Remembering 9/11

This article was originally published in the September/October 2011 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.

We knew it would come. We knew that one day the hurt, the anger, and the confusion would recede like tide sliding back into the sea. We knew that pain so explosive and so blinding couldn’t last. One day, we would have to start breathing again.

Ten years ago, in the moment before the attack, America was a profoundly different place. But everything shifted at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. When the second plane hit the south tower at 9:03, our hearts turned to ice and our heads struggled in vain to comprehend the inconceivable reality of large-scale warfare in lower Manhattan. When the Twin Towers collapsed to the ground our innocence collapsed with them.

Nothing we had ever experienced could have prepared us for the horror of that morning. News from the Pentagon and from the Pennsylvania crash made it clear that this was a concerted attack and that America was in fact at war. And it was not just an attack on America. Among the 3,000 dead that day were citizens of fifty six countries and members of all faiths, including many Muslims. On the seventeenth floor of the south tower there was an Islamic prayer room where devout Muslims from all walks of life met for daily worship. The murderous brutality of the attack staggers the imagination and defies logic. Across the country and around the world a crushing grief descended on us like a plague.

The stages of grief and healing unfold on their own schedule. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance each take their turn at the wheel. In our spiritual practice we focus on the last stage, acceptance, and for good reason. The consciousness of acceptance is both the end and the means of our deliverance unto wisdom. When we let go and surrender to what is, we move out of confusion and into clarity. But it takes time. It takes time for silt to settle back to the bottom leaving the water clear. It takes time for waves to soften into stillness. It takes time before the moon can once again be seen reflected on the surface of the water.

But it doesn’t just take time. It takes effort. After we let the body’s knowledge lead us through the necessary seasons of our grief, feeling fully every wrenching seismic shift, we gradually find the courage to take our lives back. Our prayer and meditation practice opens windows to the light. No longer satisfied to be a leaf in the wind we find our inner compass, that part of us that longs to thrive and be well, that yearns to heal and be a part of the healing of others, and we step boldly forward not knowing where the road will take us, but knowing that up ahead lies something beautiful and true.

We know that all forms arise and all forms fade. We know that to everything there is a season. We know that death and birth are two names for one circle. And we know that Life, in all its myriad forms, will go on forever and ever. We even know that this body we call our own is made of dust and will return to dust. But knowing all these things doesn’t stop the heart from longing. We long for that crisp taste of apple, that first kiss, the feel of sun on our skin. Life is just too beautiful to let go easily. But the beauty itself holds the key. Behind the veil of the world’s fleeting forms lies a Divine Ground, a changeless source known as God, Brahman, Tao or the Nameless. It is out of this formless Source that the world of forms arises. The beauty of the world is the beauty of the Eternal shining through the surface of things. It’s the apple we love, but it is the orchard, rooted deep in the ground, that expresses itself as the apple. When with sickening finality the Twin Towers collapsed we saw with our own eyes the undeniable truth of the impermanence of all things. And yet in precisely that moment, we knew in our hearts that the love and truth that gives rise to all things can never be broken, no matter how many apples fall to the ground in the storms of autumn.

When we come together to pray and sing and breathe in the silence, we stand on the shore of a sea of knowing that goes down and down and down to the place where we are all one. It is from this knowing that forgiveness and acceptance arise. Together, in our families, in our spiritual communities, in the boundlessness of nature, we feel beyond thoughts and know beyond words that despite the horror of the foreground, in the depths of the Source there is a peace that surpasses all understanding and we have only to allow it to carry us. When we stop struggling we feel ourselves begin to lift like a wing on a wind not of our own making. Let these hands hold us. Let this love lift us. Let this wisdom lead us. We cannot stop the arising and fading of forms any more than we can seize the setting sun. But we can feel in our bones the peace of acceptance.

Tragedy and loss are universal. When a terrible fire swept through 17th century poet Mizuta Masahide’s property, with characteristic Japanese minimalism he wrote his most famous two-line poem: “Barn’s burned down, now I can see the moon.”

With every loss we have an opportunity to see things anew – wonders that were right in front of us but for one reason or another we overlooked.

This is how we heal. By opening our eyes and our hearts to what is, knowing that none of this is ours, that everything we own and everything we love is only on loan to us, and that we must give it all back, every bit of it – often without warning. Wisdom means living in the consciousness of gratitude that we ever even got to touch any of it. Be patient and forgiving. Let your life be a proud testament, not a sad apology. You belong here, but only for a while. Stand up and be amazing. Release your mistakes. Rise out of the ruins.

We remember the dead and we will always love them. But memorials aren’t for the dead. The real purpose of memorializing is to affirm and celebrate the infinite value of this baffling mystery called life.

We have lost so much. But now we can see the moon.

The Ends of Things

It’s been ten years since the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed under their own terrible weight taking all of our innocence with them. The unmitigated horror of that day knocked the breath out of us. Many of us kept walking – life goes on – but our souls still linger at the killing ground where so many lives of incalculable beauty were crushed and destroyed in the name of an ideological beef. But the militant extremists who planned, funded and carried out that attack were not just killing Americans – citizens of 56 countries died in the towers that day including many Muslims. On the seventeenth floor of the south tower there was an Islamic prayer room where devout Muslims from all walks of life met for daily worship. Not that it mattered to the killers. When your heart’s set on killing, nothing matters.

What we learn from loss is this: fate can take everything from us – our husbands, our wives, our children, our home, our money, everything we love, and yet just beyond the veil of this incalculable suffering is a still-point, a changeless refuge, an island in the stream. We cannot name it, conceptualize it or understand it, but there it is nonetheless. Some teachings call it serenity, others call it the peace that surpasses all understanding, and still others call it acceptance. Some have tried to describe it as nirvana, the kingdom of heaven, moksha, satori or sat-chit-ananda. Wisdom traditions all over the world and across the centuries have zeroed in on this universal aspiration: how to navigate this treacherous minefield called life and come out unscathed. The answer? You can’t.

The point is not to avoid suffering. The point is to feel the pain and live your life anyway.
The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life hurts. Everything that comes into being goes out of being. Because we live in linear time everything is in constant flux. The ends of things hurt. The one fundamental experience we all have in common is loss.

Among the many gods of the Hindu pantheon one god stands out – Shiva. He is charged with the task of destruction. Like any gods, the Indian gods are simply personifications of the many powers of the one power and presence in the universe, the divine ground, the sacred, cosmic intelligence of the matrix out of which all forms arise and to which all forms return – what George Lucas called the Force. Why then would the act of creation stand out as more sacred or more important than the act of destruction?

In the most common depiction of Shiva he is shown dancing on one foot surrounded by a ring of fire, his other leg sweeping before him like the wing of a bird. In one of his four hands he holds a tiny drum with which he metes out moments of time. In his other up-raised hand he holds the flame of transformation which will consume all forms.

His other two arms sway sinuously near his waist, each hand formed into a gesture, a hand-sign called a mudra. One of the mudras is an invitation to liberation, an opportunity to join in the dance and say yes to change, yes to loss, yes to the inevitable cycles of creation and destruction that swirl in and around us. The other mudra means “don’t be afraid.” Surrender your fear and live in the knowledge that all forms are temporary. Know that beneath the waves of change lies a depth undisturbed. Be liberated from the gut-wrenching illusion that we own any of this, that we have the right to possess or cling to anything. Everything we see, everything we touch, everything we own, everything we love is only on loan to us, and we have to give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. Stay in the consciousness of surrender to this truth and feel your appreciation for the beauty and value of everyone and everything increase. Fall in love with the world and all its folly. Get ready to laugh and love and feel more deeply than you ever have before. It may seem counter-intuitive, but when you let go of everything you will feel closer to everything than you ever have before. It is only in the consciousness of surrender and acceptance that you become truly capable of loving. As Gandhi said, the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is fear, and where there is fear there cannot be love and where there is love there cannot be fear. The two states are mutually exclusive. The consciousness of loving-kindness is just another word for freedom from fear. This is why Jesus, like Shiva, continually told his students to “be not afraid.”

The seed must die for the tree to be born. Shiva is ultimately a creation god – destruction is merely the means by which he creates. That we celebrate birth and fear death is evidence of our limited understanding of how things really work. The ends of things make way for everything we are trying to create, everything we are trying to become, everything yet to be.

Fear and anxiety are the disease. Surrender and acceptance are the medicine.

In the grace beyond judgments of good and bad, where the lion lays down with the lamb, where tears of joy and tears of sorrow flow together and no one counts them up, there is a deep and final forgiveness where all the thoughtlessness, cruelty, self-centeredness and ignorance fall away leaving us once again awash in our original oneness, returned at last to remain in that state we have only visited in our dreams.

