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.

A Light Sense of Self

Is the ego our enemy, our friend, or just another tool in the box?

Even the most casual student of the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions knows that self-centeredness is the blade that cuts us off from wisdom and well-being. We must relinquish selfishness the sages tell us. Egotism is the enemy. And yet a nagging cluster of questions remain: Is my innate desire to learn, grow and create egotistical? Is my sense of identity such a bad thing? Don’t I need personal ambition to get anything done?

These questions arise in any walk of life, but they seem particularly acute in the arts, especially the performing arts. If you’re going to get on stage and demand people’s time and money, you’ve got to believe that what you’re offering has value. You need a strong, clear sense of self. Nothing is more important on stage than confidence, which, by the way, is very different from arrogance.

What is the ego? It is that thing we refer to when we use words like I, me and mine. It is a concept of self, an identity that is separate from everything else. It is one of the truths about us. But there are other truths.

In the spiritual and philosophical wisdom traditions of the world a few recurring principles arise again and again. Aldous Huxley called these recurring principles “the perennial philosophy”. Foremost among these universal ideas is the concept of Oneness, the notion that behind the veil of differentiation there is an underlying unity. All separate things, then, are expressions of the One. Whether you personify and deify the One or think of it as an impersonal force is purely a matter of preference. Some call it God, others call it Dao or Brahman or Spirit or Source or Divine Mind. “The Truth is One,” says the Rig Veda, “the sages call it by many names.”

Why the One became the Many is the great mystery of existence. We don’t know why. But it did. As humans evolved, spiritual traditions emerged, girded by philosophy and clothed in mythology. Imbedded in these traditions are maps left for us by those who went before, maps that make clear that realizing our unity with Oneness is the highest form of wisdom; to rise up out of the consciousness of separateness characterized by agitation, fear, competition, scarcity and craving and into the consciousness of unity characterized by serenity, clarity, kindness, community, abundance, compassion and gratitude. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and countless other truth-traditions all lead by different paths to the same summit.

In this context then the ego is neither good nor bad – it is simply one aspect of a complex array of energies and faculties nested within the phenomenon of consciousness. The ego, that sense of separateness, is a necessary construct. The ego serves us well. It encourages us to invest considerable time and energy into the maintenance of our own lives, materially and spiritually. I enjoy being me. Initially, I may think that I’m doing all this for myself. But it’s equally true that as I get stronger, smarter, more creative and more skillful I’m equipping myself for greater acts of service. Maybe the ego with its love of achievement, accomplishment, competition and attention is all part of a larger plan. By cultivating our own excellence we are adding to the wealth of the world. As I expand my capacity for self-expression, I am simultaneously deepening my connection to the Source and becoming a widening channel for Source to express Itself through me. In this way the false dichotomy between my individuality and the One begins to dissolve.

All one hundred trillion cells in your body emerged from a single cell, the egg. After fertilization, it quickly divided into two, then four and so on. The rapidly multiplying and expanding cells began to specialize – some becoming bone, others becoming skin, still others becoming brain tissue with the capacity for self-awareness. Deepak Chopra asks an excellent question. Are the heart and the brain different? Yes. Are they separate? No. They are differentiated expressions of one, unified organism. Differentiation is not separation. In this same way then all of reality is One, despite appearances to the contrary.

The problem arises when we mistake the ego for our entire being. We may fault the ego somewhat for playing along with this self-serving delusion, but it is certainly not the ego’s fault. It’s just doing the job for which it was designed – leading the parade. But thinking that one lousy drum major makes a parade is a big mistake.

“Person” and “personality” come from “persona”, the Latin word for mask, specifically the masks actors wore on stage in Classical plays. Our personality is the mask we show to the world, behind which lurks all the immeasurable mystery of our little slice of the One consciousness. Our identity, the way we are known to the world, is a cluster of associations made up of a complex and interwoven tapestry of threads – race, age, ethnicity, profession, looks, skills, mannerisms, voice, preferences, opinions and so on. This cluster of elements we call a “person” is led by an ego, an organizing principle that ties together all of these otherwise disparate elements. In this sense then the ego is our friend. We would be hopelessly fragmented without it. Before we demonize the ego it is probably wise to remember that the ego is, after all, yet another manifestation of the One.

Still, the dangers of egoic attachment are very real. Mistaking the ego for the entire depth and breadth of our being is the source of all our suffering. Putting the ego in charge of our lives is like letting a flea rule the world. In the end, neither the flea nor the world prospers.

What if we re-conceptualized our ambition as emergence, our hunger for more as sacred expansion, our yearning to be heard and understood as holy communion? “You have the right to work,” Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward.” The Buddha also counsels non-attachment in the midst of deep engagement. And Confucius says, “The inferior person asks ‘what’s in it for me?’ The superior asks, ‘what is the right thing to do?’” The highest form of action is selfless action rooted in the ground of Being. When the ego recedes its as if the clouds fall away from the sun – the whole world is enlightened.

Cultivate your excellence. Revel in your expansion. Don’t hide your light for fear of appearing egotistical. What matters most are your intentions. Are you working for egoic glory born in the consciousness of fear, or are you working in the consciousness of service, joyfully allowing Transcendence to express itself in you, through you, as you? Make something happen. Be a channel of the creative manifestation of the sacred energy of the universe. Participate in the healing of the world. Co-create your own best life out of the raw materials within and without you. Do it with a bold sense of Oneness. Do it with a light sense of self.

