Indigenous Spirituality

 I have been reading Richard Wagamese's book One Drum, and reflecting on how the Ojibway spirituality differs from any I have known. One of the principles I enjoy reading is the connection with matriarchy: how, from the Ojibway view, we are all energy and are bound universally by that shared energy. Without a sense of belonging and having a shared energy, it's all too easy to go down the road of hopelessness and feel that nothing makes sense-even the wheel of suffering seems quite dark at times, because it can be so difficult to see the end of it. But if we understand that in spite of the endless wheel, we are always surrounded by beings who care (and a shared being) we can at least find comfort in that spiritual principle.

   Wagamese is describing a spirituality that is based on gifts: not an "eye for an eye" type of exchange, but rather the gifts that are freely given because the gifts are so abundant and endless. If my mentality is to compete for scarce resources, I will always find myself struggling and wanting. But if I take a deep breath and appreciate that this breath is free to me, and that I have another moment to live, then perhaps things very much change for the better. Even something that seems depressing can be the opportunity for hidden renewal and new hopes. If something stays the same, there is no room for alternate perspectives. In addition, if we are only thinking in terms of good and bad (or polarities), there is no room t see that actually there is an ability to hold the tension between these things; to want and not want at the same time and be ok with that!

Gradual Approaches

  Things can be gradual: I decide to do one thing with a calm mind that is not worried about the future outcome. The point is to keep returning to the tranquil and still mind that is not attached to wandering thoughts. Can one do this even in the midst of tightness, tension, or even the feeling of "I am not in control of my life?"

    Put in another way: do clouds affect the sky? Do they prevent the sky from "happening"? Of course not. If the sky's existence were based on clouds not existing at all, then we would all be in trouble. Under the same token, times when a person feels "pressed", or passes judgment on themselves for not being spiritual enough in those moments, are already in a kind of dualistic bind. This can only be resolved by, at that moment, returning all things to their original source, which is beyond self and other. It needs to come from dropping everything: self, this, that, wanting, craving, delusive, discursive. Don't let it become your overarching reality anyore.

      This requires space: a breath, a time to be silent. Unfortunately, the world of comparing oneself to others doesn't allow for that, and there is always tension around this. Conversely: "I won't be good enough, happy enough, unless I do this", won't suffice.

  

Unconditioned

    Unconditioned mind is hard to really realize directly. The most I have been able to do is to use some kind of metaphor or analogy to get at it. My reflections this evening is that when there are no wandering thoughts in mind, there are spaces for things to simply happen: birds fly, a pine tree shimmers and shakes its topmost branches, some car honks. These things are registered in the blink of an eye, only to become part of the usual narratives of everydayness. Only when there are no labels and there are moments of clarity--pure presence--can I really behold something close to unconditioned. That is because in those moments there is no conceptual filter of self or other, and no intermediating thoughts. The experience has a certain quality that refuses to be described, and is sometimes best caught on camera, provided that one is not too focused on getting the shot correctly.

   As crazy as it sounds, I think that everyday jaunts to the park and behind the school nearby have been giving me some glimpses into stillness, unconditioned mind. I want to bottle it, but it really cannot be bottled, any more than the dragonfly can be caught in an unskillful net. In fact, it seems to be peripheral to the grind of life--again, the dragonfly comes to mind because it cannot be caught so easily, and yet nobody would ever think to seriously catch one.

    But sometimes these glimpses into the eternal serve to make me realize how the knots of the conceptual imprison, keep me chained in the fetters of habit. In daily life, there is certainly a way to bring this in, but one must allow it to come forward rather than aggressively pursuing it. The unconditioned is like a kind of stealthy animal or bird: it does not arrive according to agenda, it is not attracted to fear, and it won't simply respond to one's calls. Nameless, formless, but also demanding the utmost humility from a person: the humility of knowing that one is simply not calling the shots in this game.

   I don't think one should worry too much: just carry on with daily life and sit still and meditate sometimes. But try not to do it in order to achieve something. This would be like trying to walk while standing on one foot. The leaf is ever wise: it drifts quietly off a tree branch without leaving traces of itself everywhere. Its name can be both a noun and a verb: a leaf gently leaving.