Don’t try to understand it. Feel your way through the thicket of thorns. See, even in the eyes of your tormentor, the frightened child walking within all of us, barking orders and sacrificing beauty on the altar of self-protection. Once we know that our essential self needs no protection because it is imperishable, we soften our grasp, open our hands and release our resentments. Those who were once our enemies are now seen in the light as victims of their own illusions, and with compassion we begin to move out of conflict and into cooperation. Life hurts, and there are enough tears to go around. Let us breathe into the knowing that we are free to choose our thoughts and free to bring to bear on anything we encounter the wisdom dwelling within all of us. We already know how to feel joy and gratitude for the beginnings of things. Let us expand our awareness to embrace with joy and gratitude the ends of things as well.

The Wisdom of Water

Water permeates and shapes everything it touches. It carves mountains into sand and swells seeds to fruition. It grows forests and destroys cities. It fills our bodies, builds our blood and bathes our cells. Nothing is as simultaneously ordinary and miraculous as water. But like a draught of forgetfulness, its ever-presence lulls us into complacency. It is so like us to forget to pay attention. When we reawaken our imagination, however, water offers up its lessons freely. Let us soak in the wisdom of water.

Follow the natural line. Unlike us, water doesn’t conjure up cravings in a vacuum and then impose them on the world. Instead, it humbly feels for open channels and falls effortlessly through them. Like water, find the openings and be led by something other than fear and craving.

Don’t struggle. Water doesn’t strain or strive. The power of water comes not from willful assertion but from the unintentional force of its presence. Your true power comes not from the ego and its schemes but from your ability to manifest the one presence and power that runs through everything.

Go around obstacles. When a stream comes upon a boulder blocking its path it doesn’t freeze, panic and spiral into resentment and victim-consciousness. It just goes around. Like water, avoid struggle by simply going around problems.

Be soft in your strength. When it is time to exert force, be fluid. You harbor a great store of life-force which is capable of manifesting itself mentally, physically and spiritually. When it’s time to assert yourself, blunt the edge of your attack and be willing to bend and absorb the myriad influences of the energies around you. You accomplish far more in cooperation than you do in dominance.

If you want clarity, be still. Wind and waves stir up silt and make water murky. Only when the wind and waves subside does the silt settle back to the bottom. Then the surface becomes a mirror and the depths become visible. So too we can deepen our insight only when we grow silent and still. Moving out of the narrow channels and endless agitation of the thought-stream and into the boundless stillness enables us to quietly perceive signals drowned out by the day to day noise of our lives. Things that were hidden in plain sight are revealed.

Circulate, don’t stagnate. Stillness is important, but don’t hide. Cut off from the flow, stagnant pools fester and rot, drowning in their own imbalance. Healthy, clear water stays engaged in the flow of life and scrubs itself clean by breaking open to oxygenation and transformation. Like a healthy river, find ways to balance periods of languid stillness with vigorous activity, letting each of the phases of your life inform and nourish the others.

Persistence is stronger than insistence. A frenzied flurry of activity is never as effective as long-term persistence. Slow and steady wins the race. Over time, a tiny, trickling stream erodes a deep canyon. Take a high pressure fire hose to a granite monolith for an hour or two and see how far you get.

Allowance is stronger than resistance. When you stab your fist into water it doesn’t fight back or resist, and when you pull your fist out, the water closes over as if you were never there. By allowing your fist to pass through, water exerts much less effort and experiences far less harm than if it had mounted a complicated counter-offensive. In our own lives, resistance to things only makes them stronger. By defining events as “problems” and people as “enemies” we manufacture conflict where there was only confluence. When Jesus says “resist not evil” he is trying to teach a very elusive notion: what you resist persists. Instead of resisting and fighting back, let powerful storms pass until they expend their wild energy and settle back into the peaceful flow of life all on their own.

Be needed. Nothing surpasses water for its usefulness, therefore it is valued everywhere. In your creativity, in your work, in your generous service, give people what they genuinely need. This way you will always get paid, you will always get fed and you will always have friends. Become an inextricable part of people’s lives by carefully perceiving their authentic needs and fulfilling them.

Be humble. Water always seeks out the lowest places and quietly goes about its business. Water is often underground and hidden from sight. Ninety nine percent of the water in the ocean lies beneath the surface. You can accomplish far more behind the scenes than you can in the spotlight. Let others grab the glory. Be a part of the support system that makes it possible for others to blossom and shine.

Don’t give problems anything to hold onto. You can’t grab water with your fingers or catch it on a hook. By living in a state of deep acceptance of whatever is happening in this moment, you achieve the slipperiness of water. Events arise and fall. Difficult people assert their ludicrous demands and fade away like flares. By remaining fully present in this now moment you rob both the past and the future of their power to distort immediate experience by imposing both unrealistic expectations and egoic cravings on the perfection of this.

Resonate. The waves crashing on the shore aren’t the only waves in the sea. Sound waves also travel great distances through water. The low frequency songs of humpback whales travel thousands of miles around the curvature of the earth through the oceans, guiding other humpbacks on their migration routes. Like water, stay open to the energy frequencies that reverberate around us. Let yourself be inspired. Let your consciousness be a conduit of that which is best in all of us. Identify the values you hold dear – kindness, generosity, willingness, courage, compassion – and amplify those values in your own actions. “Universe” means “one song”. Let the song of the universe resonate in you, through you, as you.

All is one. A raindrop only seems to be separate from the other raindrops. As it falls from a cloud high above the sea the force of the wind around it keeps it separate from the other drops. When it hits the surface of the ocean it does not cease to exist; only its temporary boundaries dissolve as it loses its illusory individuality, returning to the source from which it and all other raindrops come. So too we and all things arise from the divine ground and stand apart for a while as seemingly separate entities. As beautiful as this dance may be, it must one day come to an end. But Consciousness doesn’t end. It simply expresses itself anew as evolving, evermore mellifluous beings of sound and light. Let your brief time here be worthy of the source. Let your life be a breathtaking expression of the grandeur of the cosmos. From time to time, move into the stillness and brush up against the wordless understanding of oneness, an understanding that can never be reduced to a concept, just as water can never be defined by the vessel containing it. These miraculous bodies we inhabit are comprised of nearly eighty percent water. Isn’t it natural then to allow yourself to be an expression of the wisdom of water?

The Wisdom of Trees

Summer time is a good time to go outside. There’s nothing like a walk in the woods to clear away the debris of worry and woe. Sometimes the best teachers are the ones who say the least, and in the silence of their presence we feel innate wisdom welling up through the cracks of our own lives. The best teachers might be trees.

Feeling stuck? Feeling sad? Feeling nothing at all? Find a winding path through a canopy of trees, leave your worried mind behind and let the voices of the wind lead you deep into this present moment. As your awareness begins to shift, you will notice, gradually at first and then suddenly, that trees are silent teachers and the lessons they offer would change our lives if we had the patience and courage to learn them.

Here is what trees know.

Grow where you’re planted. We do not choose our parents, our families, our birthplace, our century, our genes or any of the other accidents that inexorably shape our lives. Like trees, we must learn to accept the things we cannot change and thrive where we are. As a tree grows from a tiny seed and rises up through the challenges of its environment, adapting adversities into advantages, wisdom begins with acceptance and self-knowledge and ends with ascension and transcendence.

The invisible is the source of visible. Unseen beneath the surface, roots grow deep giving trees the stability to stand tall and reach for the light. Trees instinctively know this, and put far more energy into root growth than branch and trunk growth in the early stages of their lives. Only when the roots are firmly established do the upper branches and leaves unfurl. We too should attend first to our inner growth before we get top-heavy with adornments and accessories.

Young and old have different needs and different gifts. A tiny sapling is weak and tender and needs protection from hungry mouths and trampling feet. The same tree, many years later, is able to provide protection, shelter and sustenance for others. Our roles change as well as we age and grow. But no matter what our stage of development, strength comes out of our own nature, not our busy efforts. Stand in the truth of who you are at this moment in time. Accept help when you need it, but don’t stay helpless and dependent forever. Allow yourself to grow so big that others take refuge in you.

Strength comes from struggle. Twenty years ago when scientists built Biosphere 2, a vast, enclosed ecosystem in the mountains of Arizona, they planted, among other things, trees. The trees inside the sealed enclosure grew more rapidly than their wild cousins outside. But they were thin and weak with underdeveloped root systems. Some even fell over from their own weight. At first scientists were mystified. Why would trees not thrive in this “perfect” environment? Then they realized that the trees were weakened by the absence of the one thing not included in Biosphere 2: wind. In the wild, trees must withstand strong wind and as a result develop what botanists call stress wood – strong, fibrous wood that vastly improves the quality of life for a tree. In our own lives, it is hardship and struggle that spurs our growth and strengthens our core. As we work hard to overcome the difficult people and challenging situations that threaten our serenity and steal our comfort, a toughness develops within us that informs everything we do. In light of this truth, gratitude, not resentment, is the wisest response to the forces that oppose us.

