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.

The Three Truths

Life is dizzyingly complex. It’s easy to feel lost, confused, and overwhelmed. So many conflicted voices clamoring for our attention – it seems impossible to cut through the clutter and find the essence. But in the end there are only three truths: impermanence, presence, and love.

Impermanence

On the surface, everything’s impermanent. Nothing lasts. All forms arise and fade. Not only does every wisdom tradition attest this truth, but more importantly, we see it confirmed in our own experience over and over again. There is a graceful fluidity to the process of becoming and be-going that makes life achingly beautiful. But it’s also true that impermanence sparks continual suffering. Everything we touch slips away. For the 2nd century Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius this unimpeachable fact was liberating – our impermanence frees us to more fully live in the moment and truly enjoy our lives. Even as Emperor he knew his fame and importance was illusory and fleeting. His writings are filled with the names of previous luminaries – Augustus, Caesar, Plato, and the question: Where are they now? Reduced to dust. One day we will be lowered into our grave, and all the mourners standing around will one day be lowered into their graves as well, and their loved ones after that, until many, many years from now no one will know any of our names. It will be as if we were never here. The whole world will come to an end. Far from lamenting this, Marcus Aurelius suggests we look with clear eyes at this truth so that we might live with authenticity, courage, and enjoyment. An awareness of impermanence drives us into the depths of the significance of this now moment. This is, after all, all there is.

Presence

When we fully acknowledge, accept, and even celebrate the transitory nature of all things, we are freed of our debilitating attachment to any of them. Coming out of the mind and its endless dissatisfactions, desires, and fears we show up disarmed and awake in the simple, uncluttered, and concept-free awareness of this present moment. No longer enamored with the thought-world, we fully enter the real world. Even our sense of self is amended – we experience ourselves not as a separate entity, cut off and alienated from the whole, but as an egoless aspect of the whole. This is a freedom the conceptual mind can only imagine.

Through practices such as meditation, contemplation, reverie, aesthetic rapture, and immersion in nature we begin to experience for ourselves a realm of being formerly hidden from us – the background beneath the surface of the fleeting surface of impermanence. This abiding presence was always with us – in fact, it is us. It has many names in the world’s wisdom traditions – Inner Christ, Buddha-Consciousness, Atman, Inner Witness, Holy Spirit – and yet no name can fully describe or contain this depth-reality. It eludes our conceptualization and defies any attempt to clothe it in language. All of our words and concepts merely point to it the way a trail sign points to the path ahead. The sign is not the destination, the menu is not the food, and the map is not the place – yet we rely on these referents to show us where we need to direct our active engagement, knowing that when you walk the trail you leave the signpost far behind.

One thing that all the sages and seers report, and a claim we can confirm in our own experience, is the idea that this nameless presence hidden just beneath the surface of the fleeting world of forms is silent, still, abiding, and changeless. Unlike the world of surface forms, it never wavers. It hovers beyond all qualities, categories, processes, and concepts. It just is. And in its stillness it seems apart from the impermanent realm. Calling it permanent is probably excessive and unnecessary – we should avoid calling it anything. Names and concepts distort more than they reveal. But what we’re left with is this – it feels like something. We may not be able to think it, but we sure experience it. There’s a deep, abiding stillness and peace in the presence. We experience an aliveness here, a sense of refuge, and a loving warmth. It’s easy to see why in many belief systems this sacred background, this abiding presence gets personified as a deity, and how teachings, doctrines, dogmas, rituals, and institutions spring up around this primarily experiential awareness. You can call it God if you want to. But you don’t have to. It is possible to remain in the presence of this abiding, underlying reality without clothing it in language, concepts, or religious ideologies.

If we had to name the feeling we have when we realize this presence, we’d probably just say “love.”

Love

Love is the only word left standing after we’ve eliminated all the others. Of course it too is inadequate. But it’ll do.

The most immediate and acute way to experience this for yourselves is in the wake of the death of a loved one. Your beloved is gone. They took form, graced your life, and have now returned to the formless realm. And yet in their absence, you feel more keenly than ever before their presence and the absolute love that you shared. Love is unaffected by the passage of time and the transience of forms. Love is the name of the infinite field out of which forms arise and to which they return.

