic and the thiness of the veil between our world and the worl of spirit. Two weeks ago, I went to the Drala level of the Shambhala Sacred Path series. Drala is a Tibetan word for magic. It literally means "above aggression." What I love most about the teachings is that magic is about our very ordinary perceptions, the quality of how we pay attention to even the most low level details of our lives.

Drala is an energy that is in everything and an energy we attract to ourselves by the way we maintain our environment and ourselves. I love thinking there are unseen beings who are looking out for my benefit and attracted to me because I am paying attention to them. On the other hand, the instructor said when you are not paying attention, the dralas leave you and shit happens. I would love to live my life in such a way that they would be my constant companions and I might somehow be as aware of their presence in my life as they are aware of me.

Shrine keeping has become a new passion in my life. As the end of the semester rolls around and I am so busy with deadlines, I realize that I cannot neglect them any more than I can neglect my papers and projects that are due for school. It is both challenging and necessary to have them in my life. I would like to believe that at least for this holiday season, I have attracted lots of good drala energy in getting my home all clean and neat for my company on Thanksgiving. I hope to keep things in drala shape throughout the season.

The Christmas season has always filled me with a sense of magic and wonder. This year, I will once again have a chance to see the giant tree in Rockefeller Center and New York done up in lights. It is the New York I love most, magical and beautiful.

May there be lots of drala energy, magic and beauty in your life this season. May all of your interactions be blessed and above aggression.

Thanks

I was held back by mere trifles, the most paltry inanities, all my old attachments.
– Saint Augustine

"Sooner or later, most of us encounter the haunting fear that if we turn our senses inwards, which is what diving into the murky water of consciousness means, we may lose everything enjoyable in life. This fear is one of the most formidable obstacles between us and deepening meditation. But if we persevere, we will see the day when these old attachments will fall away, almost of themselves, and no one will be as surprised as we are.

Gradually, with experience, our faith grows that deep within us the Self is willing and able to take responsibility for our ultimate welfare. Slowly we can surrender our personal will to an immeasurably more profound purpose. Bit by bit, we can work ourselves loose from the grip of compulsive entanglements in the faith that our capacity to love and be loved will thereby be magnified a millionfold."
–Thought for the Day – November 25th (Thanksgiving Eve) by Eknath Easwarn

This walking the spiritual path seems so difficult at times. I read EE’s Thought for the Day every day, and every day he reminds me in some way of how much work I still have to do. Coming to Naropa has been an amazing opportunity to immerse myself in a practice environment and in connection with so many experiences that push my buttons and raise my hackles as the old folks used to say. I can see daily how much there still is to let go of and once in awhile I glimpse how something has shifted and I am seeing a bit more clearly. For this on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, I have much gratitude. I am truly grateful for the blessings I receive daily from my Naropa experience even as it stresses me some days almost beyond my limits. What I can say without a doubt I am most grateful for in this experience is my Cultivating the Sacred companions on this path. Thanks to you all and may you all have a most blessed and precious holiday.

Treat Them Well

In her book Being with Dying, Joan Halifax talks about a miner who died in a catastrophe and wrote a note to his family before he died. Hi name was Martin Toler. His last words were “Tell all I will see them on the other side. I love you.” Joan goes on to say, “Toler’s last words honor the noblest of our human connections, that life is sacred and relationship holy. Through the darkness, he reached out not only to his family but to the rest of us in his community through his abiding and compassionate words. For as the Buddha told his cousin Ananada, the whole of the holy life is good friends. Our relationships—and our love—are ultimately what give depth and meaning to our lives.”

I love the old story of the Rabi that stops overnight at a monastery that had fallen on hard times. When he leaves the next morning, he says to the monks, “one of you is Jesus.” The monks look at one another and no one knows which one it is. From then on they start to treat each other as they would treat Jesus. Eventually there is a revival of the monastery and people from all around come to just experience being with the monks. I believe if we really could treat each person we come into contact with with the same reverence we would treat the Buddha, Jesus or even that we treat the Sakyong in Shambhala, it would not one revive all of our relationships but would create a ripple that would certainly change at least our slice of the world.

