The Open Heart

When the eyes open, the heart opens. The more you see, the more you feel. Even an ordinary walk through the neighborhood breaks you open – the desiccated skull of a hummingbird, an out of season flower, a discarded condom wrapper – everywhere you look the poignancy and insistence of life, death, and everything in between. It’s as if the whole world – scattered for a while in disparate embodiments – is longing for reunion.

            Being born means initiation into the world of death. Instead of seeing this as bad news or some sort of cosmic unfairness, we shift into acceptance and a door opens, and if we’re brave, naïve, and crazy enough to walk through that door the world begins to shimmer with unspeakable beauty. The only thing left is love.

            The world’s spiritual traditions are rife with paradox: it is only when we give that we receive, it is only when we release that we attain, it is only when we let go that we make contact, it is only when we surrender that we win. Grasping, clinging, craving, attachment, ego-demands, and self-obsession lead only to suffering. All bliss needs are unclenched hands and an open heart. Give bliss a chance. Let go.

            There is nothing to grasp, and there is no one to do the grasping – this is the great secret. A confluence of factors tricked us into thinking we were separate from everything else, and spiritual practice – any spiritual practice – is the long, slow process of undoing that trickery.

            As white light scatters through a prism into colors, so too the oneness of Being scatters into multiplicity as it passes through the prism of the human mind. Our crude perceptions and conceptual thinking distort and imprison Oneness into paradoxical categories of our own making. Then we become warehouse workers, taking inventory, and cataloging conceptual boxes into hierarchies. We call this “knowledge.” We squander our lives arguing about doctrines, theologies, definitions, and labels. Meanwhile, the real world – the unquantifiable world right outside the doors of our carefully organized warehouses – flows by like a lazy river.

            Water doesn’t ask, “Am I a stream, a river, an ocean, a cloud, or a drop of rain?” It rests in its waterness. It allows individual transformation and evolution of purpose to take its natural course. We, on the other hand, insist on our labels and hierarchies – at great cost.

            We have become addicted to explanation. Like drunks lurching for the bottle, we stumble into the arms of any decent argument or self-serving emotional appeal – anything to assuage the uncertainty of not knowing.

            Not knowing is the doorway to unity and reconciliation. Not knowing is the embodiment of courage. Not knowing is an act of love.

            The simplicity, the clarity, the unmediated symphony of this present moment eludes us when we remain enamored and caught by our thoughts about this present moment. Somewhere along the way we became convinced that our true life, our real life, existed in the realm of thought. That was the most destructive thought of all.

            When you wake up in the morning say thank you. Say thank you as you drift off to sleep. Say thank you between tasks. Say thank you in the middle of everything. Make thank you your mantra. It doesn’t matter who you’re saying it to. Simply be in the consciousness of thank you. We do not say thank you to appease or acknowledge some higher power – the higher power isn’t a needy parent. We say thank you to open our hearts and minds to the truth that we did not create this – we receive this – our lives, these hands, this passion, this beauty, this support, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the love we rely on. We live in the holy thank you. When you do this, you turn the key that unlocks wisdom, wellness, and bliss.

            A nearby star floods our planet with light. Through photosynthesis plants utilize this celestial energy to replicate the cells of their own bodies. Plants are starlight storage systems. Then animals eat the plants, and each other. Then we eat the animals and the plants. In this way all life forms are embodied starlight, feeding on one another in an endless energy exchange. Individual forms come and go, but energy doesn’t die – it just keeps changing address. Life is not a possession. No one owns the energy. The water does not belong to the sea – it just holds it for a while. We do not live life. Life lives us. As Eckhart Tolle wrote in Stillness Speaks, “The opposite of life is not death. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” That’s why the only sane response to any of this is thank you.

            When it is our time to navigate death, other’s or our own, we are forced to let go. The pain of the loss is directly proportional to our grasping. The tighter we cling, the more acute our trauma.

            A young mother came to the Buddha carrying her dead child. She’d heard the Buddha had powerful magic that might restore her child to life. She asked the Buddha, “Is there anything you can do to help me?”

            “Yes,” he said. “But first you must go into the village and find three mustard seeds, and they must be from a house that has been untouched by death.”

            She went door to door through the village carrying her dead child. At the first house she asked, “Do you have any mustard seeds?”

            “Yes.”

            “But has anyone died here?”
            “Yes, we lost our father last year.”

            She went to the next house and knocked on the door.

            “Do you have any mustard seeds?”

            “Yes.”

            “But has anyone died here?”

            “Yes, we lost our mother last month.”

            She went to the next house and knocked on the door.

            “Do you have any mustard seeds?”
            “Yes.”

            “But has anyone died here?”

