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.

Growing Old

Growth is inherently painful. To grow is to fall apart. New forms arise from the debris of the old. What was must die, so that what is can be. And we are always growing, even when we are growing old. This is why in the First Noble Truth Buddha taught that life is suffering. To be alive means to grow, and growth means change, and change hurts.

            Unless you accept change, embrace it even. Then your pain is transformed into awareness. The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism lays bare this process – that our suffering and dissatisfaction are principally caused by our resistance to what is. We suffer because we refuse to accept that life is not controlled by our arbitrary and self-serving demands. We don’t get what we want. We don’t get to stay young. We don’t get to not die. Once we accept the fundamental impermanence of all forms, including our own, a peaceful serenity illuminates the path ahead. The Buddhists call this nirvana.

            Nirvana is a compound Sanskrit word: nir a negating prefix, and vana meaning air that is moving, like wind or breath. Nirvana, often translated as “to blow out,” as in extinguishing a candle flame, is really just a way of saying stillness. It is a state of consciousness free from the agitation of self-centeredness, craving, and fear. In nirvana we are awash in gratitude, wonder, loving-kindness, and acceptance. Because we want nothing, we receive everything.

            To age consciously means to understand the full cosmic process that coming into being and going out of being entails, not from the perspective of a single organism, but from the God-perspective. Being born is a death sentence. No matter your afterlife belief system of choice, these forms – these awkward, aging bodies – are not long for this world. If you have anything pressing to do, I would get to it now. You don’t know how much longer you have.

            In the Phaedo, Plato’s dialogue about the final hours of Socrates’s life, we see Socrates’s friends gathered around him as he calmly faces execution by means of a long, cool drink of hemlock. As his friends fret, wail, and moan, Socrates remains the model of serenity and acceptance, like the hub of a wheel around which everything spins madly. They ask him how he can be so cool and composed in the face of death. He explains that the philosophic life is “training for dying,” and that in many ways he has been practicing for this his whole life. The lover of wisdom, Socrates argues, works hard to root their existence into something deeper, something truer, something more abiding than these fleeting forms. We don’t really know what happens when we die, he says, and it might be better than this mortal life. How do we know? We don’t. So it’s irrational, he argues, to fear death.

500 years later Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius further amplified the burgeoning Stoic doctrine of acceptance. “Frightened of change?” he asked. “But what can exist without it? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that can happen to us. How you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.”

I never really liked that Dylan Thomas poem, the one that says “Do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I prefer the stance of Buddha, Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius – to welcome aging and death like any other change – an opportunity to practice slipping the noose of attachment and sliding into the vast and boundless space of sacred realization.

[This piece was originally appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the September/October edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Optimal Health

In our quest for optimal bodies, optimal skin, optimal hair, and optimal minds, we face a danger – the delusion that life is a consumer product and we the disgruntled customer. We believe that if things aren’t quite right, we’ll just keep shopping until they are. As soon as all my desires are met, we think, everything will be fine. But life is short, and death inevitable. We can’t shop our way out of that. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about health a little differently.

           Health is not mastery and control. Health is cooperation with the will of nature. Our best healthcare practices augment and amplify the restorative processes already underway. When we pray for healing we are not issuing marching orders to an otherwise indifferent supernatural entity. God, or nature, will not be coerced. True prayer is a sacred opportunity to abandon fear and come into accord with what is. “Prayer doesn’t change God,” said Soren Kierkegaard, “but it changes him who prays.”

           It’s a miracle that any of us are even alive. When you consider the baffling complexity of the human body-mind system it staggers the imagination. How on earth did such an intricate web of consciousness and matter ever arise, let alone survive? But it did. A round of applause, please, for Mother Nature.

           Optimal health is a noble pursuit. We have every right to feel good, be strong, and thrive. For Aristotle, this innate urge for optimization sets us on the path toward our best lives. It’s only natural that we put these big brains to work finding and perfecting ways to increase our well-being. Science has brought us a long way. We understand things we didn’t used to understand about the workings of the mind and body. But all our collective knowledge is still a façade, a veil behind which lays a vast and unknowable mystery – the namelessness of being.