Don't Act with a Twist

"Don't act with a twist." Chogyam Trunpa

This morning when I pulled this card from my lojong deck, I couldn’t imagine what it could mean. Then I read Chögyam Trungpa’s explanation in Training the Mind. It ended with, “The practice of this slogan is to drop that attitude of looking for personal benefits from practice—either as an immediate or a long-term gain.” All day long I was pondering what would mean to give up thinking about gain from practice.

I imagine that everyone takes up spiritual practice initially at least expecting some benefit unless the inspiration comes from somewhere much deeper and maybe not even recognized. Over many years, I know I have hoped somehow spiritual practice could improve me, make me happier, make me lovable, teach me how to love, and any number of other projections on how life would be different when I finally found my practice. I question now whether I have arrived at a place where I don’t expect anything from it for myself any more or if I ever will get to that point. Jamgon Kontrul in The Path of Great Awakening relates it more to the stages of the Buddhist path and arriving finally beyond practicing merely for yourself to responding “to the inspiration of full awakening for the benefit of others.” In Thomas Keating’s writing he talks about devotion and service. They appear to be to him two sides of the same coin. I believe that what starts out being for ourselves through growing in devotion over time leads to the desire to be of service to others. Somehow it becomes too good to hold onto just for ourselves and a desire to share rises from within. There is a growing sense within me that there is an aspect of “being” for others, not just doing. Perhaps what arises from practicing no longer just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all beings (which includes us), is that it opens our hearts wide. Then do from this heartful place, whatever we do will be of benefit and not done with a twist.

Rituals Western Style

I am listening to a program by Joan Halifax. In it she was saying how bereft she felt the West was of rituals of passage.

Yesterday as I sat at the inauguration of Naropa's fifth president, I realized it was very much a ritual of passage not only for our new president, Dr. Stuart C. Lord, but also for the faculty, staff, students, board of trustees and communities that are touched by Naropa. It seemed so appropriate that a school that teaches it students how to make rituals would include a very sweet ritual for the actual swearing in ceremony with Dr. Lord sitting on a cushion with the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche combined with the usual Western style speeches of congratulations, and invocations and music from African, American Native, and other religious traditions.

Most of my life, I have avoided such programs. My initial incentive to go was to support Dr. Lord as a student and as a person of color. Then it was to support the Rinpoche and my Shambhala community. Finally it was in recognition of my own need for more ritual and community in my life and the sheer joy of participating in it. I was happy to arrive early and find something useful to do to be of help.

Today I attended a ritual of a completely different flavor and texture. The Rinpoche is going away on retreat for a year and this was a going away party of sorts. But so consistent with this being a contemplative community, there was a very long, slow, silent ritual by an archer. There were chants and incantations in Tibetan by the Rinpoche's mother, step father and step brother, chants by the community for his longevity, and a blessing ceremony for the whole community. The sweetest part to me was the deep-felt request from Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown to the Rinpoche on behalf of the entire community for the Rinpoche to live a long life and to continue to teach his community. You could feel the depth of her own heartbreak from losing past teachers to death and at the thought of the Sakyong being away from the community for a full year.

I also attended the dialogues on Thursday night. I had the honor of refilling the water glasses for the dialogue participants. I had to find the pitcher and glasses and get everything ready. It seemed like something small at first and then I felt like I had been given a great responsibility. I had an opportunity to care for them in advance and to be very mindful of them throughout the whole dialogue in a way I would not have if I hadn't in my own way been a participant too.

One of my Naropa undergraduate friends is graduating in December. She told me all about her plans for her family and friends to come to the graduation and how excited she is about this opportunity to take the walk to get her degree. I did not even go to my undergraduate ceremony. I only went to my high school and MBA ceremony for the benefit of my mother primarily.