Armed with these three truths – impermanence, presence, and love – we return to the battlefield of our lives full of humility, yet brave enough to take a stand and do what needs to be done. Love is our power now, and love overcomes every fear, every foe, every lie, and every limitation. We see clearly the beauty and pathos of these lovely, fleeting forms around us. We accept the changes that we and everything else are going through. We no longer cling to the past or crave private happiness. We simply intend the best outcomes, and work diligently to bring them about, letting go of attachment and practicing deep-tissue acceptance of whatever comes our way.

We cultivate a practice of conscious intentionality. We live our lives on purpose. We leave time and space for reverie, joy, meditation, prayer, contemplation, and connection, knowing that these are the windows through which the sacred presence behind the veil of impermanence floods into our lives like sunlight after a storm. No matter what is happening in the outer world, we remain aware of the sacred background, the stillness and silence of our inner being.

Love and only love enables us to withstand the suffering brought on by impermanence. In our pain we reach inside to touch the presence within and are in an instant restored. Love is who we are, what we are, and what everything is. When we live and have our being in love, we are on the beam and held aloft from darkness, ignorance, and meaninglessness. In love we rise to our full stature as beings of infinite value. And we fall in love with the whole messy, beautiful world.     

The Constancy of Change

[This was originally published in my column "A to Zen" in the January/February 2016 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]


"You can't step in the same river twice." ~ Heraclitus

The only thing that doesn’t change is change.

The transient nature of life puts us in a precarious position. Lulled into complacency by the apparent solidity of the world, again and again we are shocked by life’s sudden transitions – the terrible phone call, the cancer diagnosis, the death of a friend. Like Charlie Brown we fervently believe that this time Lucy will hold the football in place. But every time we go to kick it, it isn’t there.

In Buddhism this fundamental fact is known as anitya or impermanence. The evidence is all around us. Sure, things change at different rates, but change they will. A mayfly lives 24 hours, a proton billions of years. Yet both are bound by the same inexorable law: change.

If one follows this reasonable premise to its logical conclusion, we arrive at another core Buddhist teaching, shunyata. Shunyata is usually translated as “emptiness” or “the void,” but what shunyata actually conveys is the fundamentally indefinable nature of reality. Whatever all of this is, it is beyond language and thought. Shunyata is the nameless field of pure potentiality out of which all forms arise and to which all forms return. Yet shunyata itself remains formless. So in that sense reality is empty of fixed forms. But look around – it is most definitely not nothing.

We think we live in a universe comprised of solid objects distinct from one another. But ancient wisdom traditions and modern physics confirm the illusory nature of our misperceptions. So-called solid reality is 99.9999% empty space. Turns out the Buddhists were right.

Shunyata is like a clear sky and things are like clouds. Clouds arise, appear to have form, last a while, and then disperse, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. This is the nature of things. As he lay down to die, the Buddha left his friends with one final thought. “Remember this,” he said, “all forms arise and all forms fade.”

Embracing the fundamental transience of reality enables us to navigate the strange and beautiful arc of our lives with a modicum of dignity and joy. We realize we don’t own any of this. It is all borrowed and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. Yet in the face of impermanence it would be wrong to conclude that nothing matters – quite the contrary. Everything matters – more than you ever imagined.

Every fleeting moment has a magical quality, a sacred ordinariness that we mostly miss, caught as we are in dreams of yesterday and tomorrow. Only when we come into the presence of this now moment do we tap into the real.

We cannot change the past. It is forever out of reach. The future is equally elusive and beyond our grasp. What we call the past or the future is only a thought and thoughts by their nature exist only in this present moment. We are only and forever rooted in the now. This is where we think, act, feel, love, and have our being. Yet most of us spend very little time here, caught forever in thoughts of the past or the future.

Buddhist practice seeks to draw us out of our thought-world and back into an immediate awareness of our authentic nature. But what is it going to take to get us out of our head and back into our heart?

Meditation, devotion, prayer, service, mindfulness, loving-kindness, empathy, compassion – these are the core practices of all spiritual traditions. As the Tibetan saying goes, “Want to go to hell? Think of yourself. Want to go to heaven? Think of others.”

When things change, and they will – when those we love are taken from us, when we find ourselves alone in a field with nothing but the wind to hold onto – we are drawn into a powerful and liberating awareness. We see through our tears that no matter what, there is an unbroken light, a boundless consciousness, an unchanging love, and an immutable being that binds it all together, despite the apparent transience.