           In Greek tragedy, the fatal flaw of the protagonist is called hubris, or excessive pride. Most of the time this malady manifests itself as thinking erroneously that we’re in control. It is the downfall of Oedipus, and it is our downfall too. Our medical and scientific prowess has spawned an illusion, namely, that we’re running the show. Again and again nature rears up to remind us of the folly of our collective hubris.

           There are three mistakes we make.

           First, we view death as a curable disease, an enemy to be vanquished with our cleverness. Instead, we must learn to see death as a part of the natural cycle, as beautiful and welcome as birth.

           Second, we view healthcare as overcoming nature, rather than cooperating with it. We falsely frame our efforts as combat – the war on cancer, the war on Alzheimer’s, the war on mental illness. Instead, we must frame our healthcare efforts as cooperation with natural processes already unfolding.

           Last, we mistake influence for control. Thanks to modern surgical practices, increasingly insightful therapeutic modalities, and modern pharmacology, we exert enormous influence over our mind-body systems. But we are still gnats flying in a hurricane – so much of what transpires is far outside our influence, let alone control.

           The bottom line: We are self-healing. It is the body’s nature to correct its imbalances, and to eventually wither and fail. At their best, our healing modalities are an effort to co-create the conditions in which the body can best heal itself, and when the time comes, let go and accept our impermanence. We are not in control. We never were. Health is not a consumer commodity to be purchased and possessed, any more than a beautiful sunset is. You can’t own the sky, and you don’t control the movements of the stars and planets. So too we don’t control our health. Health is not something you have – it’s something you are. The best and brightest healthcare professionals understand this. They see their role as optimizers, not controllers. They know what the rest of us are still learning – that health is our natural state, and it is more allowed than achieved. 

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column as "How to Thrive" in the November/December 2016 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Before the Fall

I think a lot about aging and dying these days. No, nothing happened. I’m fine. It just hits you sometimes – we don’t have forever.

            If you’re paying attention at all you can’t help but notice – everything moves around us like a comet. Events, people, problems, and gifts sling in out of deep space, loom into view, come so close we can touch them, then slip through our grasp to recede into the darkness beyond all reckoning. The trick is not to think about it too much. Just stay present to what’s right in front of us. Pay attention. It all goes by so fast.

Rehearsing Death

            After Socrates was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by the Athenian court, he awaited his execution in prison. His friend Crito came to see him. Crito considered himself well-connected, and presented Socrates with a proposition. I have the guard bribed, he said, the warden bribed, and a sailboat is awaiting you in the harbor. But Socrates refused to escape. He considered it an admission of guilt, and immoral besides. As a devoted Athenian citizen and decorated war hero who’d benefited from Athenian citizenship his whole life, he argued that it’s irrational to obey laws in your own interest while breaking laws against your interest. If we do that, he said, we violate the very concept of law and regress into naked self-interest. But there was an even deeper reason Socrates refused to escape.

As his friends gathered around him in the final hours, their grief was profound. They loved their old philosopher friend, a virtuous and charismatic teacher who exemplified for a generation of Athenians the courageous and noble pursuit of wisdom. As Socrates lifted the cup of hemlock to his lips they wept. Yet he remained calm, good-natured even. How, they asked, can you be so accepting of this horrible fate? He turned to his friends and said, the philosopher rehearses his own death. In other words, if you really love wisdom, and if you’re really honest, then you have to admit that none of us knows what death is. How can we be afraid of something we cannot conceive? Fear has no place in authentic wisdom, Socrates taught. And then there’s this – what if being dead is better than being alive? I mean, we don’t really know do we? So living in fear of death is the height of folly.

What does it really mean to rehearse one’s death?

