The Eightfold Path

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

Mostly, evolution happens to us. Sudden changes in circumstance force us to adapt. When fleet-footed tigers found us, we learned to run faster. When storms raged around us we learned to build shelter. When the low-hanging fruit was gone, we grew a little taller.
 
But not all evolution is involuntary. We can choose to change.

The world’s wisdom traditions are rife with practices designed to help us do just that.

A prime example is Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path.

Buddha taught that we live in a state of suffering, dissatisfaction, and incompletion, but that it doesn’t have to be that way. Our suffering is generally rooted in self-obsession and endless craving. We want things to be different than they are – it’s too cold, it’s too hot, I wish it would rain, I wish it would stop raining. When we turn the key and the car won’t start we get angry and upset. It’s not the dead battery’s fault. Batteries die. The suffering is generated solely by our strange, ridiculous demand that batteries be immortal.

To undo the damage, Buddha suggested that we reduce our suffering by reducing its cause, namely, self-centered craving and expectation. Conditions around us would infinitely improve if we simply stopped resisting them and moved instead into complete acceptance. And the good doctor offered a prescription to help affect this change – the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditation.

Right view means understanding the nature and the cause of suffering, and the method of release. We just talked about that.

Right intention means resolving to stop being sick and start getting well. This is the part where you choose to consciously evolve. It won’t happen if you don’t choose it.

Right speech means using language impeccably, telling the truth, and avoiding language that harms yourself or others. Words are thoughts made concrete. They create reality. Make a new reality.

Right action means behaving ethically in all areas of life. If this has to be explained to you in great detail, you might be in real trouble.

Right livelihood means working for a living in a way that honors yourself and others. Even our work life is part of our spiritual practice. Be ambitious, make money, create things, but do it in a way that honors the dignity of all life.

Right effort means finding the middle path between doing nothing and overdoing everything. Slow and steady wins the race. You must exert effort, but be vigilant against manic obsession. Nobody likes a spiritual Nazi.

Right mindfulness means gently monitoring and shaping mental content. Our thoughts shape our lives, so let us consciously shape our thoughts. In this way we re-create the whole world.

Right meditation means cultivating a regular practice of intentional consciousness and spending time in the silence, knowing that it is from silence that our strength and wisdom comes.

The purpose of the eightfold path is simply this – to reduce self-obsession. The rest takes care of itself. As we walk this path our hands unclench, our eyes grow clear, and the knots that strangle our hearts loosen. It’s not so much that solutions arise – problems simply recede. We renounce attachment to ego-centric expectations and come to love what is. As the contemporary Zen teacher John Tarrant puts it, “Suffering is the statement, Not this. Enlightenment is the statement, What is this?” Coming out of criticism and into acceptance, we give ourselves the gift of a joyful life.

But it takes time to undo a lifetime of habitual sleep-walking. You won’t awaken from reading a book, going to church, attending a satsang, or traveling to a weekend retreat. Yet all those things help by paving the path one brick at a time. But in the end, you have to start wake-walking all on your own, and the Noble Eightfold Path is a very good map.

The Rising Lotus

[This piece originally appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the May/June 2015 issue of Unity Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]

The lotus flower is a powerful visual metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. Rooted in the mud beneath the pond, the stem rises up through the water, breaking through the surface and blossoming into startling beauty. To the casual eye, the exquisite refinement of the lotus blossom seems superior to the muck at the bottom of the pond. But in contemplation we come to know that there is no hierarchy between the mud, the water, and the rarefied air – each proves to be an essential environment for the unfolding.

The lotus blossom is not an alien visitor from a transcendent world. Its vibrant color and delicate form are simply an expression of the root, hidden deep beneath the mud at the bottom of the pond. Sure, the flower gets all the attention. But where would it be without its formative period? Our analytical mind divides the process into parts and stages, even imposing preference for one stage over the others. But the fact remains – each stage contains all the other stages. We are witness to a seamless unfolding not of sections, but of an indivisible unity.

Enlightenment, it turns out, is our natural, innate state. But in the depths of gestation, it’s easy to forget our original nature.

In the Indian traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism the lotus stands as a wordless lesson – we are all on the way to our fullest realization, and our highest manifestation exists already within us in embryonic form.

