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.

Who Gets Forgiven?

No one can force you to forgive. It doesn’t work that way. Is it reasonable to ask a victim to forgive their wrongdoer when there has been no admission of wrong-doing, and furthermore, when the harm is on-going? To pressure a victim to forgive under these conditions is to re-traumatize the victim. This sin is especially prevalent, I’m sorry to say, in so-called “spiritual” circles. “To err is human, to forgive divine,” they solemnly intone. But what about the wrongdoer? Is there anything they need to do to facilitate this process? Or is forgiveness a one-way street?

            Rabbi Yeruchem Eilfort was a frequent guest speaker in my world religions classes at Palomar College. He was brilliant, funny, warm – in a word, a mensch. It was from Rabbi Eilfort that I first learned about the three Rs. In order for us to be forgiven for our wrongdoing, in order for us to be restored unto right relationship with God and with one another, we must first do three things.

            First we must feel remorse. We must genuinely feel the suffering we have caused the other. Secondly, we must repair the damage. If you stole, pay it back. If you lied, admit it. But how can you repair murder, false-imprisonment, or structural discrimination? We’re going to have to get creative. And this is key: our efforts at repair must be made directly to the harmed – we cannot sit back and wait for a supernatural third party to do it for us. Thirdly, we must reform, that is, lend new shape to our lives. The offending behavior has to stop. When these three conditions are met – remorse, repair, and reform – forgiveness may be granted thereby drawing both wrong-doer and victim into right-relationship and inner peace.

As a straight cisgender white male, I am the beneficiary of untold unearned privilege. When I walk into a store, when I rent an apartment, when I apply for a loan, when I interview for a job, or when I’m stopped by the police, I am treated differently than people of color or other discriminated groups not because of my individual merit, but because of an accident of genetics.

Being a person of color means living in the shadow of multi-generational, institutionalized, and often unconscious discrimination. Growing up black in America means growing up in a nation built by slaves, learning American history from white teachers in schools named after slave owners, and living with the fear that simply being black is a death sentence in all too many situations.

And yet a majority of white people mistakenly believe that racism is no longer a major problem, and that it’s all behind us. “I don’t see color,” they say. Believing that racism doesn’t exist is a privilege reserved only for those who never experience it.

Racism skeptics also say things like, "Black people need to get over it. Slavery was a long time ago. And besides, I didn't do it, I don't have a racist bone in my body." How are people of color supposed to forgive the dehumanizing horror of racism when it remains unacknowledged and when they're gaslighted for even bringing it up? So they don't. And we don't talk to each other. And a sickening silence descends like a fog keeping us all in the dark. Real forgiveness is possible. Real restorative healing is possible. But first, the dominant culture must work through the three Rs.

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the November/December 2019 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Art and Memory

There is a mistaken assumption that memories are reasonably accurate movies, little pieces of trustworthy journalism, reliable reporting about prior events. It’s a comforting, if false assumption. I’m afraid the truth is much less comforting. Truth is like that.

            Believing that memories are reliable helps us cling to the notion that there is a clear and linear continuity binding together the moments of our lives, both as individuals and as society, into a knowable whole. Everything – history, identity, even our very notion of truth – is built upon the foundation of memory. So if we’re wrong about memories, if they’re not as reliable as we think they are, then we might be wrong about everything else too.

            Memories are simplistic portraits of highly nuanced and complex phenomena, like children’s drawings of quantum fractals – phenomena that cannot be reduced to a single narrative and painted with crude brush strokes.

Memories cannot be objective. In fact, they are the very definition of subjective – everyone has their own private memories of even the most communal events. And the way we perceived that event was largely filmed, so to speak, through the lens of our own prejudice and conditioning. It really is true that we do not see the world as it is – we see the world as we are. At root, memories are projections of what we think we saw, not what happened. They are creative acts. And we’re the artists.

            What’s most troubling is this irrefutable fact: when you are indulging in a memory, you are not going back to the past. Here’s why. A memory is a thought, and thoughts by definition exist only in the present. In other words, the past doesn’t exist, except as a thought occurring in this present moment. You can never return to the past. There’s no such place.