Bring it Back

In 1983 at a talk called Explorations delivered at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Joseph Campbell revisited one of the central themes of his lifework. He claimed that the artist plays an essential role in the formation and maintenance of the psycho-spiritual health of the human race, and that artists far from being mere entertainers or decorators have a sacred duty to brave the depths of the unconscious and bring back treasures that inspire us all to realize the depth and beauty of our own lives. In other words, for Campbell, art is as important as the air we breathe. But unlike air, art does not fall out of the sky ready-made. We have to make it.

How does the artist minister to the psycho-spiritual health of humankind? By setting before us the archetypal symbols of our own awakening and drawing us into ever-deeper forms of self-knowledge.

It begins with a long apprenticeship. Every chance encounter, every tug of the heart, every starry sky, every word, sound and moment forms a sea in which the fledgling artist swims. The artist’s greatest skill is discernment – what to leave in and what to leave out. From nothing less than the entire sphere of human experience the artist begins to mold her vision of beauty. But she must first learn the techniques of her craft. She must find a teacher.

After mastering the vocabulary of her medium she reaches the first crisis. As her own unique voice begins to emerge the teacher becomes obsolete. She must break away. Art is so much more than mimicry. It is time to move on.

With her apprenticeship behind her and a growing body of high quality work taking shape, the young artist stands at a threshold. No matter her medium – paint, sculpture, dance, photography, film, poetry, prose or music – she must brave the hero’s journey into the underworld of the unconscious and face the dangers of madness, loneliness and poverty in order to reach the transcendent goal: nothing less than the realization of unity, integration and the resultant healing of the world.

According to Campbell, there are three main realization symbols: the heiros gamos, the atonement with the father and apotheosis. The heiros gamos or sacred marriage is the profound healing and integration of the animus and anima, the male and female energy found within each of us. This often takes the form of boy meets girl. There’s a reason there are so many love songs. On the surface they’re about finding someone to love. Deeper down, they’re about healing the rift between the conflicting energies of our own souls. The second realization symbol, the atonement with the father, is the satiation of the universal longing for the source. As Luke Skywalker goes searching for his father, we all want to know where we came from as a means of finally answering the primal question, what am I? If we knew what made us, we would know our own essence. This is why we love songs about the road and songs about home. It turns out take me home country roads isn’t really about West Virginia after all. And finally, apotheosis means realizing the divine nature of our own essence, as Buddha experienced under the bodhi tree when all his illusory mental constructs and so-called understandings faded away in the bright light of the realization that he was one with the universal consciousness from which we and all things come. All of us, whether we realize it yet or not, want what Buddha has, what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven, where we realize that in the depths of our own being we are one with the Father. Great art can give us these three gifts, sometimes all in one overwhelming moment.

It is the challenge of every authentic artist to bring these gifts out of the depths of their own understanding and re-present them to us in new and relevant forms. “The point is that what you have to bring,” said Campbell, “is something that the world lacks – that is why you went to get it. The daylight world doesn’t even know that it needs this gift you are bringing.” So this isn’t going to be easy. In fact, at this stage of the journey, the artist faces a perilous decision. As she struggles to create works of art should she stay true to her own private invention and vision, or should she speak in the pedestrian language of mass culture? Should she be an artiste or a hack?

Should she stand in the corner of an art gallery in Manhattan and caterwaul like Yoko Ono or should she go to Nashville and churn out the next formulaic hit? Should she paint what her soul sees or should she paint Thomas Kinkade fairy houses? If she’s true to herself she runs the risk that no one will care. Art for an audience of one (the artist) is a lonely life. At this point she may flee to a cabin in the woods to paint the masterpieces nobody wants in the hopes that some future generation will lionize her as they did Van Gogh. Or she may utilize her extensive skill to give the people what they want, thinking to herself, when I make enough money painting this commercial slop, then I’ll paint what I want. But that day never comes.

The third and most courageous alternative is to find a way to stay true to your depth vision and develop a vocabulary that hooks the public without pandering. Campbell calls this the pedagogical path. Here, you help your public connect with their deepest needs and initiate them into a process of realization by bringing your silent answers into alignment with their unspoken questions – the artist as teacher.

In the language of the hero’s journey, the hero must go into the underworld to retrieve the boon or the prize. In the first scenario, the artist who refuses to communicate and hides in the woods is guilty of what Campbell calls “the refusal of the return”. It’s a common pitfall, to dismissively condemn the untrained masses and blame them for your failure. In the second scenario, the artist returns but doesn’t deliver anything; they simply give the public more of what they already have which doesn’t help them at all. In the third scenario the hero returns with the boon and finds a way to deliver it to the masses in correct proportion to their ability to receive. This, says Campbell, requires great sensitivity and compassion on the part of the artist. Having the patience and skill to draw your audience in is a loving, ego-less act. It’s so much easier to hold your audience in contempt, take your toys and go home. Or become a soulless panderer. But the path with heart, the sacred opportunity, is to bring the treasure right into the marketplace and integrate us all in the process. If you are an artist, do you have the patience, loving-kindness and courage to do this? When it comes to transcendent wisdom, do you have the guts to go get it and the compassion to give it away? There is so much need for healing. Develop a voice, believe that there is something worth singing about and be that voice. Trust that you are the one we all need. Then without ego, grounded in the profound depth of humility, find the treasure and bring it back.

