When Me is Three

[A version of this article was first published in my "A to Zen" column in the March/April 2014 issue of Unity Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.] 

            What is the most important relationship in our life? Is it the one we have with our spouses or life partners? Our parents? Our children? Our friends?

None of the above.

The most important relationship is the one we have with ourselves because that is the ground out of which all the others grow. Who you are and how you navigate the terrain of your inner life affects everyone and everything around you.

In ancient Athens Socrates was fond of repeating the motto chiseled into the marble at the Oracle at Delphi – “Know Thyself.” For Socrates self-knowledge meant far more than simply knowing your place or playing your role well. It meant digging deep, questioning everything, and seeing what remained after every pretense was turned to ash in the blazing light of reason. Journeying through the abyss of the unconscious is no walk in the park – it takes tremendous vision and willingness – the vision to penetrate the smoke of denial and the willingness to let go of everything false. When the goal is authenticity, no price is too high.

But what is this self that we are supposed to get to know?

In Vedanta philosophy – the ancient wisdom of the Vedas, Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita – a subtle and sophisticated philosophy of self emerges. We, like everything else in the universe, are said to be woven from three strands or gunas – tamas, rajas, and sattva. Tamas is the quality of unconsciousness, ignorance, darkness and inertia. Rajas is the quality of undirected energy, manic self-centeredness, and restless anxiety. Sattva is the quality of illumination, stillness, and inner-wisdom. All three gunas are ever present within us, but one is always eclipsing the other two.

When tamas is dominant we are lethargic, deceitful, and lost in delusion. We take pleasure in vulgarity and intoxication and have no regard for the well-being of ourselves or others. We procrastinate and waste time. Covetousness and envy cloud our minds. Tamasic consciousness is hell on earth.

When rajas dominates, we swell full of ambition and self-seeking, working hard for outer rewards and recognition. Greed, rather than the good, motivates us. Fear and competition drives us like a lash. We view others either as rivals or as means to an end. Even when we attain our goals, satisfaction eludes us because there is always someone who has more. Rajasic consciousness is busy-mind incarnate.

When sattva dominates, we work with the greater good in mind. We move out of thoughts of I, me, and mine and awaken into unity consciousness, realizing our underlying oneness. A genuine sweetness wells up through the cracks of our ordinary lives. Healing and serenity replace dissatisfaction and craving. We finally realize that we are and have forever been in the Kingdom of Heaven. Sattvic consciousness is self-illuminating enlightenment.

The tamasic person suffers continually, yet is too sick to do anything about it. The rajasic person stays stuck in the illusion of separateness, beset by endless longing and fear. The sattvic person realizes their inner divinity and experiences fully the blissful nature of this now moment.

The good news is that each of us has the capacity to shift into sattvic consciousness. The spiritual practices of the world’s wisdom traditions offer ample support. Study, pray, meditate, love, create, devote, serve – there are many paths to the summit.

Simply put, sattvic consciousness is our inner light. Others call it Christ-consciousness, Buddha-nature, Atman, or our unseverable connection to the Source. It is not something we attain, nor is it the fruit of our spiritual discipline – it is what we already are and have always been. We have only to awaken to it. In fact, it is our tamasic lethargy and our rajasic busy-mind that cloaks this divine reality within us. When we feel the compulsive, addictive, and self-destructive energy of tamas, when we feel the manic, racing, fearful, self-obsession of rajas, we  have only to shift our attention to the sattvic inner light that shines behind the fog of tamas and rajas. It may not be as difficult as we think it is. Turning enlightenment into an arduous ordeal is a favorite game of the rajasic mind.  What if we allow it to be easy? What if we take Jesus at his word when he says, “My yoke is easy, my burden light.”

Now self-knowledge takes on a whole new meaning. When Socrates says, “Know thyself,” he means come into alignment with your higher self, the part of you closest to the divine and therefore most real. In Buddhist enlightenment, it is the sattvic consciousness that finally lifts us out of the haze of tamas and rajas, illuminating the whole world. “Be lamps unto yourselves,” said the Buddha, and when you realize your inner light, “don’t hide it under a bushel basket,” added Jesus. Coming into right relationship with whom and what we really are is our greatest gift to ourselves, to our loved ones, and to the whole world.

Rock Star

Rock and roll’s been around for a long time. For young people, it’s the music of their grandparents. Yet its eternal coolness remains intact. The rock and roll sensibility keeps rearing its head in every new wave of music. Fashion and hair styles change. Aesthetic tastes evolve. But, as Huey Lewis sang, “the heart of rock and roll is still beating.”

The perennial allure of rock and roll speaks to its deeper nature. “Rock and roll” is no mere genre descriptor – it’s a whole attitude, a mode of consciousness, a way of life.