As I sat in the audiences these past few days and listened to my friends excitement yesterday, I realized that I have missed something important by not participating in the rituals that I have passed by over the years including many funerals. Through our Cultivating the Sacred class, I am learning how valuable rituals are and how few opportunities we actually do have to participate in them in our culture. So the next time someone invites me to a wedding or a ceremony of any type, I will not so quickly turn up my nose at it and may even accept with joy instead of disdain and go and really be mindful of the opportunity I have to particpate in a rite of transition Western style.

One Person at a Time

This morning while I was meditating, my phone rang. When I looked at the caller ID, it was a cell phone in Washington, DC. I assumed it was a friend returning my call. I decided to check the voice message. It was a call from a complete stranger that found me completely by accident.

She is an extraordinary young photographer named Emily Troutman, and she has just been designated a Citizen Ambassador. She acheived this distinction by entering a contest sponsored by the UN asking "If you could speak to world leaders, what would you say?" Please, please go to her blogsite and watch her film. It brought tears to my eyes. The text is also on the site.

Here is an excerpt from the end of the video:

"I want us both to agree to say one true thing out loud everyday. To remember one real person. To remind ourselves that our tragedies—yours and mine—are lived and felt one person at a time; just like our hope, our renewal, our future can also be lived and carried out into the world, one person at a time. You have a chance to be that person. So make a promise with me:

I promise to humble myself.
I promise to grieve.
I promise to bow down to truth.
I promise to argue.
I promise to listen and to live with intention.
I promise to know my own strength.
I promise to risk something.
I promise to stop talking about what hasn't been doneand start doing something different.

We are 6.7 billion real people who want to be remembered, who only want to live a life as good and as safe as the one you live. If we promise to think of you, to work with you; I hope you'll promise to think of us, to work for us. One person, one small baby, one dream at a time.
Sincerely,
Emily Troutman

Here is a link to her Message to World Leaders:http://www.emilytroutman.blogspot.com

As well as the press release regarding the contest:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32591&Cr=akasaka&Cr1=

I am hoping to travel around and ask people the question I answered, "If you could speak to world leaders, what would you say?"

=========================================
I wasn't actually able to assist Emily with the reason she called me, but I am hoping to help her in her mission by getting her an invitation to Naropa.

Re-emergence

Yesterday our Centering Prayer class had an all day retreat. It was a beautiful encounter with my own contemplative practice, sitting in the beautiful silence, and with contemplative Christianity which I have never really known before now.

I am reading "The Grace in Dying" by Kathleen Dowlings Singh. It is another thing that has come into my life by synchronicity. I was told about this book by two or three people including David Frenette (teaches the Centering Prayer class) in the last week. I found a copy on my bookshelf. Two friends sent it to me awhile ago, and I filed it with my hospice book collection.
It is an awesome book about the qualities that take place as we near death and the notion that we come out of the Ground of Being (God, Source, etc.) at birth, differeniate ourselves (develop ego) and then return to the Ground of Being just before we die unless we figure out sooner that that which we are longing for is the return to God.

If we figure it out sooner we start a contemplative practice. If not, it happens anyway as we approach death. It doesn't matter which contemplative tradition we "dig our deep well in." According to Ken Wilbur all mystics of every tradition ultimately discover this unity. It is inevitable as the night follows the day that you will re-emerge into God. But how wonderful to do it in life as we live at this very moment. Then to have time to share this blessing with others and help them to this consciousness. That seems to me the deep work of our call to chaplaincy.

Sacred World

In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa describes Sacred World. The world becomes sacred essentially because we treat it as sacred and hold that intention in the way we express ourselves both internally and externally. In the external world, it is holding the intention to regard our home as sacred. Sacredness is a way of connecting to the moment as it is right now. It is being aware of how we maintain our home; how we cook our food; how we attend to our friends and family and all the details of our everyday. According to Trungpa, this paying attention and being present to our lives is how we move our existence out of the mundane and into the sacred. It is out of this sacred space that we create enlightened society.“Enlightened society must rest on a good foundation.…if you apply awareness in any situation, then you are training your whole being so that you will be able to open yourself further, rather than narrowing your existence.”