“Rehearse,” from the Old French rehercier, originally meant “to go over again” or “repeat,” or literally “to rake over,” and “turn over,” as in turning over the soil for planting. Rehearsing one’s death then means to face it again and again, engage with it, work with it, prepare for it, learn it, and turn it into a productive field of insight. 

Rehearsing our death means practicing deep acceptance of the transitory nature of all things. To everyday let go of everything you love, to live each day as if it were your last, and to embrace your loved ones as if you were about to be forever parted. There is no time for half-hearted commitment. Only whole-hearted will do. This, for Socrates, was the examined life – the only life worth living.

            By not rehearsing our death, we live in an illusion, falling prey to all manner of distortions. We slip into the illusion that we are a permanent, isolated identity. We fall into the illusion that our current belief system is true, pitting us in eternal conflict with all other perspectives. We dangerously ascribe to all sorts of tribalisms, nationalisms, and other deleterious parochial maladies. We trade in our vulnerable humanity for false security. But in the light of wisdom we realize the fluidity of the self, the poverty of group-think, and the provisional nature of all truth claims. We grow willing to relinquish our illusions in exchange for full membership in the loving community of consciousness that transcends self, ideology, tribe, ethnicity, and nation.

Over Our Shoulder

            In Carlos Castaneda’s wonderful, controversial account of his apprenticeship with the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, death played a prominent role. Don Juan taught Castaneda that our death is always present, lurking just over our left shoulder. Knowing he is always there, like a good friend, we acclimate to his close proximity. We get used to him always being around. His nearness frees us from the pettiness of our lives. We get better at letting the little things go. With death as a constant companion, our priorities shift, our values clarify, and our courage tempers into steel. We quickly drop perceived slights (since there is no more ego to defend), and move instead into the consciousness of forgiveness and gratitude. Every moment becomes a shining, singular miracle – a gift of infinite grace. In the words of the Jewish mystic Abraham Joshua Heschel, the world becomes “bereft of triteness.” Banality transforms into significance. Boredom becomes impossible.

            But if you are unwilling to make friends with your own death – your own fluidity, your own impermanence – you close yourself off from its gifts. You sentence yourself to a life of illusory self-importance, confusion, suffering, and disappointment. The fullness of the beauty of the world eludes you, the grandeur of human creativity evades your grasp, and the delirious depth of love remains only a rumor, not a lived experience. Our death is always hovering nearby, trying to cajole us into our own best lives. But we keep running away, pretending he isn’t there.

Before The Fall

            This, after all, is the source of all our pathologies – we think we have forever. We think there is always time. That tomorrow exists. But it doesn’t. Not really. It exists only as an idea in our heads. It’s not real. There is always only this now moment. And in the eternal present, all is well – every fear unfounded, every longing met, every question mollified.

            Instead, we idolize the past. Some of us live in the illusion that everything used to be better, and long to return to the good old days. We obsess about our looks and spend thousands of dollars on skin treatments, hair color, cosmetics, and even surgery to turn back the clock, mistakenly thinking that if we could be anywhere other than here, anytime other than now, anyone other than who we really are, we’d be happy. What a torturous pursuit.

            Sure, blame the culture. Blame the cosmetics industry. Blame the media. Blame advertising. Blame corporations. Blame Photoshop. But they are just a mirror held up to our own fear, and our belligerent unwillingness to make nice with our old friend death.

            Summer’s winding down and soon the leaves will turn brown and red and gold. They’ll fall in spirals to gather in drifts, clattering down the street in the autumn wind. The days will grow shorter, the nights colder. Winter is coming. We love the changes. But we fear them too. Because we know we only have so many autumns left, so many winters. What if this is our last summer, our last hot day? If we knew it was our last, would we waste it complaining? Would we label it a hardship? Or would our hearts open laughing to delight in its embrace? It’s never too late to awaken to the truth and renounce the illusion of permanence. It’s never too late to really, fully come alive. All you have to do is rehearse your death, and receive its gifts. All you have to do is know, really know in your bones, that this is it.