            All of this leads to the next question. Have you ever wondered why so much art is about memory? From Proust’s madeleine to Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, art looks back. Think about how many songs and movies and novels and plays and paintings and poems and short stories and television shows are anchored to an earlier time. Why is that? For a lot of reasons. Sometimes artists are genuinely trying figure out how we got here. Other times it’s pure escapism. People simply want to swim in a dream world of a past that never really existed. The same dynamic applies to so much of fantasy literature and film.

Even the world’s creation myths can be seen through this lens. Many people believe that the world’s creation myths are attempts to answer the question: How was the world made? But Joseph Campbell and others suggest that a far more personal question is in play: What am I? The idea is that if I could understand the creator’s essential nature, I might begin to understand my own essential nature.

All of the world’s creations stories, if read as history, are of course patently absurd. Did any of the people who wrote these stories witness the events they describe? Obviously not. How can human beings be reliable witnesses of their own emergence?

            And yet stories of the past, creation stories included, have enormous power and purpose. And what is the fundamental purpose of this kind of art? What are we really after when we write a song or a myth about the past?

            It depends. Creation stories, as we have seen, have a largely investigative purpose. They are poetic attempts at metaphysics, and if read metaphorically, have much to teach us. Or at least they help us raise beautiful and profound questions. Creation stories allow us to confront and frame the ineffable forces of the cosmos itself. But if you’re writing a song that simply draws the listener into an idyllic vision of a lost world, whether that world be “Dixie,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” or “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” you’re trading in nostalgia. Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, the songwriters of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” taught us all how to sing “Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River,” but neither of them had ever set foot in West Virginia. They made the whole thing up.

            Maybe Plato was right when in The Republic he warned us to be wary of artists. Artists, he argued, don’t deal in truth or reality. They lie for a living. They weave threads drawn from real experiences into entirely fictional but comforting burial shrouds. They don’t lead us to the light, but to the comfort of the coffin.

            But there’s another side of the coin. There always is.

            In his essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote that poetry (and by extension all art) strengthens our capacity to empathize by exercising our imaginations, for it is our capacity to imagine that makes empathy possible. If you cannot imaginatively put yourself in another’s life, another’s circumstance, another’s skin, then you cannot experience their suffering. And if you cannot feel their suffering as your own, you cannot experience compassion. Without empathy we are sociopaths – no one but ourselves is real. Art then has an enormously important and therapeutic role to play – it is an instrument of global awakening and social justice.

            Still the fact remains that art trades in illusion. Artists create artificial worlds where they, like gods, ascribe value and meaning to everything in them. Depending on the artist, this can be a benign process, or a simply enjoyable one. But it is also how pedantic, manipulative, and dangerous propaganda is constructed.

When in the early 20^th century, some 40 years after the end of the Civil War, white supremacists in the American south began to push back against the enormous strides freed slaves had realized during early Reconstruction, they concocted and propagated a false narrative about the war that served their racist agenda. Racist white leaders reframed the war as a noble cause that had little or nothing to do with enslaving African Americans. And they erected statues of Confederate generals all across the south as totems of their self-serving nostalgia. For generations, every black child walked past these statues on their way to school – schools named after prominent slave holders. The paradigm of racism and inequality got codified into the consciousness and baked into the structures of the community through art, song, and even curriculum. This is how a lie takes hold, with art as the glue that holds it together. Can you whistle “Dixie?” Yeah, I can too.

“Dixie” was written by a white northerner in the mid-19^th century and quickly became a standard on the minstrel circuit, the most popular form of entertainment at the time – white singing groups in black face depicting black people as infantile simpletons. Songs like “Dixie” wistfully portrayed slavery as a bygone age of bucolic happiness. The lie of the happy slave salved white conscience, and made possible all the horrors to come – black codes, Jim Crow, lynching, and institutional racism.

Who owns the past? Who gets to sing about it? And what is their agenda? These are important questions we ignore at our own peril.