Runaway Train

How do you stop a runaway train? How do you break that racing chain of thoughts and worries and plans and schemes? How do you stop the spinning kaleidoscope of all-possible-scenarios that flood the mind’s eye with a dizzying array of fragmented colors and lines that lead nowhere? If the mind is such a powerful part of life, why do we over-think everything to death?

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it makes sense that the early human beings who worried a lot and excelled at imagining elaborate worst-case-scenarios would have a better chance of survival. The hyper-vigilant hominid perpetually anxious about whether or not there was a saber-toothed tiger in the bushes was far more likely to survive and pass on his genes than his more lackadaisical brother, you know, the one they call “Tiger Food”. Traits like the capacity to worry were naturally selected by the process of evolution. The result? Modern humans have an inordinate capacity to vividly imagine every conceivable negative outcome and spend a lot of time worrying about the worst possible future, a place where everything goes wrong, everything is lost and everyone hates you. Early humans who worried about scarcity of resources would work harder to store up food. They would envision future problems and work hard to prevent them by creating elaborate plans. As a result, they would be far more likely to survive than their live-for-today neighbors who never worried about a thing and died from easily preventable missteps. We are the children of worriers.

So here’s the problem. We modern humans have plenty of food and adequate shelter and extremely long odds on the possibility of saber-toothed tiger attack, yet we still carry around with us this vestigial and irrelevant conditioning. Our capacity for worry and fear far outstrips our actual risk factors. The mind, once our greatest asset, is now our greatest liability.

Have you ever woken up at three in the morning, mind racing, thoughts crowding, worries bearing down on you like angry bees? It’s dark. Everyone’s asleep. You’re lying there perfectly safe in your bed. You’re not thirsty and you don’t have to pee. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. And yet there you are, adrenalin-sopped, heart racing, blood pounding, desperately envisioning endless possible negative outcomes, inventing problems and emotionally inhabiting them for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It’s all just conditioning playing itself out, echoes of once-useful impulses. There are no saber-toothed tigers.

Maybe it’s time to turn these giant brains of ours back on themselves. Maybe we should do a little thinking about thinking.

The first thing you have to do is laugh. It’s all sort of silly how the thought-stream sucks us into a vortex of anxiety despite the absence of any legitimate cause. And when you laugh, the death-grip of the mind is loosened. I always worry a little when I visit churches or synagogues or mosques or classrooms or satsangs where no one’s laughing, where a desperately serious and self-important air hangs over the entire room and every soul in it. Without laughter, people too easily fall prey to the ever-pervasive thought-stream. When we laugh, the whole charade is exposed and we, for a moment anyway, return to our original selves, free and easy, as we were before these giant brains took over. That’s why laughing feels so good. It is a glimpse of freedom.

The second thing to do is decide to set into motion some different patterns. Now that the shackles of the busy mind are no longer hidden, it’s time to search for the right key to unlock them for good. Techniques like meditation, centering prayer, physical exercise, music, dance, immersion in the beauty of nature, practicing loving kindness toward others – these are all proven and effective methods for breaking the tyranny of the thought-stream. There are also a whole host of other remedies that are far less effective: television, shopping, drugs, alcohol or any other form of sensual escapism. The problem with these “solutions” is that they tend to create as many or more problems than they solve. Some people realize this after the first bong hit. For others, it takes thirty years of addiction for the bloom to fade from the rose.

My friend the spiritual teacher Will Newsom uses the analogy of a compass. When we are trapped in the thought-stream, drowning in currents of worry and fear, it’s as if our compass needle is jitterbugging all over the place. How do we get the needle to settle back to truth north? How do we restore our original inner-peace, our naturally joyful equilibrium? We cannot force the needle to go where we want it. In other words, you can’t solve the problem of over-thinking with more thinking. “A problem cannot be solved,” said Einstein, “with the same consciousness that created it.” Like trying to see your own eyes or bite your own teeth, we cannot cure the mind with the mind.

Wayne Dyer writes that a sign he saw on the wall of a church basement where he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting burned into his psyche like a brand: “Our best thinking got us here.” Relying on the mind to cure the problems of the mind is a fool’s errand.

Does it help to replace bad thinking with good thinking? Certainly. Does it help to set positive intentions and craft a plan of action? Naturally. Right thinking is a necessary preliminary step in the process of restoring sanity. But it is only a preliminary step. Right thinking alone is insufficient.

Instead, Newsom and many others suggest a far simpler approach.

Quiet down, rest in the silence and wait.