            “Yes, we lost our child just last week.”

            Many hours passed. Twilight faded to darkness. She had knocked on every door in the village. Not one house was untouched by death.

            She walked out into the forest and looked up at the stars arrayed in thick fields of light above her. “The living are few, and the dead are many,” she whispered. “They outnumber even these stars.” She buried her child and went to the Buddha and thanked him. She joined the order and devoted her life to compassionate action and service. Knowing the universality of death, and the impermanence of all forms, she now understood that none of us owns any of this, we only get to love it for a while. This is the wisdom of the open heart.

Practicing Gratitude

No matter how urbanized, technologized, and commodified we’ve become, we still feel in our ancient, primordial bones the gratitude of the harvest season. We come from farmers. We are hard-wired to the celestial cycle. Autumn comes and the wandering days of summer give way to hearth and home. We start nesting. We take stock and store up for winter. We plainly see how flush our lives are with abundance. We grow thankful.

We may not have everything we want. But we know we have everything we need.

Half of the world’s population, 3.6 billion people, lives on less than $2.00 a day. That’s an annual income of $712. From that meager amount they have to pay for housing, food, clothing, water, healthcare, education, and fuel. 20% of the world lives on less than $1.00 a day. 40% of the people on earth do not have indoor plumbing. In developing countries, 90% of sewage is untreated and discharged directly into lakes, rivers, and streams. 95% of the people on earth do not own a car. If you own a car, you are in the world's wealthiest 5%. The United States makes up only 5% of the world's population, but we own 35% of the world's cars. 5% of the people on earth own a computer. 20% own a smart phone.

If you own a car, have indoor plumbing, have a computer in your home, and have a smart phone, you are obscenely wealthy by global standards.

Yet no matter how much empirical evidence you amass, that nagging feeling never seems to leave us – we don’t have enough.

It seems we need more and more just to stay in the same place.

Psychologists and marketing analysts have a name for this. It’s called the hedonic treadmill. As on a treadmill where one must remain in motion to stay in the same place, our appetites and cravings keep reaching for the next thing despite the obvious abundance of our lives. Even lottery winners, after the shock, thrill, and flush wears off, return to their previous happiness set point. This is also known as hedonic adaptation – we simply and unconsciously adjust to the new material reality. But inside, nothing’s changed.

In other words, happiness cannot come from rearranging the outer conditions of our lives. Happiness is an inside job.

This is why it’s essential to shift our thinking about gratitude. In our normal way of thinking, gratitude comes after a need or a desire is fulfilled – it is an endpoint arising only when just the right outer conditions come into existence. What if instead we began thinking of gratitude as a starting point, a decision we make here and now, regardless of external conditions. In one sense it isn’t hard to do for most of us. Look around. By world standards we have everything we need. All that’s left is to change our thinking.

“Gratitude,” Cicero wrote, “is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Courage, compassion, serenity, wisdom – all of these human excellences begin to develop only after we come out of the self-centered consciousness of scarcity and recognize our abundance. And when we recognize our abundance, we recognize our interconnectedness and the extent to which we co-create each other. None of us does any of this alone. We all carry each other. And we are supported by an infinite, conscious universe. When we start with the warm glow of humility and thankfulness, we experience an inner alignment and availability to our other higher functions. Gratitude opens the door to greatness.

How many times have we convinced ourselves that when we get that new car, that new guitar, that new job, that new lover we will finally be satisfied and happy? How many times have we fallen under the same old spell? You’d think we would have learned by now.

And pouring gasoline on the fire is the relentless marketing machinery of our capitalistic economic system which requires ceaseless and ever-expanding consumption. If a business’s income stays the same year after year, it is by the curious standards of capitalism failing. The job of corporate advertising is to create ever-knew “solutions” to the problem of human dissatisfaction. This car, that vacation, another pair of jeans. This furniture, that beer, another diamond pendant. Whatever we have, advertising says, isn’t enough. You need this thing too. And this thing. And another. And the coup de grace is to surreptitiously align their product with our nameless emotion longing. They craft beautifully produced mini films called commercials to peel back our rational defensiveness and cut right to the heart. Owning this kind of car proves your fatherly wisdom. Buying this kind of mayonnaise proves your worthiness as a mother. We already mistakenly believe that our happiness comes from external objects. And we bear so many wounds, labor beneath so much self-doubt, and harbor so many insecurities. Show us a pathway out of our pain. We aren’t that hard to sell to.

The favorite word of mercantilism is “new.” Like Pavlov’s bell, it sets off immediate salivation in the maw of the American consumer.