Nature is more cooperative than competitive. Survival of the fittest is true up to a point. Life begins with self interest. Inevitably, however, organisms, both within and between species, realize that their own survival is deeply intertwined with the survival of others. We’re much stronger together than we are apart. The well being of others becomes our own well being. The lie of individuality is laid bare by the truth of interconnectedness. Just as the cells of your own body work together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts, we too are cells in a wider ecosystem utterly void of boundaries. Life is one vast phenomenon – conscious, aware, perceptive, intelligent, creative, adaptive – systems nested within systems without beginning or end. As individuals, if you can even call us that, we are simply one momentary expression of the vast field of consciousness that expresses itself as stars and dandelions and blue whales. To not know this is to remain deeply ignorant of your essential nature.

Nothing is wasted, everything has value. In nature, there is no such thing as trash. Last year’s leaves become next year’s soil. Every individual form arises out of material left behind by previous organisms. There is no new matter. At the molecular level, matter simply reforms and recombines into new aggregates and arrangements. Nothing is ever lost. In the forest, there is a thin, diaphanous veil between birth and dying. Consciousness moves through the veil like the in and out breath of a sleeping god. In our own brief lives we too are formed from the materials of those who went before us, just as the things we cast off are re-embodied. Nothing is ever thrown away. There is no such place as “away”.

Be only who you are. Cedars don’t come from apple seeds. Have the courage and humility to surrender to your own nature. Don’t waste time trying to be something you are not. Without pretense or guile trees effortlessly express their own nature. They make it look easy. But it is not. For us, a thousand threads of desire, envy and illusion tug at our hearts and pull us away from the simplicity of our essential core. It takes discipline and humility to learn how to distinguish between the authentic energy of our own nature expanding and the inauthentic egoic cravings and desires rooted in fear, anxiety and ill-founded feelings of inadequacy. Do you want to become a singer because singing is your authentic calling or do you want to become a singer to salve a wound caused by feelings of inadequacy? If the latter is true, no amount of fame and glory will ever heal that wound. If the former is true, the music itself will fill you with satisfaction. In other words, is singing rooted in your authentic nature, and end in itself, or is singing a means to an end, namely self-aggrandizement? Before you embark on any strenuous journey, be it a career in the arts, a marriage or any other attempt to craft a life of joy and meaning, deep soul-searching is needed to sort this out. Spend some time under a big, shady tree. Life isn’t long enough for a thousand wrong turns.

Don’t be afraid to grow. Trees never apologize for growing new leaves and branches. They don’t intentionally stay small in a misguided effort to appear humble. You don’t do anyone any favors by shrinking, holding back or hiding your gifts. Let what is trying to emerge through you emerge. Become a channel through which the creative energy of the universe can sing one more song. But go slow. A tree never hurries, and every movement is in keeping with its current strengths and abilities. There is no need to struggle and strain. Natural effortlessness is far more effective than hurried grasping.

Chances are there are woods not far from your home. The forest is lush, green and full of secrets. Take a day and walk alone through shafts of light and fragrant breezes. There is so much to learn from the wisdom of trees.

California College Commencement Address

The following commencement address was given at Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, San Diego, California on June 9, 2011

Good afternoon graduates.

I am very aware that as a commencement speaker I am the one thing standing between you and a well-deserved evening of fun and celebration.

But as a teacher I also realize that, even though you have been sitting still and listening to teachers your whole life, this might be the last time you sit still and listen to a teacher, and I feel a certain obligation to not let this moment pass by without one last attempt to say something important, or try to.

I am a philosophy teacher.

I have spent my life trying to understand what wisdom is.

Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Wisdom is not something you know – wisdom is something you do.

You don’t attain wisdom by simply agreeing with all of the right theories.

Wisdom is not something you get only after you’ve read all the right books.

Wisdom does not even mean having an answer for everything.

Instead, wisdom is a way of being in the world.

Wisdom is the accumulated depth within you, born of ten thousand choices and actions made in the course of a thoughtful, deliberate life – and if your life is anything like mine, a life full of missteps and mistakes and damage sometimes so profound it can’t be fixed – we can only walk away from the wreckage saying, “well, I won’t do that again.”

And wisdom is not just an intellectual event; it is the child of many mothers, the most important of which is action.

If you are tired of the way fear interferes with your life, if you’re tired of the way fear holds you back from achieving the goals your soul is asking for, if you’re tired of the way fear robs you like a thief of your happiness, and you want to become more courageous, how do you do that? What does wisdom suggest?

Wisdom suggests that if you want to be more courageous you simply have to act more courageously. You have to ask yourself, the next time you feel afraid, “what would a courageous person do right now” and then do that.

If you want to be more compassionate, act more compassionately. Ask yourself, “what would a compassionate person do right now” and then do that.

If you want more self-discipline in your life, and you’re tired of the way laziness and procrastination and runaway cravings get the best of you, simply ask yourself, “what would a disciplined person do right now” and then do that.

Wise people know that we become what we do. Personal transformation is not mysterious. Our lives are the sum of our choices and actions. We are responsible for the consciousness that we bring into every situation. What at first sounds like an accusation or a condemnation is actually heard, with the ears of wisdom, as a call to freedom – that no matter what is going on around us, we are free. With every breath we are free to choose our responses to the events around us. And with freedom comes responsibility. We are responsible for our responses.

Our thoughts shape our words, our words give rise to our actions, our actions repeated become habit and our habit constructs character. Our lives are the sum total of our thoughts, words, choices and actions.

We become what we do. And this is how wisdom begins to emerge.

Choose your thoughts and your words and your actions wisely, in the fully awakened awareness that when you choose your thoughts, your words, your actions, you are in fact choosing yourself, inventing yourself, creating yourself out of the raw materials your ancestors gave you.

Every one of us is free today – free to begin living the life we so richly deserve. Commencement means beginning – and today each of us begins again, unhindered by the past. Every day of our lives is a commencement. Yes, our past choices and actions got us here, but in this next moment, we are utterly and completely free. Wayne Dyer puts it this way, “The wake does not drive the boat.”

The past has no power in this present moment. Only our thoughts about the past have power. And we can choose new thoughts.

And as I look out at all these graduates today, I am looking at a group of people who knows that everything I just said is true. You don’t need guys like me to tell you this stuff. Wisdom is not something anyone can give you. It is discovered within; it wells up through the cracks of our everyday lives. You have let go of the past. You have chosen and acted wisely. You have decided to feel the fear and do it anyway. You have decided that you are worth it. And you have freely chosen to open yourself up to the possibility that life holds for us even bigger dreams than we dared to dream for ourselves.

Now, teachers have been asking you to do stuff for decades. And I ask you today to do one more thing for me. I ask that you stay humble.

You have every right to be proud of your accomplishments. Feel proud. What you have done is no small thing. All of us here know that. But never forget that the professional skills you have mastered do not make you better than anyone else. Each of us is a being of infinite value, even the least among us, and you and I are no better than anyone else, no matter what our accomplishments. Nor are we beneath anyone else. Never believe for a moment that anyone is better than you. Everyone you will ever meet is a being of infinite value, and we walk alongside our sisters and brothers, not before them, not behind them, and every single one of us brings a unique and vitally important set of gifts to the world.

If anything, your hard-earned professional skills enable you to be of greater service to your fellow human beings. And that is why we come to college, and work so hard. Not just to make more money or to prove that burned out high school counselor who told us we’d never amount to anything wrong, or for some other egotistical reason.

We don’t go to college to heal old wounds of inadequacy or to feel superior to others.

The real reason our soul wanted to go to college was because our soul knows us better than we do – our soul knows that what we really want is to be a part of the healing of the world. And we come to college to gain the knowledge and the skills and the wisdom to more ably be of service to a world that so desperately needs us, that so desperately needs us to show up strong, brave, masterful, aware, willing, compassionate and committed to something bigger than ourselves.

And wisdom also knows that the old dichotomy between self-interest and altruism is a lie. We do not have to choose between serving ourselves and serving others. In the depths of our wisdom we already know that giving and receiving are two names for one circle, and that the best way to increase our own happiness is to cultivate the happiness of those around us.

We receive only what we give.

We thrive only when those around us thrive.

So as you go forth on this beautiful summer day and begin your life as professionals, please remember that all work is service. Cleaning bathrooms, balancing account ledgers, changing diapers, managing teams of people, writing computer code, mastering the minutia of lab protocols, caring for the grievously ill and dying, helping our new neighbor carry a couch upstairs – all of it is service. With each act of work you are bringing order out of chaos. You are binding the wounds of the world together with your love and your skill and your kindness and your presence. Walk into every situation with the awareness that there is no other place, no other time – there is only here and now, and this moment is where we have our best shot, our only shot at bringing the ideal of heaven down into this now moment, into these real lives we share with each other.

This is it. No more rehearsal. No more what ifs. No more some days.

It all matters. It’s all important – every meeting, every email, every moment. Now you can step proudly into the life you have worked so long and hard to create, knowing that with every thought and word and deed you are shaping yourself and shaping the world around you.

Finally, I believe the fruit of wisdom is happiness. That’s what we’re all in it for. And happiness is never a private affair. Our happiness is forever bound up in the happiness of those around us. So make your work a sacred offering. Look the people you meet in the eye, and really see them. Let them know, not by your clever words or practiced gestures but by your open heart that you really care. Slow down. Be the presence of healing in this world, no matter what your chosen profession is.