The Joy of Attention

  When I experience difficulties at work, I tend to feel distracted and want to rest my mind but at the same time, I feel as though I need to have figured something out in order to give myself permission to rest or do something else. What I have come to experience in myself, however, is that solutions are not so forthcoming, and nor are they predictable. Instead, they seem to come in small "bursts", with no predictable pacing or timing. That's why I think it's important to simply wait---but try to be productive in the midst of that waiting. This is because the waiting I am referring to is deeply productive. It looks for pieces of the puzzle, sifting through various experiences until it arrives at a conclusion or an idea that is worth trying out. The worst thing one can do in that situation is to dissipate the energy of waiting through various distractions such as Youtube or whatnot. The energy of thought, the determination to know the answer, etc. need to be sustained through some kind of focus, even if it means resting the focus by doing something less strenuous (yet productive) while still finding the answers.

   People often forget that creative solutions rely on many outputs and are often the result of a synthesis of ideas across disciplines. To rest from one area doesn't mean that we simply slack off--rather, it might mean drawing from another wellspring in order to feed the current one. So in that sense, it's important to sustain attention, and even make a joy out of the experience of having a tight beam of attention that lacks a clear object (which is essentially a feeling of confusion or "being lost"). Instead of rejecting that feeling of being lost, one must sustain the necessary attention to still remain productive in the midst of that.

Life as a Joy in Spite of...

  I think that when a person realizes that there is nothing to lose, there is an opportunity for joy. There is this parable I have heard in many Buddhist stories, in which a person on the throes of death is dangling over a tree-branch. Realizing that they are about to fall to their death, they take a strawberry from the tree and eat it, savoring it fully.

   I am not exactly sure what the parable means, but I suspect it is something like: true enjoyment comes from realizing the inevitability that we will lose everything. This is no reason for despair, because despair always contains a false hope that things will be better if we are sufficiently sad. When we are children, we likely develop the idea that our parents punish us for doing bad things, and this gets processed as "if I endure the sad things, happiness will come out like the sun emerging from a cloud". But over time, I start to realize that this is a false comfort, and really we should just grab the strawberry, whatever that happens to be in the moment: a sip of coffee, a walk, a tree, a song, a book. 

    There is no reward for doing the "good", or at least appearing to be good to appease others. Instead, it's in letting go of that illusion that the joy becomes within reach because everything is a joy: everything is fleeing like a passing dream, and just like children we can enjoy the kaleidoscope when we know it is not ultimately real; they are just episodes, even the painful ones.

A Hopeless Joy

   From interdependence--the sense that there is no self that is separate--comes the courage to let go and "just be". This comes even in the worst moments or when one is not feeling in control even of one's own body, much less one's destination. 

     But there is a trick to this that is so hard to understand and I think only a few did (Colin Wilson, Gurdjieff etc.). The trick is that we need to just keep walking even when there is no longer ground under our feet--no longer the assurance or the hope that what we do even means anything in the end. This is often achieved only when we have overcome the attachment to tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, which we mistakenly take to be a limit to ourselves--the snake that lies dormant at the end of the world, waiting to swallow us whole.

   This, to me, is the essence of the vow and it's what distinguishes a vow from something that is impelled, compulsory or somehow done with a specific motivation in mind. Nathalie Goldberg perhaps put it best in her advice to writers that they should "keep moving the hand" even when what they are writing seems nonsensical or even antithetical to their familiar sense of self. This is because it is only by doing this that we can go beyond the confines of the familiar, habitual and comforting sense of "I" to embrace a more uncertain yet certainly generative relationship to things. I can only truly create when I trust my hand (and heart, essentially) to guide "me", even when this very "me" has exhausted itself. And in fact, we can practice flexing the muscle of walking into uncertainty through the simple process of free-writing without the beginning, middle or end. This is spontaneity at its finest, but the goal s to finally get the point where we are no longer attached to hope, and we can function just as well without it.

Self-Expectations vs Pressure

  After the meditation today, we were shown a video where Master Sheng Yen discussed how to deal with stress. One point he mentioned that stuck out for me is navigating expectations from others vs self-expectations. I think the difference between the two is that when we have expectations on ourselves, we are able to not fool ourselves into thinking we are "pressured by others". As I understand from Master Sheng Yen, there is a difference between feeling pressed by the external deadlines and taking it upon oneself to do something to the best of one's ability. Whereas the first may seem like stress and pressure , the latter can be a kind of vow that I make for myself.