Mommies everywhere extol their toddlers with the accolade “you rock” for the triumphant accomplishment of not pooping in their pants. Nine year olds who bring home an A on their math test are crowned “rock stars.”  Sixteen year olds on their first job who successfully change out the oil in the deep fryer are praised by their bosses with a “rock on man, rock on.” On a literal level, continence, math skill, and proficiency in deep fryer maintenance seem utterly unrelated to the mesmerizing, hip-shaking shamanism of Jim Morrison, yet there it is. It makes sense. There’s something about rock and roll and rock stars that has come to stand for any human achievement involving risk, courage, and accomplishment. So what are we really saying when we call someone a rock star?

A rock star personifies courage. They are willing to risk everything to step out on stage and lead a hungry crowd on a Dionysian journey through the bowels of their own longing. A rock star has to overcome the natural proclivity of any artist for isolation. They don’t play it safe. They leap into the breach risking rejection, failure, or worse – the yawning chasm of their own irrelevance and ineffectiveness. They put themselves to the test and live with the consequences. Will their art move people, or move them toward the door?

A rock star is reckless. They engage in high risk backstage behaviors, they play dangerously loud, they jump off of scaffolds to crowd surf and act like they’re immortal. Some of them die young. They don’t seem terribly interested in longevity or prudence. Instead, what’s important is this moment, this experience, this feeling. Sure, it may not be smart. But we live vicariously through our rock stars and secretly revel in their revelry. They have the audacity to believe that no matter what, they’re going to be o.k.

A rock star is audacious, impudent even. In other words, they’re not terribly interested in respecting or conforming to your narrow definition of propriety. Their very existence is an affront to the polite sensibilities of the careful people in their Dockers and minivans. Rock stars cuss, spit, wear jeans to formal soirees and drink too much. Their hair is a mess. They have sex whenever, wherever, and with whomever they please. Like trickster gods they are hell bent on shattering every cultural norm and giving voice to every impulse on the human spectrum, licit and illicit. We disapprove of their excess just as we thrill at their abandon. In their freedom we feel our own limitlessness.

A rock star sacrifices themselves for the greater good. Like a hero in a classic myth, the rock star leaps into the abyss to wrestle with the demon. By their willingness to face their own death, we are all resurrected. On the surface, a rock star may seem the very portrait of self-obsession. But it’s all part of the act. They are playing a role. And in their play-acting, they model for us the quality of selfless service. Like any hero, they leave the known world with its well-defined boundaries and its value system rooted in safety and security, trading all this for the madness of the unknown. From the safety of our bounded universe we watch them careen into chaos, hungry for the catharsis their self-sacrifice will bring. Perhaps this is what we love most about our rock stars – their willingness to fully inhabit a role. In our work we too long to go big, to surrender to the fullest measure our responsibilities and tasks require of us. Yet we stay stuck in a careful utilitarian calculation of means and ends. Once, just once, we’d love to say what we really want to say, do what we really want to do, not out of self-interest but in the service of our larger role. We want to fight for what’s right and risk it all for the fullest realization of our aims. But instead we say yes ma’am, yes sir, and crank the Led Zepplin in our cars on the long commute home. It’s been a long time since we rock and rolled indeed.

A rock star is self-confident. They ask a lot of themselves, and they deliver. Through years of experience they come to learn an important fact about themselves – they know what to do and they know how to do it. They have what it takes. Self-confidence of this nature doesn’t have to brag or draw attention to itself – it’s evident in the work. There’s nothing to prove and no need to compete. A certain ease exudes from their every pore. An eerie calm fills the room when they walk in. Call it fearlessness, call it mastery, call it whatever you want. But it can’t be bought and it can’t be faked. You either have it or you don’t. The only way to get it is to earn it, then own it.

A rock star is focused. This isn’t always their most apparent feature. But beneath their Dionysian excess is a highly organized Apollonian process. To be a successful rock star you have to master marketing, business management, organizational dynamics, technology, logistics, and financial planning. Not to mention an unwavering work ethic. The work always comes first, often to the detriment of relationships, family, even one’s own well-being. Pushing through their own laziness the rock star does whatever it takes to achieve their aims.

A rock star is playful. Although they may be hard working business professionals, for them the line between work and play dissolved a long time ago. They are willing to laugh, especially at themselves, at a moment’s notice. This is all just one big stupid game, and they know it. They know they’re not in charge, and that luck and chance played an enormous role in their journey to the top. They keep themselves and everyone around them energized by slipping into playful silliness and light-hearted frivolity as often as possible. If you’re not having fun, something is very, very wrong.