You don’t have to fix anything or solve any problems. That’s just more mental manipulation. Instead, sink beneath the mind. For most people, meditation and centering prayer are the best paths to this goal and are profoundly effective if given a chance. When we meditate or practice centering prayer, we practice presence in this now moment and drop down beneath the level of thought. Deepak Chopra calls it entering the gaps between thoughts. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Resisting them only makes them stronger. Instead, simply notice them, laugh, and settle down like a rock sinking to the bottom of a pool and watch your thoughts slide by above you on the surface as if you were watching clouds drift by in the sky. You are not the clouds; you are not your thoughts. In the content-free, thoughtless silence your compass needle will naturally return to true north all by itself, through no effort of your own. In the same way that we do not consciously digest our own food, grow our own hair or heal our own cuts, inner peace is not an achievement of the mind. It happens only when you break free from the tyranny of the mind.

Great spiritual teachers from Jesus to Yoda all make the same promise: peace is possible – as individuals, as families, as communities and as a planet – if we somehow learn to get off of this crazy, runaway train.

Smooth as Stone

I have a smooth palm-sized river stone on my desk, right beneath my computer monitor, a nice juxtaposition of high tech and no tech. I sometimes hold it in my hands when I don’t have anything to say. Silence is the language of stones.

It feels heavy and cool on my skin. I feel it pulling toward the ground, waiting for my wrist to twist or my fingers to part so it can slip from its perch and return to mother earth. I never let go. Stones teach patience.

No rock begins this way, smooth and round. Rocks begin jagged. Then sand and water and other rocks bash and scrape and grind away at the edges until only the smooth round middle remains. Everything unessential is gone. Songs and poems and people and ideas and nations and marriages begin the same way; messy, unfocused, complicated, overwrought, cluttered. Then along comes the scouring. Without the friction and the conflict and the constant, painful cutting away, the beauty of the final stage is never revealed, cloaked forever beneath peripheral layers of obfuscation and detritus. The secret of life is learning to love the cutting away.

As we strive to create our best lives, as we endeavor to hone our craft, fortify our fortunes and magnify our excellence, we learn the art of intention and practice the law of attraction, thinking that by drawing toward us everything we lack we will eventually be fulfilled. Manifesting situations, conditions and objects out of the field of pure potentiality is a worthy goal. But lost in this model is the simple truth that we already are everything we seek.

Maybe we have it backwards. Maybe instead of adding this skill and that quality and this new piece of equipment, we ought to be letting things fall away, jettisoning everything that isn’t genuinely, authentically real. When we let slip the limiting labels we use to define ourselves, our essence begins to emerge. 13th century German mystic Meister Eckhart said that we become who we really are not by a process of addition, but by a process of subtraction.

In a famous anecdote about the sculptor Michelangelo, he was asked by an admiring patron how he managed to create the masterpiece “David”.

“When I approached the marble,” he replied, “I simply removed everything that was not David.”

Like most philosophical advice, this is easier said than done. How do we cooperate with the forces around us, the forces that will peel back the cocoons of our own becoming?

How did this river rock reach this stage of its own beauty? By bumping up against the messy world, by following the flow of larger currents, by letting itself be pulled away and dragged and dropped until it lost all sense of separateness. With each encounter it left its mark on others, at the same time feeling the shape of its own life change. People often try to change all by themselves. Rocks do it together.

We do not have to know what all the steps are. Nor do we have to choreograph them. We only have to willingly surrender to the yearnings of our own deeper nature, then step forward courageously, humbly and in the consciousness of service. Let the river do the rest. Life will meet us head on. Difficult people will scrape up against us. Circumstance will rip away all our carefully constructed comforts. Our own misguided instinctual drives will draw us into destructive decisions and actions that will take years to repair. Pain will shatter our façades and death will flag our every step. But throughout the rough and tumble of this watercourse, we grow smoother and smoother every year as the disingenuous artifice is ground away by the hardships of our lives. “The trials we endure,” wrote Epictetus, “introduce us to our strengths.” In our dawning maturity, we thank our enemies and honor our failures, for without them, this growing wisdom would have fallen stillborn to wither on the bright plains of our misspent youth.

“All first drafts are shit,” said Ernest Hemingway. Having the backbone to cull the garbage from your writing, your song, your poem, indeed your life is the mark of a great artist. The only thing worse than a half-baked song is a half-baked songwriter. If our lives are our masterworks, then everything is at stake. We have been given an opportunity in the march of these days to step to the beat of our own drum or follow the beat of another. From the copious bounty of our lives we draw the sustenance that will fuel our muscles for the march, knowing that there is always another meal and another cool drink of water around the bend. Letting go of thoughts and behaviors that no longer serve us, mindfully culling the clutter from our homes and to-do lists, leaving room for new growth to rise up, take root and bloom – these are the gifts we receive on the road toward our awakening, this joy is the fruit of our renunciation, this verdant emptiness is the silence out of which the music of our lives emerge.

“Pay attention to your enemies,” wrote Antisthenes in the 4th century B.C.E., “for they are the first to discover your mistakes.” As a devoted protégé of Socrates (and witness to that tragic ending), Antisthenes taught that misfortune and opposition ultimately serve us better than easy living and blind support. Unlike friends and lovers, enemies have no stake in our fortune – they’re success is utterly unhinged from ours. In this light, difficult and abrasive people are a profound gift; they are sandpaper to our soul leaving us lighter, smoother and more deeply beautiful.