And once in a while – promise me this – once in a while, stop. Just stop. And feel the joy of the work sink in.

Graduates, and all the people gathered here who love them, remember this moment. Remember this perfect June evening when you took the time out of your busy lives to join together in a ritual honoring all that is best in us. Take this honor and this dignity with you and into all of the struggles and dark nights of the soul that lie ahead, and know that the world needs you only to be exactly who you are, nothing less and nothing more.

Thank you for this opportunity to be a part of your celebration this afternoon. I’m proud of you, and I’m inspired by you, and I’m deeply honored to witness this beautiful wave of humanity rolling out into the world. It’s staggering really to contemplate how many lives will be changed for the better by meeting you, by the love and the mastery and the service that you will bring to everything you do, everyday, for the rest of your lives. It’s overwhelming, and I know you feel it too.

And I know I speak for all teachers when I say, that we have learned as much from you or more than you have learned from us. And for that we are forever grateful.

Thank you.

Letting Go

So the world didn’t end on May 21, 2011. This isn’t the first time. Ever since the Bible was written thousands of end-times predictions have come and gone. Despite the consistent and continual failure of all end-times prophecy people seem perennially willing to buy into the next one. Why is that?

The promise of impending disaster clearly feeds a deep psychological need. The zeal with which people foster and foment doomsday scenarios – catastrophic and irreversible environmental disaster, the collapse of the global currency market, the Biblical rapture, and all other forms of apocalyptic expectation – is evidence of the deep attraction disaster-scenarios hold for us. Something inside us wants to let go of the illusion of control – it’s not working anyway – and feel the freedom of surrender and non-attachment. Since we’re not very good at cultivating surrender and non-attachment consciously, the unconscious takes over. We unconsciously long for something or someone to come along and tear it all down.

We know that we live in a world of perpetual change. We know that all forms arise and all forms fade. We’re exhausted from trying to keep it all going. We want to let go but we don’t know how.

Learning to let go means willfully overriding tens of thousands of years of human evolution where fierce attachment and anxious worry ensured survival. Qualities that once served us now stand in the way of well-being.

Given the difficulties of retraining a mind shaped by the glacial forces of evolution, most of us don’t bother. We stay stuck in the consciousness of clinging, craving and conflict, drunk with the delusion that it is only through our own strenuous effort that anything good gets done. Some of us find our way to one or more of the world’s wisdom traditions which all invariably teach us to surrender and relax into the wonder of it all. The rest of us want to stay angry and resentful.

But the soul never for a moment stops asking for what it wants, what it needs. Our soul longs for the surrender of peace, but our mind refuses to give up the fight.

Things have a way of working themselves out. If truth is not realized in the conscious mind, it has a way of welling up from the unconscious mind. So powerful is our longing for surrender that out of the collective imagination fanciful scenarios emerge where everything is taken from us and everything is lost – the end of the world.

Most of us watched with bemusement as the recent doomsday prediction came and went. But what struck me was the powerful hold such prophecies have over their believers. Apparently reasonable people – writers, realtors, teachers, business owners – sold their businesses, said goodbye to their unbelieving family members and spent every penny of their savings in the days leading up to May 21, 2011. Many of them reported a deep peace welling up within them as all their worldly worries were lifted. “I’m not thinking about retirement funds anymore,” said one financial planner, “you know, 401Ks, annuities, commodities, stocks, the bond market or tax strategies. I’m living in the moment. I feel like a terrible weight has been lifted off of me.” We may find his belief system baffling, but this much is true: collective end-time mania has at least taught a few people the benefits of non-attachment.

Entering into the consciousness of surrender and acceptance frees you from the bonds of your own ego – there is no one there to do the controlling, no one to aggrandize by diminishing the other. Because you surrender to the reality of your own infinite value and the infinite value of the other, the idea of trying to control any of it seems ludicrous. All is as it should be, no matter what is happening. And frankly, it’s just exhausting trying to run everything, isn’t it?

The need to control is born from the consciousness of fear and the mistaken notion that we have to fight, claw and struggle our way through this world. An agitated, fearful and conflict-oriented mind experiences everything through the lens of its own violence. A gracious, surrendered mind finds its way through life’s challenges the way water flows through a boulder field – only effortlessness will prevail. Most of us are too busy trying to move boulders with our bare hands.

If unacknowledged, this soul-longing for tranquility and peace can deviate into dangerous pathology. Our unconscious longing to surrender control often manifests itself in unhealthy ways – drugs, alcohol, random sex, reckless driving, mindless consumerism, slavish devotion to gurus and other ideologues, and a myriad of other self-destructive, high risk behaviors. There’s nothing like diving off a bridge high above a river gorge with a bungee cord wrapped around your ankles to, for a moment anyway, free yourself from the tyranny of the busy-mind and drive you deep into the knowing that your joy lies in the surrender of letting go.

If we consciously acknowledged this, it wouldn’t manifest itself in such destructive and ludicrous ways. We would no longer need to concoct and cleave to elaborate impending disaster narratives that forcefully strip us of all control. If we made non-attachment our conscious practice, a new-found freedom and joy would arise. Gradually the destructive impulses would be replaced with an utterly ordinary sense of well-being.

In the pursuit of our careers, in the cultivation of our mastery as artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists and entrepreneurs, in our continuing drive to deepen our relationships with our husbands, wives, parents, children and friends, we must allow our innate longing for peace and surrender to manifest itself in healthy and meaningful ways. When we stop struggling and learn how to live in accord with the deep currents flowing forever around us we awaken the ancient dream – a dream retold in every wisdom tradition – to put first the kingdom of heaven, to accept as your birthright the peace that surpasses all understanding, to still the mind until, like a lake, all the silt has settled leaving nothing but clarity and depth. All of our endless grasping and clutching only stirs up mud clouding our vision and robbing us of our simplicity. The more we cling, the more we struggle, the more we suffer. The busy-mind works tirelessly to perpetuate the illusion of its own importance. When we awaken to the reality hidden just beneath the surface of the illusion, we move into wisdom. And wisdom means letting go.

Meaningful Work

In my role as a professor I have the opportunity to counsel many young people as they face the endless options before them. What should I major in? What kind of career should I work toward? Should I do what I love or make a living? I’m not there to tell them what to do or who to be. In my counseling work I don’t try to change people. I help them tell the truth to themselves about themselves. The healing comes from that.

When students agonize about their majors, their college choices, their careers – in other words, their futures – what they are really agonizing about is a far more fundamental question, the most important question of all: who am I or even more to the point what am I? No other question so effectively clears out the accumulated debris of years of fear and misunderstanding leaving us clarified and ready to act in accord with our essential nature.

Although he is terribly out of fashion and much maligned, the philosopher Karl Marx made a powerful point when he suggested that instead of homo sapien, our species would be more aptly named homo faber. Homo sapien means “man the thinker”. Homo faber means “man the maker”. For Marx, the single most defining characteristic of our species is not our ability to think but our ability to shape the world around us. Yes, birds make nests and bees make hives, but human beings reach into the ground extracting iron, oil and other elemental substances and then with our opposable thumbs and creative visions we turn the earth’s elements into space shuttles, heart valves and iPads. Like gods we pick up clay and breathe our essence into it. In the alchemy of transformation, work is our talisman.

It is in our nature to work, to create, to combine, to innovate, to synthesize and to build. The things we make, whether they are songs or skyscrapers, are externalizations of our essence. And as we shape the world after our own visions, the world in turn shapes us. It is hard to know where our consciousness ends and the world begins. When we invent the world we are inventing ourselves. And work is the sacramental act that binds it all together.

A former student recently wrote to me through Facebook and relayed a struggle he was having. His heart and his gut were telling him to major in religious studies but he knew that with only a BA he wouldn’t be able to teach or in any other way earn a living with that degree. Grad school in the foreseeable future was out of the question and without a Masters degree his fear was that he would have to settle for some menial job outside his genuine interests – something just to pay the bills. As he framed it, the dilemma was between making money and meaningful work. He asked me what to do.

When a philosophical dilemma arises the problem is often rooted in the way we frame the issue. In other words, to make any headway on this dilemma we must first step back and examine the words we are using. What are our underlying, unexamined assumptions? What does “meaningful work” really mean?

What we have are two conflicting truths. On one hand is the notion that each of us must realize our passion by finding work that is deeply and personally meaningful for us. By finding a career that aligns with our deepest purpose we realize joy. From this perspective, the greatest blunder is selling-out for the almighty dollar and letting our sacred purpose wither.

On the other hand is the equally compelling notion that any work, so long as it does not profit from the suffering of others, can be profoundly fulfilling if the attitude of the worker is deeply committed to the consciousness of service. In this truth the so-called dilemma between making money and meaningful work dissolves. Any work can be meaningful work because meaning is found in the consciousness of the worker, not in external conditions or circumstances. It is this second possibility that often gets short shrift from both career counselors and spiritual advisors. The idea that any work can be meaningful is just not as sexy as following your bliss.