He says on the Shambhala path we also regard sense perceptions as sacred. Instead of fighting with them or trying to get rid of them, we see them as basically good. We use meditation practice to train connect us to the nowness of our world and hone our wisdom. Through treating our world as sacred and our perceptions as sacred, we begin to experience the magic that exists in the world. We begin to magnetize magic by treating our world as sacred. We pay attention to the details of our life. We live disciplined lives with great attentiveness and with great heart. We magnetize magic in our bodies by becoming one with our existence. Our whole body hangs together as one integrated entitiy. Our sense perceptions also “work as one unit, one basic goodness, one expression of basic health.” By all the ways you take care of yourself, your discipline, the way you dress, the things you eat, how you attend to others when you are in a conversation and so on invokes this magic. Trungpa says even the way you dress, the fit of your clothes can cause you to feel upliftedness. You are synchronizing your body and your connection to the physical world outside your body.

I am starting to get a sense of how this works and how I move in the world with this sense of sacredness. I begin to see how if everyone were living from this sense of sacredness, we would treat one another differently and the whole society would move in the direction of sacred world.

Holy Ground

Joel Goldsmith says wherever we stand is holy ground. Joseph Campbell tells the story of the Vedic saint resting his feet on a sacred symbol. A priest comes along and is outraged. The saint says where can I put my feet that are not sacred. The priest keeps trying to move the feet only to discover that everywhere he tries to put them, the sacred object pops up underneath them. He catches on and moves on his way.

If everything and everyone is sacred, it begs the question what does it mean to be sacred anyway? We often think it means being special in some way like the neon sign on the church across the street that says, “You are the most valuable thing to God.” If I don’t hold anything in particular as more valuable to God has sacred lost its meaning? Is there anything in this world more valuable to God than anything else? If I accept that everything is indeed sacred, would I move through this world in a different way? Would I value everything equally or would it mean though I have reverence for everything, I could care more deeply about some things than others? What does God really think about all this anyway? Does he/she/it even think about such things or consider humans in any particular way. If I pray fervently for myself and others, is there really someone or something listening that truly cares about my existence or my suffering?

I would like to believe so and yet, I very much hold to the notion that God doesn’t distinguish, that the love of the universe belong to us all in equal measure, that indeed we are all equally sacred and equally valuable.

End of life rituals for the remaining

One of the sacred rituals that still seem to remain in our culture is the funeral. I went to the services for my hospice client. He had been born in an observant Jewish family over 70 years ago, but left those religious roots and went searching for the rest of his life. In the end he was part of a Buddhist community and was studying the Course in Miracles. It seemed he has strayed a long way from his Jewish roots, but in the end, his service was conducted by a rabbi and our hospice chaplain. His body was not allowed to sit out for a few days as his Buddhist sangha had expected much to their dismay. He was interred immediately following the service.

My childhood experience with funerals was not very good, and I was so distraught after my grandfather wake, my mother would not let me attend the funeral service. I didn’t go to another funeral until I was an adult. Even then I mostly avoided them or made excuses to not attend. When my husband died, I conducted his memorial service and turned it into a celebration of his life. At both my parents’ funerals, I thought it was a shame that the family and friends had not gathered like this while they were still alive and could appreciate the experience. My hospice client had such an experience. His spiritual community hosted a celebration of his life while he was still alive. It was a testament to his life and an affirmation of his connection to his friends and family.

I have not been to the graveside of my parents and Michael's (my deceased husband) ashes are buried in the front yard of the only house he ever owned under a tree we planted together. I don’t see myself walking up to the owners and asking if I can bow and pray in front of their tree. However recently a friend asked me to go with him and his family to his mother’s grave side for the first anniversary of her death. We placed flowers and sang hymns. It seemed very healing and life affirming for them. The one graveside I have attended with some regularity was that of my grandfather. He was buried in a concrete crypt in the field of the family farm. So he was always near at hand when I was at my grandmother’s house. I spent many hours over the years lying on his cement crypt pouring my heart out to him about my life and problems. I cried bitterly on his crypt when my mother died and asked him to watch over her. Of course I have no idea if he heard me, but this ritual that I started when I was seven has over many years given me comfort and a sense of connection to my ancestors. They recently moved my grandfather to the cemetery where my mother and grandmother are buried.