Would we rather be rough-edged, difficult to warm up to, loud, caustic, inelegant, chaotic, bloated, overblown, ineffective, awkward and hard to love? Or would we rather be simple, smooth, graceful, centered, grounded, powerful, clean, elegant, quiet, concise, clarified and effective? Let life wear away your sharp edges. Thank your enemies. Honor your challenges. Know that when you lose, you win. Welcome the struggle. Let it bring your essential, authentic self to the surface. Learn to glide. Let everything that’s false fall away. Become who you really are. Become as smooth as stone.

Endless Becoming

The San Diego County Fair comes around every June and wraps up right after the 4th of July. An annual summer ritual, the fair brings over a million people together on a prime piece of real estate in a coastal estuary just north of Del Mar, California. Warm sun and cool ocean breezes play tag while fairgoers part ways with their hard-earned cash in exchange for wildly inappropriate and oddly compelling food items like chocolate covered bacon and deep-dried butter.

The fair, like the top car on a Ferris wheel, comes around every year without fail and we file in knowing that everything will be exactly as it was the year before – the same sheep in a row, the same magic mop demonstrations, the same greybeards in Hawaiian shirts playing geezer rock – and yet we keep coming back year after year. There’s something comforting, even beautiful about the symmetry of it all. Going to the fair is like stepping into a time machine, a very particular time machine – not one that delivers you to the past or the future but one that delivers you to a realm completely outside of linear time. The fair is an eternal, changeless moment that we fall into summer after summer. We don’t go to the fair to return to our childhood. We go to the fair to stop the wheel of time entirely and experience, for a while, the wide open freedom of timelessness. “Time,” Plato wrote, “is a moving image of eternity.” And I think I saw him on the midway in a Harley-Davidson bandana handing out cotton candy to kids, beaming with joy, the kids and Plato.

I have a friend who never goes to the fair. “It’s just the same old crap year after year,” he says.

“That’s why I like it,” I say.

Not going to the fair because it’s the same old crap year after year is like saying why go to the beach, I’ve seen waves breaking before, or why go to the forest, you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ‘em all.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” wrote Thoreau. “I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” Beneath time’s shimmering surface there lies a depth that goes down and down and down. We long to swim in those waters, but the only way to them is through the surface. Only by letting go of the rope swing and plunging through to the depths will we know the full measure of the beauty of our own ephemeral lives.

The fair, like any hash mark on the wheel of time, is a sticky-sweet reminder of the simple pleasures, the bounty of the land and the chance to come together as a community to celebrate each other. And besides, it’s fun. “The secret of life,” sang James Taylor, “is enjoying the passage of time.”

There is an innate human tendency to celebrate and honor the recurring moments in the annual cycle of time. Lent, Yom Kippur, Ramadan and Groundhog Day are just a few examples. As with the fair, we don’t celebrate these events year after year in order to return to the past. We celebrate them in order to move into a deeper consciousness of the fundamental unreality of linear time. We celebrate them in order liberate ourselves from the tyranny of time. “The distinction between past, present and future,” said Einstein, “is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” The apparent relentless march of time, which we normally allow to tyrannize and torment us, is temporarily lifted when we enter into the joyful celebration of these annually recurring events. Birthdays, anniversaries and the like restore us to our original purity as beings of infinite awareness and infinite value. That sort of thing gets washed away by the torrent of time.

The same pattern, the same apparent, but ultimately illusory dichotomy between motion and stillness occurs in music. A good song has to accomplish two contradictory aims – it must be fresh and familiar. It must be rooted in the known while breaking new ground. If new music does not somehow fall within the parameters of familiar tonal and rhythmic spectrums while also delighting and surprising us with something novel and unique, we turn away. From Bach, Handel and Haydn Mozart learned where the boundaries were, and then he pushed them. Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Bob Dylan showed the Beatles the road to their own genius, and they never looked back. Everyone who’s ever written a song or played in a cover band knows that if you really want to move an audience you must take them on a journey, but you must also always bring them home, home to the heart of their own lives. People want to be moved. But when it’s over they want to sleep in their own beds.

Life itself turns on these same illimitable laws. All forms arise and fade but the totality remains unchanged. Each year we grow older. Our faces continue to change right before our eyes. But the I within, the silent witness, knows nothing of the passage of time. Past, present and future are all continually occurring in this eternal moment. The mind cannot understand this. The mind is just a squirrel strapped to a rocket, convinced that it’s steering. Poor squirrel.

I turned fifty two last month and am, on my better days, deeply grateful to be alive. I’ve been to too many funerals of friends my age and younger whose lives were cut short by hard living, heart defects or the vagaries of cancer. I’m also grateful to my parents for many things, foremost among them good genes. Bollands tend to stick around awhile. When I talk to my eighty eight year old father I feel the full width and breadth of his life – the maddening struggles, the heroic choices, the simple beauties – and I know that none of us has forever. And yet we do. These transient forms around us – that song on the radio, these vibrant bodies, the warmth of the hand we hold as we walk through the midway of our lives – these will all slip from our grasp. But behind the shimmering veil there is a constancy far more real than any passing image. Developing the ears to hear it, the eyes to see it and the heart to feel it is the lifework of any lover of wisdom. Only then, in the timelessness of this eternal moment, are we freed from the wrenching sorrow of the world with its endless cycles of birth and death. The fair, like a good song, can only last so long. Like a long, slow ride on the Ferris wheel, life winds down. Below you the midway lights shine on clusters of teenagers careening though the barkers and the colored balloons. The sun is sinking into the sea. It’s time to go home. It’s time. But if you let it, time opens a door through which the flood waters of eternity pour, holding us and nourishing us like amniotic fluid in the wombs of our endless becoming.