But what’s perhaps most inspiring about rock stars, and the main reason we use the appellation “rock star” as our highest compliment, is their mysterious ability to integrate all of these disparate qualities into a unified whole. By bridging the dichotomies of intellect and intuition, focus and abandon, calculation and risk, assertion and surrender, wisdom and foolishness, mastery and immaturity, they perfectly champion and embody the qualities of art itself. They use their bodies, minds, and souls to channel our deepest, most unconscious dreams and bring them to the stage. In an opera both sublime and grotesque they turn the mysteries of the soul into public performance and mold our gravest fears and greatest hopes into transformative theater that washes over our senses, emboldens our hearts, ennobles our aspirations, and calls us to our highest purpose. To paraphrase Joseph Campbell, each of us is the rock star of our own lives, and we have our rock stars to thank for breaking us open to that immutable truth.

The Circling

Every morning we awaken from a long bout of unconsciousness. We blink, stretch, yawn, and slide out of bed. Our feet hit the floor and we start walking in a big, wide circle.  Tonight we’ll be back in this room, crawling into bed and slipping down into the same womb of unconsciousness from which we were born just a few hours ago. Everything is a circle, every day a rebirth. We orbit our lives like the earth around the sun.

 On a circle, it’s impossible to mark one point as the beginning and another as the end. Words like beginning and end have no fixed meaning. On the wheel of time there is only this one eternally present moment. Concepts like past and future are little more than helpful constructs. They have no more reality than a dream. Like dreams, past and future exist only in the privacy and isolation of our own consciousness. The still-point at the hub of the wheel knows nothing of the constant turning at the rim.

This is why the circle is the most common spiritual symbol on earth –the mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, the labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral, Ezekiel’s wheel in the sky, the archetypal hero’s journey, the sand paintings of the Hopi and the Navajo – everywhere we turn human beings express their deepest realizations in circular form. Plato said that the soul is in the form of a circle. Timaeus, Plato’s Pythagorean friend, famously defined God as a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. Throughout Egyptian, Norse, Mesoamerican, and Asian mythology the circle appears so often that Jung must be right – they can’t all have originated in one place and dispersed – the circle symbol arises of its own accord from the collective unconscious of humankind whenever and wherever they are, a universal symbol or archetype, taking on local flavor, but retaining its deeper, more mystical meaning throughout its myriad and diverse expressions. Time, it seems, is a snake eating its own tail.

So here at the beginning of the year we once again embody all the budding potentiality that January holds, seeding projects, planning conquests, pouring over maps and setting courses for new and bountiful waters. Just as we are reborn every morning, and the moon is reborn every month, so too we celebrate the rebirth of the human project every year. January comes with a distinct feeling of renewal and redemption. On one hand, the calendar does seem rather arbitrary and inconsequential. On the other, it seems deadly serious, this business of starting over. We need it.

Maybe it’s just the way our brains are wired. We discern patterns. We intrinsically assess and sort the raw data of our sense-stream into preconceived categories and columns. Conceptual abstractions like circularity are again and again confirmed in the world around us. Noticing them helps us make order out of chaos. 

We leave home in the morning only to return again in the evening. A song in the key of G wanders all around the scale before returning to G. The hero begins her journey in the known world, is called into the unknown, undergoes essential trials and transformations there and returns to her place of origin strengthened, wiser, and far more willing and able to serve. Ocean water evaporates into the atmosphere, forms into clouds, rains down on the mountains, and gathers into streams that pour into rivers that return to the sea. The hummingbird returns to the nest where she was born to lay her own tiny clutch of eggs.

Knowing this makes us ready for the inevitably cyclical nature of our own lives. We are born toothless, hairless, incompetent, and incontinent. If we live long enough we return to those same hapless conditions. In the beginning and at the end of our lives we are utterly dependant on others – only in the middle are we strong enough to care for ourselves. And if we’re particularly skillful, we can even care for others.

Since the entire universe, from the spiraling of galaxies to the whirling of electrons, is organized into circles, it seems like a good idea to move through our own lives with the same sense of shape and direction.  Straight-edged linear thinking and simplistic expectations are far less effective than allowing the naturally cyclical patterns to carry us over and around obstacles. There will be days when you are not at your best. Wait. You’ll come around. There will be days when you are shockingly creative and productive. Don’t resent all the other days for not being like this one. Begin to notice the waxing and waning, dawning and dusking, rising and falling nature of all your energies and attitudes, and allow them to move unhindered.

In the longer cycles of our lives, learn to honor the natural energies of the season. There is a virtue for every hour and a natural graciousness for every age – in our youth, humility; in our adulthood, responsibility; in our middle age; contemplation; in our final years, appreciation.