But the fact remains, we need each other, and we need each other’s goods and services. Our interrelationship is an economic one to be sure. In the struggle to survive, we’re all selling something – our ability, our talent, our service, our product. We are not debating the worthiness of one economic system over another. We are on a deeper hunt. We are looking for our freedom from delusion. There must be a way to honor our creativity, our profession, our work product, and still help each other awaken from the nightmare of, as some have dubbed it, affluenza – the disease of more, more, more.

It begins with choosing new thoughts. Start with the empirical evidence. Have an old, undesirable car? You’re in the wealthiest 5% on earth. Have a plumbing problem? Four out of ten people on earth don’t even have plumbing. They get their water from a creek – a creek that also serves as the village sewer. Struggling with a glitchy, old computer? 95% of the people on earth don’t own a computer. Then, after you take a cold hard look at the facts, begin to shift from the consciousness of scarcity to the consciousness of gratitude. This transformation isn’t a one-time thing. It takes time to replace old habits with new ones. Begin a gratitude journal. Gratitude is a verb, not a noun. Chronicle your emerging gratitude day by day. After a year you’ll be a different person. Change your thoughts, change your life.

It is not an impoverished austerity we’re after. Asceticism is just another form of self-indulgence. The final goal is generosity, abundance of spirit, and the real and unapologetic enjoyment of life. We can enjoy our things and be at play in the field of forms without pathological attachment to any of them. We can create solutions, manufacture tools, master skills, and serve the needs of others without buying into the lie that happiness is measured by the pound. We can choose quality over quantity. We can do more with less. And we can fall in love with our lives just the way they are. It begins with practicing gratitude.

Making Gratitude Real

[This article originally appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of Unity Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.]

How a number two pencil became a magic wand that broke one spell and cast another

 I had to do something. I had to change my mind. I couldn’t keep trudging down the same tired road, stuck like water in a channel it did not choose. I needed to dig a new channel. But I couldn’t find the shovel.

Simply scolding myself to think new thoughts didn’t help. Habitual conditioning doesn’t break that easily.

I needed to take action.

I began to keep a gratitude journal.

Every morning for a year I got up and sat with my blank book and a pencil. I’d write, “I’m grateful for…” and wait. Sometimes it took a while. But I always came up with something. Even if I didn’t really feel it, I wrote it anyway. Action precedes internal transformation.

I often wrote about the same things – my wife, my work, my home. And sometimes fleeting moments crept in – the color of the sky, a hovering hummingbird, the smell of French onion soup.

Some days it was easy. Some days it was hard. But a certain tenacity, a stubborn doggedness took hold. I was not going to screw this up. My ego was on the line. Hey, whatever it takes.

After a few weeks something began to shift. I began to look forward to my morning writing. It was a chance to testify, to tell the simple truth about the life I live, to proclaim and record the evidence that life has infinite value and is fleshed out with a beauty that takes your breath away. It is surprisingly not often that one gets to say true things. It’s generally frowned upon in polite conversation. People look at you like you’re drunk.

Then a few months later I began to notice a subtler, deeper shift. The daily practice of writing concrete examples of gratitude made me look at my experiences through different eyes. As I went through my day I scanned the periphery like a predator for beauty, grace, and the generosity of the world, you know, things to be grateful for. Knowing that I had a writing assignment due in a few hours, I stayed vigilant, eyes wide for bounty. And do you know what happens when you look for something? You find it.

This is the secret power of the gratitude journal. In the end, the journal doesn’t matter. It’s just the leavings after the feast. It’s not the product, it’s the process that changes you. The gratitude journal is simply a device, a shovel for digging a new channel through which the restless mind can flow.

Before I began keeping a gratitude journal I passed the hours in worry and fear, convinced that I had to guard against the inevitable onslaughts of an uncaring world and navigate a sea of vaguely dangerous human beings all working at cross purposes. It was stressful. After keeping a gratitude journal for a year these old habits of thought were reprogrammed. The scales fell from my eyes and I began to see the world as a field of infinite possibility, a beneficent, nourishing, beautiful home filled with creative people all working toward the good as best they understood it.

I didn’t change the world. I changed the way I saw the world.

And then the final, subtlest and most important shift occurred. An insight arose from the marrow of my bones. In the authority of my own experience I came to know something I had previously only suspected, or read about second-hand in the world’s great spiritual classics, like Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I came to know that I was one with the sacred source of all things, an integral member of an interconnected web of being. I made peace with paradox and declared an everlasting armistice with myself. My conflicted confusion gave way to confident serenity. My grimace of anxiety gave way to a smile. I began to laugh more easily and cry more deeply. The light returned to my eyes. I let go of the need to control, a need born of the fear that there is never enough. I came home to myself, and found that it was a pretty good place to live.

Who knew that a pencil and a piece of paper could do all of that?