To Live Deliberately

The campfire faded down to a bed of embers. Lori had already crawled into the tent and fallen asleep. I heard her deep and steady breathing.

Lying on the ground and looking up at the stars I felt the pull of gravity pining me down like a moth on a corkboard. A warm desert wind moved through the sage. The stars spread out in a vast field from one rim of the horizon to the other, too many to count. The darkness seemed insignificant in the light of all those blazing suns.

A deep and timeless silence fell over the desert.

I shifted.

Suddenly I was looking down at the stars.

They were spread out beneath me in a vast emptiness. Normally we think of the stars above us and the earth below, but in a surprising reversal of relational perspective, I was certain that I was glued by gravity to the bottom of the earth, peering down into a pool of boundless space below me.

The vertigo passed in an instant, eclipsed by a warm sense of peace and a deep surrender. I felt oddly safe and entirely lucid. The earth above me and the sky below – I wondered why this had never occurred to me before.

And with this came a knowing – all perspectives are relative. There is no such thing as up or down, over and under, above or below. Those terms only make sense from one limited point of view. If you move out of your own perspective (or any singular point of view) and take on instead a universal perspective, all orientations dissolve and there is only here, now. In other words, if you drop your local awareness and adopt a non-local awareness, you see in one singular moment the incomprehensible oneness of all existence. Freed from a parochial, provincial orientation where one ego-identifies with a particular time and place, you move instead into the formlessness of Being itself, an expanded consciousness where the ego recedes to its rightful place, as a captain of a tiny vessel, not lord and master of all it surveys. You don’t have to go anywhere to get this awareness. You’re always in it. You have only to shift. But going to the desert helps.

One of the great services wilderness provides is this opportunity to leave behind our small view of the world. As we leave the city and head into the hills we enter a realm of existence where nature reigns and the arising and fading of forms unfolds in an endless symphony utterly apart from the machinations of human activity. Stepping out of the car and walking into the woods or the desert or along an empty shore brings you into direct contact with a timeless presence untrammeled by the human mind, well, until we get there anyway. Spending time in nature gives us a chance to take a break from the torrential thought stream and its oh-so-important assessments and judgments. And when we do, we have a shot at recovering our original simplicity, our primal purity, our childlike awareness, that Garden of Eden consciousness where we walked in the cool of the evening with God, and we didn’t even know that we’re different from anything we saw.

It’s not our mind’s fault that we’re so easily trapped in an illusion of separateness. It’s just doing what it’s supposed to do – naming everything, judging everything, ascribing value to everything, craving, pushing away and attaching to everything. Bravo mind. Nice job. Keep it up. We need you. But once in a while, it’s nice to remember who’s really in charge. Once in a while it’s nice to say, mind, you work for me, not the other way around. Thanks for everything you do, but go ahead and take the rest of the day off.

In Walden, everybody’s all-time favorite back-to-nature manifesto, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” To deliberate means to cautiously reason our way toward the ideal. And how can we live deliberately if we don’t understand the essential facts? For this process to work, we have to have good information. As you deliberate about the big questions like what is the good life, what is the purpose of life, what is the purpose of my life, what should I be doing with these few short years I have left, isn’t it supremely important to first understand the most important question of all: what am I? Only in nature, or better yet, wilderness are we unceremoniously stripped of all our careful constructions and reduced to our essential core – simple, unadorned, non-local awareness. We are no long defined by the social roles and definitions that layer over us like sediment. We realize that beneath all the layers we are pure, undifferentiated consciousness. With this essential fact in hand, we can re-enter the human world of family, job, duty, citizenship, moral obligation, creativity and community with a new-found sense of direction and purpose. We know now what this is all for. Our priorities have been re-ordered. Our eyes are firmly set on what really matters. And we are willing to let the rest go.

Wilderness has always been our greatest teacher. For millennia, humans have known that despite the comforting safety of our shelters, it is only when we step out under the sky unprotected that we emerge like birds from the confines of our shells. We need the nest, but we need the sky more.

Although it’s been years, I carry with me that night in the desert when I, for a few fleeting moments, saw the stars spread out beneath me like a sea of pearls. That one shift, that reorientation, forever loosened my attachment to the fleeting forms of the world and the careless devotion we place in our limited perceptions, assessments and judgments. I know now that there are not only two points of view for every problem – there are millions. I know that I can set myself free anytime I want from the Promethean chains that bind us all to a dangerously small view of the world and of ourselves. I know now that it is not only possible, but it is absolutely necessary for my survival and for the survival of the entire planet that we learn to live from the core truths of our existence and not the surface trivialities, that we learn to live as if it mattered, that we learn to live deliberately.

Paying the Price

Violin virtuoso Friedrich Kriesler was approached by an admiring fan after a concert.

“I would give my life to play violin like that,” the woman gushed.