Awakening is not becoming something we’re not – it’s becoming what we already are. Our dawning realization is a birth process – we are all at once the mother, the midwife, and the newborn. And as with childbirth, there is little to be done other than to ensure that optimal conditions exist within which the natural process can unfold on its own.

How then can we give birth to our highest, most fully-realized state? By what steps can we become more empowered? A lotus plant can live for thousands of years. We don’t have that much time.

Here’s a shortcut that could save you years of needless searching: Empowerment is not acquiring power you did not previously have; empowerment is uncovering power you had all along. You don’t need anything. You only need to remove obstacles. We become who we are, wrote Meister Eckhart, “not by a process of addition, but by a process of subtraction.”

In the great hero myths of all cultures, the hero finally uncovers his or her power when all of the stultifying comforts – misunderstood as supports – are stripped away. It is only by dying to our previous stages of existence that we are reborn into our newly revealed authentic expression.

The obstacles to our empowerment are many. It’s naïve to ignore external conditions like poverty, violence, trauma, and the debilitating stress they cause. But where we can often do the most immediate good is by claiming our freedom to assert new thoughts in response to these vexing conditions. In his landmark book Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl noted that among his fellow inmates at Auschwitz, the ones who survived all shared a common characteristic – they imposed meaning where there was none. Out of the depths of their being they mustered the will to live and a genuine optimism despite unbearable conditions.

In Camus’s analysis of the Greek myth of Sisyphus we see a similar theme. Sisyphus had been condemned for eternity to roll a large rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down while he slept. Every morning he rose to commit the same futile task. Yet Sisyphus overcame the absurdity of his existence through a sheer act of will. He could have succumbed to the apparent meaningless of existence, but by his willingness, courage, and perseverance he transcended his fate.  

Empowerment is an inside job. It begins with a decision. “Once you make a decision,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “the universe conspires to make it happen.” What if our awakening were inevitable? What if the end was already assured and we had only to attend to the means? What if our limited thinking is the biggest hindrance to our empowerment?

A Year of Living Gratefully

It began as an experiment and ended as a conviction. I wanted to know if a simple daily ritual could create real and lasting transformation. I wanted to know if willfully choosing and shaping my thoughts could change my attitude. I wanted to know if emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being was simply a matter of pointing my attention in the right direction. The answers? Yes, yes, and yes.

             Last January I began keeping a gratitude journal. 

            The idea is not new. In ancient times wise people understood the unbreakable link between thought and action. It’s obvious that every action begins as a thought, but what is less clear is how actions shape consciousness. Buddha taught that we become what we think about. The Bhagavad Gita says that we become what we love. Aristotle taught that repeated actions become habits and habits construct character. We become what we do.

            I wanted to test these ancient claims in as simple a fashion as possible. I wanted to know if a simple daily ritual could really make a difference. I wanted to know if gratitude was the key that would unlock the door to a happier, more joyful, more positive, more compassionate, and more creative life. All I needed was willingness, a pencil, a blank book, and a little discipline. 

            At first I was skeptical. Like most people, my default, baseline state of mind was restless anxiety, worry, craving, and dissatisfaction. No matter how hard I slaved on my to-do lists, they were never completed. There was always something broken that needed fixing, a problem unsolved or a need unmet. Like a constant, steady background hum, dissatisfaction was a continual presence, punctuated briefly by fleeting moments of joy and well-being.

            This was no way to live. I was ready to try something different, even if it sounded a little weird.

            Last January 1^st I began. I wrote two sentences in my blank book that began with the words, “I’m grateful for…” The pattern was set. Every morning this year without fail, I dutifully performed my ritual. 

            It wasn’t always easy. In fact, there were many mornings when I struggled to come up with something new. Did I always feel grateful? No. But that didn’t matter. I was determined to earnestly complete my daily task. Often I would write the words, “I’m grateful for…”, then sit back and wait for something to occur to me, casting the searchlight of awareness across the furthest reaches of my life. But it was usually something right in front of me that caught my mind’s eye and made it to the page – the soft breathing of my thirteen year old dog Boone asleep at my feet, or the half moon descending through the pines in the pale morning sky. 

            Already in my second month I began to notice a shift. Having to come up with new gratitude material every morning changed the way I looked at my day. Knowing that every dawn brought a writing assignment, I paid more attention to the bounty of my life. I began to awaken to the abundance – the generosity of my colleagues, the warmth of my marriage, the joy of my work, the love of my family, the acceptance of my friends, the fleeting beauty of the world.