As a chaplain I suspect, I will attend many end of life rituals and even be asked to conduct the services. I believe this ritual is truly for the living and serves as a balm for the suffering they are experiencing. I have a new respect for these rituals and perhaps someday, I will go and place some flowers on my father’s grave and tell him how my life has turned out since he left.

Miracle

I was touched by this Thought for the Day from Eknath Easwaran on Sept. 23rd

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle. Every square yard of the surface of the earth Is spread with the same. . . . What strange miracles are these! Everywhere . . . – Walt Whitman

Once when I was giving a talk I used the word “miracles,” and someone in the audience asked skeptically, “Tell us about one.”
Every moment you remain alive is a miracle. Talk to medical people; they will tell you there are a million and one things that can go wrong with this body of ours at any given instant. It is only because we haven’t developed the capacity for appreciating miracles that we don’t see them all around us. Life is a continuous miracle: not only joy but sorrow too; not only birth but death too.
But the most precious miracle of all is to see the divinity in every creature – when we see that the divinity in our hearts is our real Self, and that it is the same Self shining in all. -- Eknath Easwaran

Diversity

I’ve been thinking about Katie’s diversity meeting experience. I often talk about being three disadvantaged groups in one. Though I am tri-racial, I am automatically classified as an African-American by the color of my skin. I am female, and I am left handed. You may wonder why that last one matters, but it has caused me many problems in a country where most things are designed for right-handed people to use. My grandmother did not attempt to teach me how to do things left handed. She couldn’t. She told me that when she was a child, they tied the left hand behind the child’s back to keep them from using it. They thought the devil was influencing the child. I am fortunate I was not born during that time. I would have likely been a slave (as her father was even though his father was white) and might have had my left hand cut off. I certainly would not have had any rights to own property of my own or be a person under the constitution.

I feel fortunate to have been born when I was born. Even though the bathrooms and lunch counters in the South were still segregated. It seemed strange to me when I would leave New York and go to North Carolina and be in a completely different world. I made speeches in my 95% white high school when Martin Luther King was killed. I got to walk around in solidarity with the Black Panther Party for a short while in college. Despite this background, I have led a very privileged life. I can only recall one or two incidents in my life that I can say real prejudice was involved. My second husband was Irish and German with a smidgeon of French Canadian. In his family the First Nations (Canadian Native American) blood was a deep secret and never discussed. When we started dating, I warned him to let his family know about me in advance. He seemed surprised at the notion. He was really disturbed when he found out that they had family meetings about “the problem” and that his divorced parents were speaking for the first time over this quandary. Eventually his mother and I became good friends, and I became ‘the exception.” The exception to what they generally think about Black people. This has often been the position I am cast in as the only Black person in a larger group.

I have First Nations Canadian friends that are still recovering from the psychological trauma of being taken from their families and put into residential schools for their own good by the government. They are still trying to recover their identities and traditions that have been lost. The mixed bloods are in a twilight world where they still don’t fit into the overall culture, but don’t fit into the First Nations group either. They have created their own music, dance and cultural norms to give them a sense of place.

These people like me are neither white, nor red, nor black (in my case), and we really have no “place” we fit into in this world. I believe we do have the best opportunity in time and place in the history of the western world to find our own authentic voices in this multi-cultural melting pot that has become North America.

Is Life Sacred?

This morning my hospice client died. When the chaplain first called to tell me about him back in June, I had the feeling the relationship would be extraordinary. We feel in love at our first meeting. Not romantic love, but a meeting of souls that felt like a deep river running underneath our surface conversations and interactions. Before this, I never had a hospice client that I met with week after week. I only volunteered at The Denver Hospice Care Center weekly or monthly and most of the time, I never saw a client again. People who come to the care center were usually only there for a few days or weeks at most.