“Madam,” said Kriesler, slowly measuring his words, “I have.”

Kriesler’s droll response succinctly sums up one of life’s great truths – that evolution toward the ideal, whether of an individual or of an entire society, is never quick and easy. And yet so many of us act like it is.

If we put even a fraction of the energy we waste on envy, coveting, resentment and victim-consciousness into the process of cultivating our own greatness we would be amazed at the beautiful butterfly we have become. But we love our cocoons too much.

The Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome called it paying the price. Craving something that you are unwilling to work for is the height of folly. And from there it’s a steep slide into misery.

Wondering why you can’t keep your weight down while refusing to exercise and reduce your food intake is a prime example of wanting the prize without paying the price. Idly wishing you were a rock star while doing little or nothing to further your mastery of musicianship, singing, songwriting, arrangement, recording technology, stagecraft and the intricacies of the music business is nothing more than a pipe dream. Wanting a lucrative and rewarding professional career without sacrificing years and lots of money toward education and training is simply unfair. Whatever you were doing those six years when you could have been in college and grad school, well, that bore certain fruit too. Every decision and action plants seeds. And there is always the harvest. You can count on that.

Every choice entails sacrifice. When you say yes to something, you are saying no to everything else. That’s what makes choosing so torturous. Kierkegaard, Sartre and the other existentialists are fond of pointing out that we are radically free and that we invent ourselves with every choice. When we refuse to choose, that too is a choice. There is no escape from our freedom.

Let’s not waste any time on remorse and regret about the wasted years and the way fear robbed us of our joy. Own your choices. Forgive yourself. You have a good life. Don’t be tortured by all of the paths not taken. You did what you felt was best at the time. You paid whatever price you were willing or capable of paying. And now you’re home looking in the shopping bag at what you got. It’s too late to complain now. But it is not too late to begin making different choices. Set a new wheel in motion.

It is natural for us to compete with one another. Our tendency to feel envious of others is understandable. We can’t help but notice the amazing lives others have created and wonder, why not me? What do we do with this feeling of envy? Do we let it eat us for lunch, or do we let it jolt us awake and spur us toward the life we so richly deserve? We stand at a fork in the road. Down one road lies a life of creativity, emergence and mastery. Down the other lies a life of safety and regret. Let your envy drive you like a lash. Let it pitch you out of your fear and into your love. Gandhi said that everything we do is driven by one of two things, fear or love. Which road will you choose?

Now it’s time to get to work. Instead of envy, feel inspired. Let the success and accomplishment of others convince you that so much more is possible. The only thing holding you back is your limited and limiting vision of yourself. Success has little to do with manipulating objects and events in the outer world. Begin within. Success is an inside job.

Believe that you deserve it. Trust your instincts. Know that there are people all around you willing and able to contribute in powerful and unforeseen ways to your emerging sense of purpose. Show up in the spirit of cooperation and co-creation. None of us are alone, even when it feels like we are. Feeling alone and isolated? You aren’t. Snap out of it. That’s just your fear trying to take back control.

Do three things everyday to further your dream – just three. By the end of the month, you’ll have completed ninety concrete, specific tasks. Put a few months together and see the inevitable progress. Three years from now a whole new life will have taken shape.

There were three brick layers at a construction site. A passerby asked, “What are you doing?”

The first one said, “I’m laying bricks.”

The second one said, “I’m building a wall.”

The third one said, “I’m building a cathedral.”

Which one do you think is going to do a better job? Which one is going to work through the exhaustion and tedium? Which one invests each stroke of the trowel with love and precision? Which one sets each brick as if it were the single most important thing they’ve ever done? Which bricklayer are you?

There is no secret. This is not mysterious. The tools for building a great life are lying all around us. We have only to pick them up.

Are you wasting time and energy on regret? Are you drunk on the poison of envy and resentment, caught in the grips of fear, defeated by the delusion of powerlessness? Or are you awakening to your own boundlessness? Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired? Are you reaching for the tools with which you will build the life of your dreams? Don’t deny your own infinite potential. What a tragedy, the Afghani saying goes, to die like a pomegranate with all one’s seeds still locked up inside.

The world desperately needs you, the real you, to show up. But it’s going to take some work. Like Friedrich Kriesler, are you willing to sacrifice your life for something amazing, something bigger than any one of us? Are you willing to pay the price?

Ten Steps to a Great Marriage

It’s coming up on wedding season. Many young and not so young couples are planning their summer nuptials. Everyone loves a great party, and while it is sensible to put some thought and energy into all of the details surrounding catering, décor and bridesmaid gowns, it is far more important to think deeply about what marriage itself actually means. A lovely wedding does not a marriage make.

I am no expert on marriage, although Lori and I will be celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary this June, and I suppose that counts for something. Along the way we’ve gotten a few things wrong and a lot of things right. It really isn’t that mysterious. As a wedding present to all of you soon-to-be newlyweds, please allow me to share some of the things I’ve learned. Let’s call this Ten Steps to a Great Marriage.