Artists of every media understand and exploit the circularity of life through the means of symmetry, rhyme, and harmony. Visual artists create cyclical echoes with shape, form, color, light, and shadow. Musicians root deeply into repeating patterns and trust their audience to recognize their own longing in the singer’s sadness. Beyond every heartbreak a healing, beyond every journey a homecoming, beyond every death a resurrection, beyond every betrayal a redemption.  Every performer who has ever stood on a stage has felt in their bones this truth – it is not they alone who create the music in the room. The performer is merely the channel through whose hands, heart, and voice the longing of the audience comes. We are in this together. We are not making the music. The music is making us.

Art is relationship. Martin Buber was right – God or the sacred exists in the space between us when we meet in authentic dialogue. God is indeed a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

What’s more important, the performer or the audience? It’s a terrible question. All that matters is what happens when they come together, when the circle is unbroken, and the vibrant aliveness of presence emerges through the cracks of our collective imperfection. Aesthetic appreciation is an art form. Put down your phone. Stop talking. Lean in. Let yourself go. Feel yourself lifted into the center of a great circle, a paradise without beginning or end. Let yourself be reborn into the eternal now, a homeland where the soul feels, finally, fully alive. In this way we are each reborn, every moment, again and again.

Renounce and Enjoy

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

When asked by a reporter to sum up his philosophy in three words, Gandhi replied, “Renounce and enjoy.”  It isn’t easy to summarize the complexity of Vedanta philosophy in three words, let alone 300, while at the same time conveying the essence of the world’s wisdom traditions. Maybe that’s why they called him Mahatma, the Great One.

And what is it to renounce? It is to relinquish the illusion of control, move out of the ego-mind and into a deep and restful state of acceptance and surrender. Renunciation is the conscious decision to stop resisting what is. When asked “What is your secret?” the great 20^th century spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi simply replied, “I don’t mind what happens.”

Yet for Gandhi renunciation was no sack cloth and ashes asceticism. The goal is not withdrawal from the world but full immersion. Free from the tyranny of our own ego demands, we are for the first time truly capable of experiencing joy. It is a terrible irony that the endless search for happiness is the very mechanism that generates perpetual dissatisfaction. Joy, it turns out, is our natural state. When we realize that happiness and joy are already inherently ours and not the result of the fortuitous arrangement of external circumstances, we loosen our grasp.

Renunciation and enjoyment are two sides of one coin – you can’t have one without the other. When you are truly enjoying something, you are accepting it as it is, you are surrendered to it, and you are aligned with it. And when you are accepting, surrendering and aligning, you are enjoying.

Yet how are we to practice renunciation in the midst of this busy, active life? Do we not set goals? Do we not strive to achieve them? If I practice renunciation, who’s going to do all this work?

In the Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi’s favorite book, we read Krishna’s words of counsel to the beleaguered warrior Arjuna as he lies crumpled on the battlefield, paralyzed with anxiety. He knows that no matter what he does, terrible things will happen. For Gandhi the battlefield is a metaphor for the field of action in which we all stand. Each of us is the Arjuna of our own lives. We may not literally be warriors, but every day we face a daunting phalanx of rivals, impossible tasks and Sophie’s choices. When Krishna tells Arjuna to fight, he is telling all of us that life brings agonizing dilemmas, and we can’t opt out – we must act. Inaction and action both bear fruit. As Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, when we do not choose, that is still a choice. There is no reprieve from our radical and inescapable freedom.

The only choice we have is what kind of action to take – selfish or selfless. Krishna tells Arjuna to act without attachment to the fruits of action. We must do the right thing, intend the highest good, and let go of the outcome. When we renounce attachment to results we become a channel through which the infinite good manifests itself.

Things will go wrong. Unintended consequences will unfold. Take action anyway. “Every action, every activity,” says Krishna, “is surrounded by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke.” Practicing renunciation, we don’t cling to mistakes or define ourselves by them.

Beneath it all is the teaching of non-duality. Everything is a manifestation of the one divine reality, the Godhead Brahman. Therefore, everything that happens is ultimately a manifestation of Divine Mind. The only thing that can interfere with this sacred outflow are self-obsessed people trapped in ignorance, imposing their own limited and limiting agenda on the world. In renunciation we move out of self-will and into accord with Divine Mind becoming its instrument. Then even in the midst of conflict the background hum of divine harmony can be heard. Sometimes it even rises to the surface.

In 1943 my father Hilbert Bolland was taken from his native Holland by the Nazis to be a slave laborer in Germany. It seemed as if the world had come to an end. Yet during those long years of war, each spring the trees blossomed, the deer in the forest gave birth to fawns and the world renewed itself, oblivious to the travails of man. One evening, my father was startled by the trill of a nightingale singing unseen high in the boughs of a Linden tree, its beautiful melody drowning out the din of distant artillery fire. In that timeless moment he knew he was going to be alright. He knew that there was a sacred presence beneath the surface of things, an eternal ground of being upon which everything stands, far more real than any man-made mayhem. By surrendering to that we gain our footing, find our path and realize our joyful nature.