Last Tuesday, I was certain I would never see him again even though he seemed to have rallied that day. When the call came in this morning, I was in the middle of my meditation practice. Afterwards, I checked the message because something told me it might be about him. I went back to my meditation seat and cried, did tonglen practice for him and sat with the feelings as they came and went. Is life itself sacred? Is it something we should treasure and hold dear? When my first husband chose to disconnect his life support, we knew he would inevitably die. I had to sit by and watch day by day and could not help him along in any way. By law we could not assist the process. Yet weren’t we already killing him by denying him food and drink?

I believe in many spiritual traditions, life is treasured. Murder and suicide are taboo. When my mother was dying, I thought perhaps now I can leave the planet too. She was the most precious person in the world to me at that time. When I talked to a friend about my feelings, she was appalled and said, what about living for her? Wasn’t she enough reason for me to keep on living? When I eventually told my second husband (we divorced the same month my mother died) about my experience he couldn’t believe I wouldn’t have considered that everyone would blame him. In the midst of illness, I have considered again the question of why I would remain here and not put myself out of my misery. Clearly as much as I might love, staying for others is not enough. But perhaps holding all life to be sacred including my own is enough. Can I or anyone take a life even our own without some cosmic repercussions? Maybe I stay alive not out of a sense of sacredness but out a sense of fear, fear that I would have committed some great error.

In my MI interview, my instructor told me that she was praying for me to raise windhorse (my life force) and practicing tonglen for me. Perhaps what is enough is to know that my presence made a difference in the life and death of my client at the end and that maybe it will make a greater and greater contribution as I aspire and deepen my commitment to my bodhisattva vow. As I read the Sakyong’s Amrita practice this morning, he reminded me that my suffering is valuable as it deepens my compassion and capacity to minister to and care about the suffering of others.

Matters of Life and Death

Today I went to the doctor to try and figure out what is going on with my health. The good news is that the fact that I am not sicker and am still alive means I likely don't have lung cancer. Then on my way to see my hospice patient, my nephew called to tell me I am going to be a grand auntie. My hospice patient wasn't expected to live to this week, and I was happy to know that he was still alive. So there was new birth and two reprieves in one day.

The visit with my client was astounding in such very simple and to me very sacred way. He had rebounded and just today was out of the bed and eating for the first time in ten days. His daughters had arrived for a visit and the rabbi said maybe he wanted to hold on for Rosh Hashanah. People often hold on for the last loved one to show up or for religious holidays. My client said he had bought into other people's ideas about when he was supposed to die and had decided he wasn't ready yet. He wanted to get out of the bed and feel alive while he was still alive. We talked about how blessed he was to have an amazing support group from his spiritual community and our hospice. As he pondered these blessings, he started crying. I held his hands and told him how blessed I felt to have met him and been on this journey with him. Then we cried together about our blessings. We talked about God, light, love and many sweet things. I didn't cry for him, but cried with him out of a shared sense of awe at the journey we were taking together. His dying of cancer in particular has made these weeks of waiting for some answers particularly sharp for me.

Today I got an email from a friend who is courageously moving through treatment for colon cancer. She wrote:
"I heard last night that Patrick Swayze died after 2 years of cancer treatment. Stage 4 spread from the pancreas to lymph nodes to the liver. (similar to her own progression) I know that I have my unique relationship with my healing and with my faith, but hearing this just scares me, like I'm fooling myself. Friends said to reach out when it gets hard, and today, it's hard."

Nothing feels more sacred to me than being with someone in the midst of moments like these: the joy of my nephew over his news, the poignancy of my client's last days and the angst of my friend. These moments of human joy and human agony are often the most powerful connectors to our experience of God or the divine.

Irony as I posted my blog I got this advertisement. Ah the sacred and the profane.

Lung Cancer Patients
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www.cancercenter.com

Humans Sacred?