1. Never Stop Being a Girlfriend/Boyfriend

I’m often shocked at the utter contempt some married people display toward each other. They act as if their spouse is the least important person in the world, little more than an annoying roommate, sibling or co-worker. This is easily remedied. Remember how you acted when you were dating? Do that. Put your best face forward. Call them on the phone for no reason. Put erotic notes in the pockets of their coats. Pack them a lunch. Bring home their favorite candy bar. Take care of your self, keep the weight down, dress nice, bathe. Look them in the eye. Listen. Act like you care, because you do, don’t you?

2. People Don’t Change – Choose Wisely

Don’t marry a musician then complain because they’re gone ten nights a month. Don’t marry an artist then resent their poverty. Don’t marry an ambitious go-getter then complain that their career always seems to come first. Don’t marry a momma’s boy then act surprised at his weakness and indecision. Don’t marry an assertive man then whine to your friends that he’s too controlling. Don’t rescue a damsel in distress and resent her for not being a powerful, competent life partner. Don’t marry a quiet man then complain because he never talks, or a talkative woman, then complain because she never shuts up. Those traits were there in full display the first day you met. Perhaps they were hard to see through the fog of your own denial, desperation or fantasy but you chose this person out of the billions of people on earth. There was something about those traits you wanted, even needed. Try and figure all of this out before the wedding bells chime.

3. Be Kind

No matter what’s happening, find a way to be gracious and kind. Your anger is your problem. Try to avoid using your spouse as a garbage disposal, a convenient place to dump all your darkness and bile. This is the one time when it makes sense to treat your spouse like a stranger, that is, restrain yourself. Courtesy and decorum pave the way for genuine bonding.

4. One Bank Account

Real intimacy has nothing to do with taking your clothes off. Real intimacy is pooling all of your resources and blending your fates into one. Only when you know you are responsible for the whole damn thing do you rise up out of your childish selfishness and become a full grown man or woman, someone who practices good communication and is intimately acquainted with prudence, restraint and generosity. If you can’t let go of control, you aren’t ready to be married.

5. On Big Decisions, Everyone Has Veto Power

Respect your spouse and believe with all your heart that this person really does have your back. Trust their judgment. Honor their opinion. On the really big decisions, everyone has veto power. What are the really big decisions? To have kids or not, to have a dog, where to live, major expenditures, vacations, religion, money. Again, all of this should be fully explored before you shove wedding cake into each other’s faces. And by the way, don’t shove wedding cake into each other’s faces. That is so over.

6. Let Your Spouse Be Who They Are

Naturally, you both need to put the marriage before your own childish desires. Foolish obsessions that pull you out of the marriage are to be avoided. You might have to let go of those World of Warcraft all-nighters. But this most certainly does not mean you are a slave to the other. Set your spouse free to be who they really are. Not all of your interests have to align. In fact, it would be weird if they did. A good marriage is a safe place to be true to yourself. To some extent, have separate lives.

7. Avoid Danger

We’re only human. Be smart about situations and environments that erode loyalties. This is controversial I know, but it’s pretty risky for married people to have close friends of the opposite sex. Intimacies develop. Attachments form. Secrets are shared. Pretty soon, lines get blurred. Good people go bad. A world of suffering can be avoided by simply avoiding certain situations. Some married couples have one shared email address. Not a bad idea.

8. Sex is Not an Option

This just in from the Obvious Department: sex is an essential, profoundly transformative experience. Open and honest sexuality between committed partners cements bonds in ways that no one really fully understands. Regular and frequent sex creates an atmosphere of trust, celebrates generosity, concretizes love, bolsters self-acceptance and heals wounds you didn’t even know you had. Sex makes everything better. A sexless marriage is a three-legged dog – it still gets down the road but it isn’t pretty. And here’s a surprise you don’t hear much in popular culture: married sex is way better than single sex. It is. And if your sex life starts to lag there’s a simple reason: you’re lagging on steps one through seven.

9. Men and Women are Different

Men and women have different needs and different ways of doing things. Wise women know that men are simple – if a man knows that he is loved and admired by his woman, he will do anything for her. Wise women also know that men show affection by mowing lawns, washing cars and painting mailboxes. Wise men know that women are complicated, and that satisfying them is a mysterious art requiring intelligence, awareness, vigilance and an almost preternatural sensitivity to the subtlest of non-verbal cues. Husbands, pay attention. Get out of your head and into your heart, then feel your way. You’ll be fine.

10. Mindfulness in Action

Marriage is a microcosm of the whole world. The same energies and actions that create a great marriage create a better world. Cultivate the sensitivity to hear what the other is saying as well as what they’re not saying. Ask questions. Say what you mean without drama and embellishment. Ask for what you want, but keep it simple. Be willing. Stop saying no all the time. When you’re feeling lonely and misunderstood, come out of yourself and give. When you wake up in the morning, ask yourself, what are three concrete, specific things I can do today to make my spouse’s life easier, better and more beautiful? Then do those things – and watch your own joy increase. That’s the most beautiful thing about a great marriage – you realize that your well-being and happiness are forever intertwined with the well-being and happiness of others. Loving is an action that does not know the difference between giving and receiving. Giving and receiving are two names for one circle.

These are the ten steps to a great marriage. Share them with your fiancé and have a nice long talk. Then after that you can get back to the important things, you know, napkin rings or linen origami?

Have a wonderful wedding. But have an even more wonderful life.