But not everyone gets to be an astronaut or a rock star. Very few earn a living at poetry or painting. Mystics and monks may get manna from heaven, but money? Not so much. And last time I checked, mothers don’t earn a dime. Clearly there must be a way to shift our consciousness into realizing that the sacred nature of work is only incidentally related to income stream. If your dream job has not yet materialized and you find yourself having to take whatever kind of employment comes your way to put food on the table and a roof over your head, consider this. There is great honor and dignity in being a part of something bigger than you, even if that something is an assembly line, a muffler shop, an office suite or a corner café. Some of the most deeply fulfilled people I’ve ever met are humble people with simple jobs – taxi drivers, janitors, warehouse workers, shipping clerks, gardeners.

When you surrender yourself to the choreography of your work, you slip into the now moment where you encounter other human beings, beings of infinite value, and you have the momentous opportunity to bring your training, skill and compassion to bear on their suffering and unmet needs. Making sandwiches, filing paperwork and cleaning rooms may seem like humble work, but it is no less essential than rocket science – without either one the world would be immeasurably poorer. No matter the nature of your work, realize that you are playing an essential role in bringing order out of chaos. As you trim hedges and stock groceries and wipe tables and deliver packages you are participating in the healing of the world. You are mending hearts. You are creating beauty. You are bringing people out of darkness. You are feeding them body, mind and soul. With every kindness you are restoring the faith of the people you serve. Your work is the connective tissue of the body of humanity. To recast an old theater adage, there are no small jobs, only small workers.

Whether we are called teachers or not, all of us teach. The way we treat other people teaches them who they are and who we are. Every encounter, no matter how mundane, is a holy meeting.

So while it is true that we must follow our bliss it is also true that we must guard against the tendency of the ego to hijack our hearts and twist our minds into thinking that we are too good for menial labor. When the Zen student complained to the master that after three weeks at the monastery he had still not learned a single thing about Zen the master asked, “Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” said the student.

“Then wash your bowl.”

All work is service. And service is the work of heaven. Who would think themselves too good to perform the work of heaven?

It is right in the midst of these everyday chores that we realize wisdom. Sweep the path. Wash the sheets. Lift up those around you who have fallen. Let go your empty dreams of fame and glory. They were only the projections of your fears and self-aggrandizement. Instead, embrace your role as a part of the whole, not beneath anyone else or better than anyone else. This is our meaningful work.

Real American Folk Music

One by one they walked up to the microphone, each taking a turn. The stone amphitheater carried the sound deep into the canyon. High overhead a red tailed hawk soared across the sky in unraveling spirals. From our seats we could see deep into Mission Gorge where the San Diego River winds beneath a canopy of sycamores and oaks, through the heart of the ancient homeland of the Kumeyaay. For 10,000 years the original Americans lived in these canyons in the stillness of the pre-industrial world.

This was a very different kind of open mic. There wasn’t a guitar case or a folk singer to be seen. Guitars are after all the instrument of the conquest, brought here by the Spanish. Instead, this was an open mic celebrating the original American folk music – Native American flute.

For thousands of years Native Americans have played a simple five or six-holed flute. Designed and crafted to play a pentatonic scale (the black keys on a piano), they are relatively easy to play. Their simplicity is deceptive. No other instrument has the power to evoke so much with so little. In the right hands, these humble wooden flutes call forth, like all great art, the full measure of the grandeur of the land, the sky, the sweep of time and the boundless consciousness that connects all things in a sacred web of being.

I first met Benny Mullinax at the Potrero Library in the tiny hamlet of Potrero, California, fifty miles east of San Diego just north of the Mexican border. I was playing a concert – just me, my acoustic guitar, my folk songs and room full of the good people of Potrero whose warm hospitality made me feel like a long-lost friend. After the show I visited with the locals, swapped stories and sold more than a few CDs.

Life has a different feel in the backcountry. Things move a little slower. People take their time with each other. There’s really nowhere to hurry off to. The sun shines a little brighter, the night sky is a little deeper, and the sound of the wind through the trees is like a spirit voice that calls all of the names of everyone you’ve ever loved. It’s easy to see how people who come to visit sometimes never leave.

Benny was a Native American flute player. I told him I was a huge fan of the music, often playing my R. Carlos Nakai CDs all day long in my office. He invited me to come to their monthly meeting. I asked him where it was, thinking Potrero was a little too far to drive for a Native American flute circle.

“San Diego,” he said, “Mission Trails Regional Park, the amphitheater near the visitor center.”

“That’s a mile from my house,” I said.

“The second Sunday of every month, from 1:00-3:00, we meet there and play. Flute players from all over come and swap songs – some real pros and some folks just starting out. You should come.”

So I did. And I ended up buying two flutes from Benny.

Now I get the genuine pleasure of beginning.

Starting out on a new instrument is always exciting and illuminating. After years and years of playing guitar, I remember the first time I played dulcimer and dobro and banjo and mandolin, fumbling around in a terrain just familiar enough to make me feel hopeful, but alien enough to make me feel utterly lost. Persistence, patience and a playful willingness eventually opened the door enough for me to get at least one foot in. I eventually smoothed it out enough on all of those stringed instruments to even use them in recording sessions. But apart from harmonica, I had never played a wind instrument. My older brother John is an accomplished clarinetist. I grew up watching him make unexpectedly beautiful music by blowing hard across a paper-thin reed on the end of a tube with about a million holes in it, each hole covered with a felt-lined stopper attached to an intricately complex system of rods and levers. What he was doing seemed impossible to me. I reached for my guitar and never looked back.

So now, all these years later, I’m finally braving the world of wind instruments. But I’m starting small.

The Native American flute first came to prominence in 1983 with the release of R. Carlos Nakai’s first album Changes. Nakai was a classically trained trumpet player with an ear for jazz until a car accident injury made it impossible for him to do the tightly controlled and challenging lip work of trumpet playing. Of Navajo and Ute heritage, Nakai eventually completed his Masters degree in Native American Studies at the University of Arizona, while simultaneously pursuing mastery of the Native American flute. With seven Grammy nominations and over 40 albums under his belt, Nakai has almost single-handedly brought Native American flute into the mainstream. Before Nakai, the Native American flute was largely unknown by the general public, loved only by a few New Age spiritualists and Native Americans far off the beaten path.

It’s wrong to say that Nakai’s car accident was a good thing, but without it, the world of music would be a very different place.

Now my wife Lori and I both have our own Native American flutes. We don’t play them together because they’re in two different keys – hers is in A and mine is in G – but it’s a beautiful thing to hear a plaintive melody ringing out from across the house, a melody thousands of years old, a melody older than this or any other empire. Some musicologists say that the Native American flute is the third oldest instrument on earth after the drum and the rattle – perhaps 60,000 years old. The simplicity and clarity of its tone, the timeless quality of its primal melodies, the way its song rises and falls like wind – the Native American flute is perhaps the mother of all music. It is humanity’s first attempt to make a singing tool, a tool that gives men and women the voices of birds. Its simple call connects us to the deepest elements of our collective consciousness and burnishes the sacred shine of all things ordinary and sublime. It speaks of a time before the conquest, before the Europeans arrived with their breast plates and swords, their Bibles and crosses, their guns and guitars. In other words, Native American flute is real American folk music.

The second Sunday of this month and every month, from 1:00-3:00, they’ll gather again under the open sky in the amphitheater by the visitor center in Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego. One by one they’ll descend the stone stairs to the stage with their hand carved flutes, their pre-historic melodies drifting out over the ancient homeland of the Kumeyaay like circling hawks. And a few of us will be there just to listen.

Are All Religions the Same?

Mystics of all traditions have long held that the doors of the world’s numerous religions open into one room. “The Truth is one,” says the ancient Rig Veda, “though the sages call it by many names.” For Joseph Campbell, the endless masks of God hide the one face. And today, a thriving interfaith movement seeks new ways to embolden this ancient dream of unity. What if we are moving into a post-religious age, where our theologies and doctrines dissolve into one? When asked about his religion the Dalai Lama famously replied, “I don’t have a ‘religion’. My religion is kindness.” What if it’s just that simple?

But it’s not that simple. It’s one thing to imagine and intend a bright ecumenical future where all religious disputes are laid to rest. Creating such a world, on the other hand, is a tall order. Mystics, with their dreams of oneness and universal love are invariably heretics within their own traditions. There is considerable push-back from the mainstream which sees mysticism as a threat to its autonomy – a threat it is often willing to meet with force. Jesus wasn’t the only one killed for claiming God-consciousness.

Sometimes in our zeal to find the underlying unity beneath all faiths we overlook important differences – differences that deeply impact the lives of billions of people and shape civilizations. Religion does as much to divide us as it does to unify us. Without first confronting the fundamental differences between the world’s religions we cannot move past them. Denial and ignorance never solved anything.