I was going to comment on Bretsky's post about holding humans as sacred and it became a whole post in itself as I thought about it. If I don't see all beings as sacred, if I am not as willing to die for a tree or for an animal as I am for a human, then do I really hold anything as sacred.

I once participated in a program with Barbara Marx Hubbard. She holds the position that we are all cells in a larger body, the universe. So we are part of a sacred collective. It seems to me at times that human beings act more like cancer cells in this body than benign cells. Like cancer cells, it seems as if we don't care if we kill our host in the process of getting more of what we want or having things our own way. It seems that our collective and individual contempt for other beings is what allows some humans to destroy rainforests and kill animals for their fur or tusks. We are certainly on the path to destroying perhaps a whole planet and the life forms that inhabit it.

Ego Consciousness

Plotkin says, "Our distinctive ego-based consciousness -- made possible by our reflexive self-awareness -- engenders both our crisis and our opportunity. Ego consciousness is our greatest liability as well as our greatest power."

It seems for the past week everywhere I turn, there are writings on ego. Campbell's opening myth of Minos is about the destruction caused by his ego-based clinging to the bull for his own benefit. Plotkin seems to say that it is our ego clinging that keeps us trapped in adolescence. It seems the major journey of ours is to somehow grow out of thinking that one more thing is really going to satisfy our craving for something that seems almost beyond satisfying, something that many of the books I am reading lately say can only be satisfied by "God." Certainly it seems that it is a longing so great it is like a vast and boundless blackhole in my own soul. The journey to satisfy that longing brought me to Naropa.


In Diane Eck's book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras she talks so much about the richness of the ritual life in the Hindu tradition. Like Gena (see her post), I have mostly avoided rituals and excessive displays of both personal and religious fervor. It almost seemed frightening to me in some cases. I certainly had a lot of judgment over the excessive fervor and emotional displays I experienced at Baptist services and funerals. When I finally chose a church, Ichose Unitarianism for it simplicity and lack of rituals. Eventually I felt a longing for something more elaborate after all. I begin now to wonder if these rituals are not ways in which get outside ourselves and our attachment to our own egos, that perhaps participating in more ritualistic practices would shift my own focus from my needs to a deeper connection to that which I am longing for.


The rituals of taking the refuge and bodhisattva vows had something of this quality for me. On retreat this summer, Gaylon asked me what I thought of all the chanting and oryoki practices. Since chanting has always very rote to me, it is hard to see the purpose in it. Yet when I think about how it connects me to 2.500 years of history, lineage and practioners that have succeeded in moving beyond their egos, chosing a Tibetan form of Buddhism with all its rituals and practices beckons me to give it a chance to work its magic in my soul and to move me closer to the mystery that I am seeking.

New Beginnings

August 30, 2009: This is my very first blog post. I am not even sure I know how I got here or how to get back again once I leave. It is a bit like life isn't it? We come into this world and we exit often without really knowing how we got here or where we are going. I am enjoying the reading assignments for this course and connecting it to other reading I am following and the Diane Eck book we are reading for Interreligious Dialog.

I am working with a hospice client who was actually seemingly healthy when we started and has since gone downhill very fast. We've spent our time together talking about our spiritual practices and his feelings about his relationships with other people and his thoughts about death. Today his spiritual community is having a "living" ceremony to acknowledge him while he is living instead of waiting for a funeral which he wouldn't actively get to participate in experiencing.

As a hospice volunteer and chaplain, I am sure to experience many different rituals around death and dying. When I read about Tibetan near death experiences, I was surprised at how different they seemed from the western experiences I had read about. I decided that perhaps when we die, we have the experience we expect just as we so often do in life. My client said he always had a wonderful experience with his chaplain and he decided it was because he expected he would have one. Recently I listened to a tape program by an energy healer who assists at death beds. She said that the people that crossed over had the experience they expected.

I am concluding that it doesn't matter what spiritual practice we choose so much as that we choose one and then really sink deeply into so that we move through the transformative stages of our spiritual life. Then we may have some sense of how we got here and where we are going that works for our own soul.