            I should have known this would happen. The same thing happens when I keep a travel journal – I begin to look at the journey through the eyes of a writer, selecting, storing and framing the events of the day and getting them ready for the next morning’s writing session. And when I travel with a camera around my neck, I’m constantly checking the angle of the light and scanning for the next shot. A gratitude journal is no different.

            Then the second shift happened. What you think about expands. By simply looking for gratitude, I found it. And the more I found, the more I felt – the consciousness of gratitude began to be a state of mind, a starting point that had little to do with what was going on around me. Gratitude became the lens through which I saw the world.

            This was a surprise. I had always thought gratitude was an end-point, a sense of well-being experienced at the end of a process of acquisition. What if the consciousness of gratitude is a starting point, a freely chosen state of mind unhinged from the ego’s incessant demands and default dissatisfaction?

            More research was required. I kept journaling.

            As the months rolled on I began to look forward to my morning ritual. It was getting easier. I began to notice that instead of skittering across the surface of my mind the daily ritual of gratitude had worn a groove, a groove I found myself falling into more often than not. Being grateful began to feel normal. I was constructing a new default baseline one journal entry at a time. Aristotle was right. We become what we do.

            The more time I spent in gratitude, the more I realized how little I understood about gratitude. There was still more to discover. But I was willing to learn.

            It turns out that gratitude is not just one thing, it’s many things. It’s a doorway to a whole new a way of being in the world. Maybe the simplest way to say it is this: gratitude is freedom. When you train yourself into the consciousness of gratitude, you are set free from the relentless craving and fear of the ego mind. Most unexamined consciousness, what Buddha called conditioned thinking, is simply the endless repetition of two fundamental energies, craving and aversion. There’s one list of all the things we want, and another list of all the things we don’t want. Life as it is normally lived is little more than the laborious maintenance of these two lists. But when we shift into gratitude, we realize that we have everything we need and there is nothing to fear.

            Then comes an even deeper shift. 

            By reducing our anxiety about what we have not yet received or achieved, we tap into a richer and more vibrant creativity, a state of being that anxiety and fear cuts out. When you experientially know that you live in an infinitely abundant universe, and that you receive everything you need, you soften, you open, you see, you hear, and you feel more. And because your hands are no longer clenched in a death-grip on the things you mistakenly call “yours,” you are open and available to receive the next gifts the universe is trying to give you. Your intentions will more readily become your creations as you move out of the consciousness of scarcity and into the consciousness of gratitude and allowance. You will struggle less and co-create more.

            Who knew that just a few minutes of writing in the morning could have such a profound impact? And if I fall out of the groove of gratitude, I have in my hand a whole book, a year’s worth of tangible evidence that I really am awash in abundance. But the real proof is within me.

            As the New Year begins, we have an opportunity. It isn’t hard to change. All it takes is willingness, a pencil, a blank book, and a little discipline. What will you be doing in the early morning hours of January 1^st?  Will 2013 be a year of craving and fear or a year of living gratefully?

From the Eagle's Nest

When a fledgling eagle gets a little too big for the nest, and the time has come for him to fly away and live on his own, he is understandably reluctant. Why would he want to leave? He has a soft, safe refuge from the frightening world. Through no effort of his own food arrives at his feet on a daily basis. There are few risks and ample rewards. But in her wisdom, the young eagle’s mother slowly begins to remove the soft, downy feathers from the nest, exposing the sharp and gnarled branches of the nest’s foundation. Soon the nest is no more comfortable and no more appealing than any other clump of branches, and the wider world suddenly seems much more interesting, much more possible. So too in our own lives, comfort is often the enemy of growth. It is our discomfort, our suffering that pushes us past stages of our life where we no longer belong. The problem is we don’t have eagle mothers. In fact, we work very hard to surround ourselves with soft, warm cocoons mistakenly believing that the purpose of life is to be comfortable. Fortunately, life has a way of shaking us loose even from the most carefully constructed cocoons.