Let’s look at three central questions and explore how the world’s religions have traditionally answered them. But before we do, a word of caution is in order: sweeping generalizations are dangerously misleading because they obscure the natural diversity of thought found within every religion. Saying “all Catholics belief this” or “all Muslims believe that” distorts the truth by rubbing smooth the complex and multifaceted array of positions found within any faith community. Nevertheless, generalizations, if used lightly and provisionally, help us begin the process of deepening and clarifying our thinking about the world’s religions.

Who or what is God?

Joseph Campbell made a useful distinction. In the religions that originated east of Iran, ultimate reality is generally understood as an immanent, impersonal energy within everything whereas west of Iran, ultimate reality is understood as a transcendent being, a personified entity above and outside the created world. This fundamental distinction would have far-reaching effects.

In Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism this immanent source is known as Brahman, Buddha-consciousness and Dao, a reality beyond all concepts and definitions – the mystery behind the masks. All existence, including the gods, flows from this ultimately nameless source. In Hinduism this is particularly apparent. The many gods of the Indian pantheon are part of the created world, not its ultimate cause.

West of Iran a very different understanding of God or ultimate reality emerged out of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here, God attained personhood and stands above and outside the created world. We are not manifestations of God-consciousness; He is the creator and we are merely creatures. This fundamental dualism shapes all of the other elements of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic worldview.

In the fundamentally non-dualistic eastern worldview the spiritual path is comprised of realizing one’s unity with this divine source, a realization covered over by ignorance. God-discovery is, in a very real sense, self-discovery. The purpose of religion and spirituality in the east is to awaken us to who and what we really are.

In the western traditions the spiritual path is one of obedience to a set of divinely revealed doctrines, beliefs and practices designed to bridge the chasm between us and a distant God, a God who cares, but a God who we have exiled through disobedience.

Another important difference between east and west involves the issue of inclusion and exclusion. If all is one as the eastern view claims, then we can realize Oneness through any number of means just as a summit can be reached from many different directions. No paths are excluded. If, however, there is only one tribe or creed the transcendent God favors, then joining the right religion becomes a matter of eternal life or death.

Understanding God as the divine Ground of Being within us and all things leads to one particular vision of human nature and human purpose. Understanding God as a personified deity outside the created world and ourselves as profane, disconnected products of that God leads to another.

What is a human being and what is our purpose?

In the western view, a human being is a mixed bag – made in God’s image yet terribly limited at the same time. Higher than the animals, lower than the angels, we are here to live as best we can in accord with God’s love and fulfill our divine appointment with as much dignity as we can muster given the mixed qualities of our nature. Jewish law, Islamic law and the guidelines of Christianity set the boundaries of authorized behavior. Obedience is rewarded and defiance punished. All three western faiths share the notion that we are called to be co-creators with God, working diligently for the good including practicing wise stewardship of the earth and its resources. Sacred service – giving our time, talent and energy for the good of others – is our highest purpose. When we participate in the healing of the world we are the hands of God.

Traditional, mainstream Christianity holds that because of our sinful nature we are adrift in self-imposed exile from God. All of the descendents of Adam and Eve carry within them an internal, irreparable flaw. We can’t think our way out of it, will our way out of it or wish it away. The only thing that can restore our severed connection to God is God’s grace. For Catholics this grace is accessed through membership in the Church and willing participation in its sacraments. For Protestants this grace is accessed through faith, belief and adherence to the word of God as recorded in the Bible. In Christian thought, thinking that you can “save yourself” is a grievous sin: pride. Without a relationship with the Christian God and adherence to Christianity’s codes, all is lost.

On the other hand, there is no doctrine of original sin in Judaism or Islam (or in Mormonism for that matter). In these faiths sin is understood as an event, not a condition; a lapse in judgment resulting in a violation of God’s law, not a genetic inevitability. This view of sin was also found in the early Christian church and advocated by some bishops like Pelagius, a British contemporary of Augustine who today is known mostly as the namesake of the Pelagian heresy. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin won the day and became Christian dogma. Pelagius and his followers were condemned and drummed out of the Church.

In the eastern view the nature and purpose of humanity is understood quite differently. If all is one, then every aspect of creation is an expression of the Divine, especially human beings with their capacity for reflection and self-awareness. The fact that most human beings are utterly unconscious or asleep to this fact in no way diminishes its veracity. Closing one’s eyes does not make the sky go away.

The tension in eastern religion is between ignorance and wisdom, not sin and salvation. We do not need to be “saved”, we need to be awakened. Buddha devoted his life to teaching a very effective awakening process, and countless gurus in the Hindu tradition did the same. In the great classic of Indian spirituality the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna a variety of methods for seeing past the illusory separateness of surface perception to the underlying unity of divine reality. We can attain this unitive wisdom through selfless action, through devotion and love, through study and through meditation, depending on one’s individual proclivities and preferences. The point is to awaken to who and what we really are and live authentically from our inner being, leaving behind the ignorance of our former lives, bound as they were by karma and the repetitive cycles of conditioned thinking. Shifting our identity from the surface ego in perpetual conflict with everyone and everything to the divine inner Self frees us from ignorance and opens us up to a life of compassion and joy.

What happens when we die?

Just as distinctly different philosophies of life emerge from the world’s religions, so too distinctly different philosophies of death chip away at our lazy assumption that all religions are the same.

While the Hebrew Bible is nearly silent on the issue of life after death, later Judaism arguably absorbed the powerful influences of Christianity and Islam on this issue so that today, all three western faiths share a similar understanding of the life and death process. God created our souls at a certain point in time (we have not always existed as the Hindus claim), then He put us into a human body where we live one life. At death our souls are judged and a determination is made regarding our eternal residency – cut off from God forever in hell, or basking forever in the beatific vision of God in heaven.

The eastern traditions are considerably more complex. In the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna learns from his teacher that death is not real. “There never was a time when you did not exist,” said Krishna, “nor will there ever be a time when you cease to exist.” The divine Self exists beyond time and space, beyond the duality of life and death, taking on many bodies in a lengthy succession of reincarnations. In the field of time everything flowers and fades, but beyond the temporal veil lay a vast changelessness. And that is where our true Self resides, whether we know it or not. Just as we cast off worn out clothes and put on new ones, so too we cast off these bodies and take on new bodies. The wise, said Krishna, see beyond the suffering of the physical realm to the implacable peace beneath all of these tumultuous processes. “All forms arise and all forms fade,” said the Buddha, and shifting our identity from the ephemeral flux characterized by craving and suffering to the underlying wisdom of Buddha-consciousness is the work all of sentient beings.

The urgency of the west, with its one life scenario and imminent divine judgment is entirely absent in the east. You have a long time to work out your wisdom. And no one needs to save anyone else.

These and many other differences between the world’s religions point out the difficulty in upholding a simplistic “all religions are the same” perspective. But what if beneath the cacophony of these very real and problematic conflicts a deeper stillness awaits? What if beneath these doctrinal variations a trans-rational, experiential reality stands ready to burn away all of our oh-so-interesting intellectual distinctions? Perhaps the Dalai Lama was right. Maybe it is simple.

Mystics of all traditions agree. Like white light through a prism, Truth splits into many colors when run through the prism of human understanding. A fundamental characteristic of wisdom then is the ability to see that behind all the conflicting truth claims lays a deep and unspeakable unity.

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This article was previously published in the March/April edition of Unity Magazine under the title "Religion: A to Zen", and is reproduced here by permission.

Things You Don't Have to Do

I know you’re busy. Everybody’s busy. We are being crushed by our to-do lists. Maybe I can help. Here’s a whole list of things you don’t have to do.

You don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to right every wrong, heal every wound and bridge every gap between what is and what should be. You don’t have to fix all of the broken things.

You don’t have to understand everything. You don’t have to figure everything out. You don’t have to force the uncarved whole into tiny conceptual boxes.

You also don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to reduce the mystery of whom and what you are to a category, a type, a box checked on a government form. You don’t have to force your boundless nature into a mold someone else made.

You are not defined by your race, your gender, your ethnicity, your national origin, your political affiliation, your sexual orientation, your ideology, your body, your strengths, your weaknesses or your endless lists of opinions, preferences and aversions. What you really are lies beyond all of those layers of window dressing.

You don’t have to worry about the future. You don’t have to waste one more iota of energy carefully imagining every possible negative outcome and then struggle to avoid those imagined outcomes with tools forged from your own cleverness. You don’t have to bear the burden of every conceivable what-if and yeah-but. You can put them down. As the old Zen saying goes, “How refreshing, the whinny of a pack horse unburdened of everything.”

You don’t have to be someone you’re not. You don’t have to compare yourself to everyone you meet, measuring their best qualities against your worst. You don’t have to violate your own nature in a vain attempt to emulate someone else’s.

You don’t have to match anyone else’s timeline. You don’t have to march alongside anyone or anything else. You don’t have to force the natural flow of events and seasons into the rows and columns of anyone’s timetable spreadsheet, including your own.

You don’t have to believe your harshest self-assessment. You don’t have to believe your own definitions of failure. You might be wrong.

You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to assume that the universe is a dangerous, hostile place. You don’t have to believe the worst about other people.