   The way I think of this is that as long as I strive toward goals that I set for myself and maintain a realistic mindset (not making myself too mentally tense even when the work may be strenuous) then work becomes a source of enjoyment, rather than suffering, and it need not be drudgery. On the other hand, thinking "I have to do this or so and so will be on my case" is hardly a recipe for joy!! And in fact there is no such thing because at the end of the day we choose to feel pressures from outside or, conversely, turn them into responsibilities that we decide to willingly take on. This is a good personal reminder for when I am feeling some sense of pressure.

Morning is Breaking

 I am not a morning person by any means, but I notice that mornings always feel like a kind of womb-like rebirth: the creaking of bones, staggering out of the comfort of a quilt, the groping for the coffee kettle, etc. Mornings feel cold when I need to emerge from the cocooned warmth of my bed. Without the first sip of coffee, I wonder if mornings can be appreciated for what they are.

   Mornings, for me, symbolize two things: the primordial fear of regressing to a beginning (the fear of amnesia, perhaps) and the promise of a reset or a reappraisal of things as they "really" are without the layers of interpretations that come from whirring and buzzing thoughts. But I think the important point is to see that mornings are both continuations of previous days and new beginnings. Mornings represent a mind that is always there, present, and clear, even when we are clouded by dreams, thoughts, fears of the day, worries about the future.

     The empty canvas always seems daunting, until we start to fill it, but what if there is nothing to fill, and we can allow the flowers, the trees and whatever we are beholding to simply grace the canvas as they emerge or arrive? Maybe sometimes the canvas itself becomes part of the work of art, something that doesn't need too many strokes; only the lightest paintbrush that hints at forms without insisting that we attach to those forms or treat them as fixed and real.

Every Moment Has Wonder

 I think that it's important not to think of wonder as something out of this world, or "supramundane", but to see the wonderful in the ordinary. It's a kind of choice to reset oneself in the present rather than being off into an uncompleted future. Now the trick to this, I think, is not about trying to glean some kind of wonderful experience embedded within something, but to have an attitude of "you are in the right place to be a part of something". It's here that the sense of wonder can ripen because it comes from faith and confidence that the moment is suited to one's abilities, skills and flourishing. I don't need to wait for another moment for this to happen. It's quite simply enjoying and reveling in what might seem obvious to some at first but is a discovery for someone with new eyes.

The Public Duty

 When I reflect on the many practices of bodhisattvas, I am thinking that there must be times when compassion is too overwhelming, and there are simply so many afflictions that we undergo. But to be simple, I like to believe that all relationships are about the mind, which is neither "private" nor "public": that is, it neither exists "out there" in some other world that is beyond my seeing, or "in here". So, the whole idea that we need to save all these beings or do something for everyone---maybe it's not so overwhelming once it's understood that the field of mind is endlessly present. It's not something in the distant future that needs fulfillment but it is what is always unfolding in the now. When this is reinforced, then there is no longer some struggle to reconcile the opposites of public and private.

  Put it in a different way: sometimes, you experience the conflict between what you feel and how you think you're supposed to feel, so there is some effort to put on a face. Then you imagine there is this conflict between inner and outer. But in act, even the concepts of inner and outer are just two separate moments, two separate thoughts that don't conflict at all. They are passing moments. One doesn't interact with the other or get in the way of the other. The notion of something I need to do "out there" is only a projection that I created. Whatever is needed to be done is actually what is already present to me in the moments I inhabit.

The Feeling of Nothing to Prove

   Every so often, I get this feeling that all along, I created fake and ridiculous difficulties for myself, believing that I needed to prove something either to myself or to others. The result is a kind of stiffness in my body and mind--an inability for the energy to flow naturally, which then creates the vicious cycle of not feeling alive in the presence of others. It is as though I were carrying this cardboard cutout of a self that I thought was my true being for so many years, only to realize the the cardboard is too cumbersome for me, and it is really very tiring to live like this. I got this feeling today while I was having a lunch with my co-workers. I sensed somehow that life is very simple: get up, go to work, try to be of help based on what you know, and so on. There is simply nothing to prove: we all do our best and work hard, but even work itself is a constantly going concern. What I accomplished yesterday has nothing to do with today, and will have little to do with tomorrow. And so when I think this way, I feel as though this burden were taken away from me, and I could truly be alive around people because I don't feel I need to prove anything to them. This feeling is only brief, but I wonder if I can keep trying it out until ..or maybe that too is just another fake self that I am trying to put on to prove something? Alas, so much for the illusion of technique! But what I experienced today might be something like the experience of wu-wei. And it would be hard to replicate such an experience around total strangers.