Making peace with the inevitable disruptions of life is the work of every wise man and woman. The capacity to reframe loss as growth is a mark of our maturity. Coming to understand that suffering and dissatisfaction are soul-messages we ignore at our own peril is a vital part of our evolution from fearful, dependent beings into courageous, independent beings. The quality and depth of our life is directly proportional to our ability to recognize discomfort as a turn-signal – a call to a higher order of being.

Instead of honoring our uneasiness and heeding the call, we often take the opposite course. We self-medicate, we avoid, we deny, we slip beneath the undertow of the thought-stream, letting our endless excursions into the imagination seduce us into the lie that it’s o.k., at least we’re thinking about it. We gaze down from our lofty perch, seeing the wider world, but never daring to venture out into it.

Think back on those times in your life when you made the most dramatic changes, changes that resulted in new-found freedom, astonishing growth, the emergence of latent talents, the acquisition of new skills, and the realization of a deeper, more authentic joy. In almost every case were those necessary changes not preceded by periods of great uneasiness or worse? Like labor pains, did not your rebirth emerge at the end of process that was disorienting, painful and frightening?

When we look back and reflect on our suffering we often see a pattern. It turns out that life itself is our eagle mother. It relentlessly strips away the ephemeral comforts we thought would last forever and the tighter we grasped the more painful the inevitable separation. It is only when we look forward with eyes uplifted, wings outstretched, feeling for the subtle and invisible updraft that rises in response to our readiness that we finally come to understand that our highest good and our deepest joy were present all along – they were simply hidden from us by the fog of our own comfort.

On the hero’s journey of our lives we must leave the known world of childhood safety and enter the unknown, a place where none of the old rules apply and none of the old supports are in place. It is only in the great wide open that we feel our own latent strengths emerge. In the Wizard of Oz, the lion, the tin man, the scarecrow and Dorothy already had courage, a heart, a brain and the way home – they just had to have it scared out of them. When the wizard sent them to get the wicked witch’s broom he really knew what he was doing. It is only by running toward the thing we fear most, not away from it, that we die to our limited and limiting sense of self and realize our authentic nature. This is why the eagle mother pulls all of the down out of the nest – because she loves her chick so much and wants its life to be as magnificent as possible.

It is our nature to grow and expand, and growth requires the dissolution of earlier forms. As old forms crumble and fall away there is always a period of great uncertainty. What shape will the new forms take? Do I have the energy and the talent to manifest them, the graciousness to allow them, or the eyes to even see them? Uncertainty is a necessary condition. Expecting certainty is a disease of the ego, that part of us that wants to control every element, manage every turn and script every outcome. New forms emerge from a complex and untraceable confluence of streams of causation – suffice it to say that no single person or power is in charge. We’re all working together, mostly unawares, in the construction of this next now moment. And it is our collective suffering that conspires to co-create what’s next.

The wizard and the eagle mother do not give us our gifts. They merely help us create the conditions in which those gifts emerge from deep within our own nature. This is the sacred role of every teacher, mentor and guide – to see in their student the potential the student has not yet learned to see. And in the hero’s journey the mentor or guide always appears just when they are needed most, when the old way of being in the world is no longer working and a dizzying shift is underway. As the old Indian saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” It is our task then not to find a teacher, or the right book, or the right philosophy or ideology to subscribe to. We are only to make ourselves ready. Readiness means openness, humility and willingness. When we surrender to the call of our own authentic life, the right people, the right books, the right opportunities start finding us. And when you begin to live the life your soul is asking for, you feel a joy welling up in you that lights the path ahead. You may not know what the next 10,000 steps are, but you know what the next step is, and you take it willingly, faithfully, knowing that by honoring your authentic nature you are honoring the sacred nature of reality itself and moving into a deep and harmonious accord with all that is. This is a satisfaction that the fearful and nest-bound never get to feel.

There is nothing wrong with being young and scared. You unwillingness to change and grow is not your fault. It’s built in. Falling out of the nest before you have your feathers is fatal. But there comes a time when the habit of comfort no longer serves our best interests. It is in an eagle’s nature to fly high above the world and see things others will never see. None of that can happen in the nest. When we learn how to take risks and test the boundaries of our nature we give a great gift to ourselves and to the world. The world needs you and the gifts only you can bring. And when we learn how to live lives of artful service, our own joy comes to fruition. We have only to find the courage to finally feel our own feathers rise on the wind, and with a heart full of gratitude for those who nurtured us, leap from the eagle’s nest.