You don’t have to buy the next newest thing. You don’t have to want what corporations, marketing departments and salesmen tell you to want.

You don’t have to obey every craving. You don’t have to believe that happiness only comes later, after every need’s been met.

You don’t have to keep running away. You don’t have to keep avoiding the simple truths that are trying to catch up to you. Slow down. They will find you.

You don’t have to be deaf to that still, soft, inner voice. You don’t have to stay so busy, so distracted, so overwhelmed that you remain forever knocked off balance. You don’t have to allow the noise of your busyness to drown out the quiet truths arising in the stillness at your center.

You don’t have to manage everything. You don’t have to scrutinize, assess and manipulate every piece of the puzzle. You don’t have to write the master plan.

You don’t have to keep eating when you’re full. You don’t have to believe the lie that it’s never enough.

You don’t have to get drunk or high. You don’t have to repeat forever habits you picked up when you were young and scared. You don’t have to obey your fear.

You don’t have to shut down when you feel your feelings arise. You don’t have to push away what you cannot control. You don’t have to make your heart an empty, hostile place full of shadows, open wounds, self-doubt and endless hunger.

You don’t have to be lonely. You don’t have to hide. You don’t have to feel unsafe outside the four walls of your cage.

You don’t have to be unhappy.

You don’t have to struggle against change and strain to hold on to things that are trying to fade away.

You don’t have to have an opinion about everything. You don’t have to mistake your own fleeting judgments for truths.

You don’t have to have a perfect family, whatever that is. You don’t have to feel deep, warm and vibrant connections with all of your relatives, or feel guilty and ashamed if you don’t. You don’t have to force your family to conform to a fictional, idealized fantasy.

You don’t have to eliminate all anger and pain from your life. You don’t have to iron out every crease, soak out every stain or chase away every confusion. In the waves of life, you don’t have to define every peak as a success and every trough as a failure.

You don’t have to agree with anyone else’s ideology. You don’t have to accept anyone else’s definition of God, no matter how earnest their pronouncements, no matter how ancient and hallowed their tradition. You don’t have to abandon your own deeply held inner convictions because they conflict with a mass movement or popular theology.

You don’t have to belong to any groups because they’re said to be important. You don’t have to blindly ascribe to any nationalisms, especially if they draw their strength from a sense of exceptionalism or superiority. Empires come and go. Humanity knows nothing of empires. Plant your flag in something that lasts.

Life is short. Don’t waste these precious hours, days, weeks, months and years on things that don’t matter. Do the work that has been given to you to do. Find a way to let go of your fears and live the life your soul is asking for. Let what is trying to emerge through you emerge. Become a part of something larger than yourself. Your bliss depends on it. Shed your limited and limiting definition of yourself. Pledge that you will no longer cling to ways of living that do not serve your highest good. Promise yourself that you will stop waiting for the right time. Now is the right time. There is so much we have yet to do. Each of us has our small part to play. Drop everything that doesn’t matter. Don’t waste another second doing things you don’t have to do.

Love

“Let yourself be drawn by the pull of what you really love.” – Rumi

Let’s talk about love. In this season of Valentine’s Day, when flower growers and chocolate makers have their best month of the year, hearts and minds turn to the mystery of love. On one hand love is just a four letter word, and on the other hand love is a Pandora’s Box of pleasure and pain packed tighter than a clown car. Love is a cluster of conflicting experiences; a cacophony, a harmony, an indeterminate blur. Love doesn’t hold still long enough for anyone to get a good look at it. Love is a crime scene where every witness gives a different description, everyone is a victim and the police are on strike.

In English, all of this chaos gets saddled with one word – love. In our longing to understand all of the disparate experiences gathered under the banner of love, let’s leave English behind and turn instead to ancient Greek. The Greeks had three words for love: eros, philia and agape.

Eros is sexual or biological attraction. It is love not born of the soul or the mind or the heart. It is what Joseph Campbell calls “the zeal of the organs for each other.” In eros there is no choice – it chooses you. It wells up out of the bio-chemical ooze and takes you over – body, mind and soul. And here’s the tricky part. It’s not personal – in fact, it doesn’t really matter who the other person is. In many ways, eros doesn’t want to know. The less talk the better.

Eros is the love of possession. Eros wants to own what it sees. James Joyce calls it pornographic love, all craving and no connection. The object of your love is just that, an object. It is about power and control. It is, in the end, a fundamentally solitary experience void of any real bond. The other person is just an actor in your private drama. If she sprains an ankle and her understudy steps in – no problem.

Philia is love of a higher or nobler order. Philia is the kind of love we have for our families, our friends, our country or our tribe. It is the feeling of belonging to something, that feeling of kindness and acceptance and warmth. It is the love that soldiers have for each other in battle. It is the love that team members have for each other in victory as well as defeat. It is priceless to know that somewhere in this crazy world there is a place where you are welcomed, where you are understood, with no need to defend or explain yourself. I remember the first time I was in the Netherlands, where my parents emigrated from eight years before I was born. Walking down the street in Amsterdam, surrounded by a crowd of Amsterdamers on their way to work, all of those tall, blond people, I suddenly felt a deep and unexpected sense of belonging. Even though I was in a strange land and couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, I felt it in my bones. I was home.

Agape is a third type of love. Unlike eros with its impersonal, physical craving and philia with its heart-felt camaraderie, agape is a decision. It is the decision to work for the good of the other without any expectation of anything in return. Rooted in free will, agape is choosing to treat others with kindness, compassion and love regardless of how you feel. It’s easy to love when you feel like loving. But can you be kind when you are hurt, angry or afraid?

It should be clear by now that our experience of love bears many strains. In romantic or marital love there is, ideally anyway, a synthesis of eros, philia and agape. We retain the sexual energy of eros without its impersonal possessiveness. In fact, in romantic love, it matters a great deal who the other person is – it is a very specific and unique individual that we fall in love with. They become your tribe, so philia is in full bloom. Your lover is your best friend. And as you enjoy the sometimes calm, sometimes stormy waves of eros and philia, it is agape that holds it all together, the conscious commitment to be kind, respectful, compassionate, supportive and above all selfless. This only works, by the way, if you partner agrees to the same deal.

Agape can also expand to become universal love, boundless love, love for all. It’s what Jesus and Buddha and all of the great spiritual teachers are talking about. When Jesus asked us to “love our enemies” he was not asking us to like them. He was just suggesting a baseline of kindness, humility, compassion and understanding despite our feelings. Attempting to put Jesus’ teachings into practice, Gandhi showed that remaining firm in the stance of non-violence requires monumental courage and will power – you have to override millennia of conditioned response mechanisms to fight back – yet in the end loving one’s enemies is a power far greater than any weapon. And Buddha taught that as we train ourselves to overcome our instinctual viciousness we must include ourselves on the list of those worthy of unconditional love. “If your compassion does not include yourself,” he said, “it is incomplete.”

Ultimately, love is not a feeling, love is what we do. We become what we love, and what we love becomes us. Our work, our dharma, our service, becomes a channel through which love enters the world. The way we garden, the way we cook, the way we create the spaces we live in, the way we serve others, the way we talk, walk, sing and dance, all of it is a manifestation of love. “Work,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, “is love made visible.”

Real love is never about possession. Possession is rooted in fear. Where there is fear there cannot be love, and where there is love there cannot be fear. Love is complete faith and trust that no matter how disheveled and incoherent things may appear, beneath the surface there is a deep and abiding order. Love is a message. As sunlight draws the rose out of the soil, from seed to full bloom, so too love draws us out of our indeterminate nature and toward the fullest realization of our deepest potential.

Beyond the grasp of our intellect and beyond the horizon of our limited vision is a vast and infinite source that nourishes and sustains all that we see. Whether you call it God or not is of secondary importance. Of primary importance is the fact that we live and breathe and have our being there – it is what we are. And when we love, we allow our authentic being to well up through the rickety structure of our so-called life, the carefully constructed façade our ego builds to cage us in. In the end, our longing for love is a longing for transcendence, to know once and for all that we are more than this, more than our bodies and minds and thoughts and fears, more than our shabby pile of things, more than our proudest accomplishments, more even than our deepest dreams and visions. Like a blinding noonday sun, love washes away all of the shadows and leaves us bathed in the light of unity, the nameless knowing that we are not lost, not forgotten, not insignificant, and that we are held in a timeless embrace where all is forgiven, all is exalted, all is well. Let us give this gift to each other. Let us love.

Through the Cracks

“No one should abandon duties because he sees defects in them. Every action, every activity, is surrounded by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke.” – Krishna, Bhagavad Gita 18:48

In every creative act – from planting a garden to writing a song, from baking a cake to raising a child – you fall short of the ideal. Nothing ever comes out quite the way you thought it would.

The aim for perfection sharpens our decisions and hones our actions. But in the end we must abandon perfection and surrender to what is. There is no shame in acknowledging limitations. We have to learn to let the accidents along the way lend their hand to the shape of things. We don’t control most of what happens. None of us does anything alone. Every act of creation is an act of co-creation.

I was writing a song the other day. I had a couple of good verses, but I needed a chorus. I tried and tried and tried to wrest one from the ether, but I just couldn’t find it. I settled on a woefully inadequate place-holder chorus, a stand-in until the real chorus came along. Each time I sang the song I cringed. I thought the chorus was awful. Then something odd began to happen. As I sang the song over and over, the place-holder chorus started sounding better, as if it had been the right one all along. The chorus wasn’t the problem. The problem was me.

I recently performed the song for the first time in front of a packed house. It got the loudest applause of the night. After the show, that was the only song people mentioned to me, again and again. My initial, knee-jerk rejection of the chorus, based on who knows what, was way off.

It’s important to discern the good from the bad, the effective from the ineffective, to separate the wheat from the chaff. But playful humility leavened with a dose of patience frees us from the tyranny of our prejudice. It is often in our best self-interest to admit that we are wrong. What we initially misjudge as bad might turn out to be a hidden jewel not entirely of our own making.

As a six year old boy living in Canada, Neil Young caught polio, a frightening disease of the nervous system that often left its victims without the use of one or more of their limbs. He recovered, but he was never the same. I sometimes wonder if Neil Young would play guitar the way he does had he not contracted polio. Would he hunch over his Les Paul a little differently? Would he have become more of a finesse player instead of settling on his trademark thumping claw hammer style? Would he have written hundreds of brilliant songs about the pain of isolation and loneliness had he not suffered the terror of a life-threatening disease at such a tender age? “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain,” sang Bob Dylan in his song It’s Not Dark Yet. It is from our wounds and imperfections that beauty arises. If we really understood this would we rush to mask every flaw, numb every pain, and sand smooth the sharp edges of our lives? “There is a crack in everything,” sang Leonard Cohen in his song Anthem, “that’s how the light gets in.”

There is an old Indian story about a young girl whose job it was to fetch water for her village. Every morning she would walk down the long path to the river and fill two large clay jars. When they were full she would fasten them to both ends of a yoke and lift the yoke onto her shoulders for the long walk home.

One morning when she reached the village she noticed that one of the jars was a lot lighter than the other one. She looked behind her and saw a thin line of dark, damp soil alongside the path. One of her jars was cracked.

“What a shame,” she thought, “what a waste. My stupid, leaky jar has wasted water and wasted my time.”

She told her grandmother about the leaky jar.

“It’s o.k.,” she said, “just do the best you can.”

Everyday for many weeks the young girl continued to do her best, but everyday the jar over her right shoulder leaked all the way home from the river. She became increasingly frustrated. She even began to hate the leaky jar. She felt like a failure.

Then one day the young girl woke up with a terrible sickness. She was so weak she couldn’t stand. No one in the village knew what was wrong with her. For two weeks she laid in her hut feeling awful. She didn’t know what was worse, the sickness ravaging her body or the shame of not being able to fulfill her duty.

Finally her strength returned. Her grandmother came into the hut.

“Come with me little one,” she said, “I have something to show you.”

They walked out onto the dusty path. The young girl couldn’t believe her eyes. On one side of the path, the side where the leaky jar had spilled, a long line of beautiful flowers grew. Orange poppies and deep blue lupines wound along the path all the way down to the river, as if the orange sun and the blue sky had poured themselves out onto the earth.

“See,” her grandmother said, “there are no mistakes. The Great Spirit moves through all things and works with what is, not with what should be. Remember this when you are sad and angry at your own imperfections.”

Inevitable flaws and unintended outcomes plague all of our actions. Some of the outcomes are good, like flowers nourished by a leaky water vessel. Some outcomes are bad. Feed the homeless and you create a destructive cycle of dependency. Write reasonable laws to protect people from poison and you fill the jails with harmless drug addicts. Send humanitarian aid into war-torn regions and you enrich local warlords. The laws of karma are beyond anyone’s control. No event stems from a single cause, just as no event results in a single effect. The best we can do is to try to do what’s right, and let go of the outcome.

As we embrace our imperfection we know that there will always be collateral damage as well as unintended beauty. It is our sacred duty to draw on the fire of our hearts and minds to light the world. And where there’s fire there’s smoke.

Perfectionism prevents action because no outcome is ever perfect. Only those willing to make peace with imperfection, only those willing to let there be cracks in the world, only those willing to let their work be flawed leave space enough for the good to get in. If you say no to imperfection, you rob the world of the light that gets in through the cracks.

The Bridge Generation

The low sun of December casts a long shadow. There’s more darkness than light. But the darkness holds a promise. Something is waiting to be born.

I’ve been thinking about the twentieth and twenty first centuries, how we are the bridge generation between the two – born in one, living and dying in the next, one foot in the old world, one foot in the new.

It was only ten years ago that the great twentieth century – the most violent century, the most inspiring century – came to a close. A time of unprecedented brutality and catastrophic environmental degradation, the twentieth century stands forever as a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when we put a narrow sense of tribe and short-term profits before the needs of the earth and the human family. Yet the twentieth century was also a time of hard-won gains in basic human rights, a time when entire categories of people began to emerge from centuries of oppression, a time when the sciences and the humanities joined forces to envision and manifest a world that works for everyone – in short, a time of awakening.

What will the twenty first century bring? We’re ten years in, and it’s still too soon to tell. If we’ve learned anything, it’s the complete unpredictability of the future.

Yet here, in the early morning of the twenty first century, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re awakening from a long dream, and in the gradual dawning of our new awareness, we are re-imagining our core values and the social structures and institutions that emerge from those values. We are redefining success. We are redefining peace. We are redefining prosperity. We are learning how to let our vision lead and our practicality follow. We know that a small group of people can change the course of history – we’ve seen it happen too many times to ignore. And we know that no matter how dire the situation, no matter how dark the night, there is within every human heart enough light to illuminate the whole world.

We don’t trust government as much as we used to. We know that we cannot wait for others to solve our problems. We know that within each of our homes, our families, our neighborhoods and our spiritual communities, it is we who lead, it is we who set priorities, it is we who articulate values, it is we who vote with our dollars to support businesses that uphold our vision of the good.

It is our growing conviction that each of us has wisdom within us, wisdom that emerges as insight, intuition and compassionate action each time we are faced with injustice and needless suffering. It is drawn out by our increasing awareness of the tremendous need around the world. We no longer think of ourselves as just Americans or just Mexicans or just Canadians, but as citizens of the world proud of our local affiliations, but not bound by them. Old institutions are crumbling and new institutions are taking their place. New technologies are shattering barriers that used to keep us apart. We are no longer beholden to powerful information distribution systems however well-meaning they may have been. Just as in the twentieth century the train, then the automobile and then the airplane closed great distances, today the internet (and whatever’s next) has destroyed the very concept of distance itself. With each cataclysmic change much was lost, and much was gained. We have had to learn to let go, over and over again. And we have struggled to adapt new technologies to the service of our humanity, not the other way around. With each change, the underlying constant remained – us. It is the indomitable human spirit that springs forth forever new from the dissolving forms of the past.

And here we are ten years into the new century, on the verge of the teenage years. I believe we have a choice. I believe that each of us has the power within the privacy of our own conscience, our own decisions, our own actions, to co-create with those around us the world we hold in our visions. We know that our intentions have creative power. We know that evolution isn’t over. We know that something is emerging, and we get to decide what that is.

Evolution has been going on for a long time. It’s absurd to think it has stagnated or that we have reached the end. If anything, we are in a period of accelerated change. This is not the final stage. As we continue to fall forward into the ever-new world, we carry with us the values and convictions that serve our deepest sense of the good. We let the old ways fall by the wayside. We take what we need and leave the rest. We buy less and give more. We move into smaller houses. We drive smaller cars. We consume fewer resources. We finally believe that there’s nothing more we really need, and that our wants are often born from the wound of spiritual dissatisfaction, and so we learn to feed ourselves not at the mall, but at the well that springs from the sacred source deep within us and all things.

Maybe you’re discouraged. Maybe you’re moved to despair by the endless bad news streaming into our awareness. Make sure you’re looking in a balanced way at the information you use to reach your assessments. Yes, there is abundant evidence of brutality and misery. But there is also ample evidence that we live in a time of great transformation where change-agents famous and obscure are working tirelessly around the world and making real progress. Find a place to lean in and help us push away the debris of the old forms that no longer serve us. Make a decision: stay caught in the disease or be a part of the healing.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world,” wrote Margaret Mead. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

We won’t always agree about how to change the world. But we share the conviction that it is our sacred duty to do so. If not us, who? If not now, when?

We are the people born in a time of great pain and promise. We are the people born in an age of unprecedented change. We are the people who remember where we came from, and hold a vision of where we are going. We are the people who know in our bones that it is possible to give birth to a world that is environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just. We have been given all the tools we need. We have each other. We have trust, faith, hope, love and wisdom. We can span the distance between the world we imagine and the world we behold. We are the connection between what was and what will be. We are the bridge generation.