Spiritual Self-Inquiry - Spiritual teacher's blog. The teacher/student relationship. Are spirituality and therapy compatible?

First Thing

8/7/2018

first thing

in the morning
I have my chance
to grab the day
and be ready
mind and spirit
body and soul

what choice
do I make first thing
as the sun rises
and I feed the cats and
I think on
the one hundred things
I want to do with a ‘free’ moment
like this
this morning

why isn’t every moment free-
what makes it free
other than my will
and how I do a task
and how I greet the day
that greets me?

in the morning
I have my chance
to say good bye
to yesterday’s follies
to bring this dawn
to birth with my
own intent
change night to day
change the many
scattered moments
to one
strong
willed
prayer
to
day

Found Time

7/30/2018

today I laid my roses to rest
their long stems gently strewn to
criss cross in garden grasses and forsythia
and a thousand other plants
hungry to live and grab sky

blood red found art
with green skeletal lines
sixty blooms for sixty years
hungry for light
now it is all found time

Dawn

1/30/2017

Well here you are. In your life. It is not happening tomorrow or yesterday. It is happening now. Mystics might say that all is happening simultaneously: past, present, future. Yet you have only a grasp of your past, to some greater or lesser extent, and an anticipation of your unforeseen future. Is your fate already present in some way, opaque to you but easily read by some all seeing one? Is your fate inscribed in your will, your ambition, your blindnesses? Whatever it may be, it remains unknown to you.

As if arriving at a party that has been going on for thousands of years, you attempt to take stock of the lay of the land. Decision after decision has been made without your input. In addition, your own talents and attributes are only partially in your power. You did not choose your parents (unless in some mysterious way before your birth) nor your height, eye and hair color. You have no control over what diseases may have come with your genetics, although you can influence your health in many ways. Like one of a handful of seeds cast into the wind you land, whether on rock or loamy soil, and consider.

What is in store for you? Are you angry or grateful? Do you rail against it all, appealing to fairness-shouting out to the vast, tangled beyond? Will you, like someone once told me, “Punch out God’s eyes” when you finally see him in fury at all that has befallen you? Punch His lights out to render your opinion of His gift of life? No. You pause, take a deep breath, and ask your first questions. How shall I live my life? What is my purpose? How do I design a life that reflects this purpose?

You have a feeling of urgency. Like some race horse before the bell, your eyes, partly blinded by dark leather, see only the path in front of you. You paw the earth and inhale the sweat of the trembling bodies around you. Then you burst forth, with no sense of direction other than that which is offered by your sliver of vision. Pounding soil, breathing dust, gathered into a ball of tight, insistent energy you rush until you have grown weary with the years. Finally you ask, Where have I arrived? Where am I headed? Sourceless, yet bound by the restless energies of life and passion to move ever forward- the grace of wonder opens up a question, albeit dark and terrible: Am I moving toward a destination or mere end?

If you have the wherewithal, you work to determine your life’s design with reference to a focus. And yet, merely to ask the question, what is my focus, you will have already used many breaths. No matter. Where do you want to go? You decided on the most insistent of the questions that knocks on your soul. Why am I here? A dialogue begins wherein you are both interlocutor and subject.

   I am here to find out why I am here.

   With what capacity can you even attempt to find out? Aren’t you profoundly    limited in your    abilities?

   I am, but there remains no choice for me. I must ask. The urgency I feel will    not allow me to rest my head if I cannot come to understand this mystery of    my life.

   Ah, so you recognize it as a mystery, then?

   Yes-a mystery that I am and see. It can be described with no less a word than    mystery.

   A mystery of terror and wonder.

   Yes, of terror and wonder.

Surprised, you notice that you are fully capable of two entirely different voices. You can question and answer easily. Like a sharp scalpel that you never knew you had, you twist the blade this way and that, conducting a surgery on the fathomlessness of your own existence. A new wonder arises. How is it possible that you can both ask and answer?

The blistering sun is reflected on a thousand peaks of water in the vast ocean of nothingness that stretches before you. Tempted to shield your eyes, you nevertheless open them and gaze steadily forward. Blinders removed, a new question rises up within in you. Am I Self? you ask. You are Self, you answer.

January 12th, 2017

1/12/2017

If I were going to write fake news I think I would begin with some good old fashioned wish fulfillment. Psychotherapists use the phrase ‘wish fulfillment’ to describe the type of dream that pictures what the dreamer is wishing for but unable to attain in waking life. My first headline might be something like this, Surge in Giraffe and Cheetah Populations Confound Scientists. Or perhaps, Widespread Tiny House Movement Reduces Carbon Footprint. Unsettling as the fake news phenomena might be, it is also an opportunity to be creative. As I gather my wish fulfillment headlines, I would throw in: Artists to Receive Annual Grants and Artists to be Given Tiny House Retreats on the second page of my newspaper.

Writing fake news is a wonderful assignment for a writing or therapy group. One option would be to describe your fear in the form of news, say Protectionism Leads to the Return of the City State, or Man Jailed for Cloning Tyrannosaurus. Imaginative exercises give us the opportunity to track the voices of our unconscious, and mine them for the jewels they shelter. There is great mystery to intelligence. We ourselves, while we take ourselves to be the source of intelligence are actually more like the recipients or witnesses of Intelligence. Of course, we quickly claim to be the cause of the wonders that unfold within us, but in truth we are no more the source of them than we are the source of the color of our hair or the height of our bodies. These gifts are granted us with human birth.

I would write headlines of a mystical nature. Woman Discovers that she is Emptiness, or Second Childhood Holds Key to Wisdom. Describing incidents occurring during live news on TV, I might say: Hit by Insight, Reporter Walks off Set. While I’m at it, I would revise commercials to say what they really want to say. The real message of every advertisement is that buying a particular item will grant you Infinity (like the car) or Inner Peace, (like a vacation) or Satisfaction (like coffee). Are we not better off when we drop the material representations of our psychic requirements and attempt to describe that which we truly crave without reduction?

The real questions, the ones which are answered pre-reflectively by what we are sold or induced to buy are profound spiritual and philosophical questions. What is Infinity, and can a human attain it? Can satisfaction be found within the contingencies of Space and Time? What is Inner Peace, and if it cannot be purchased, how is it to be attained?

Intelligence, the Intelligence that we are, has infinite creativity. While we take ourselves to be the source of this creativity, we are actually the recipients of it. Once, while walking along a stream and marveling at the rocks and the water-the water shapes the rocks over the aeons while placement of the rocks determines the flow of the water-I contemplated the muse. The way I experience inspiration is always as an interest and then as a question. My interest in this case was the mutual determination of the rock by the water and the water by the rock. Mystified, I began as series of sculptural vessels replicating this mystery in a multitude of incarnations. On this particular day my soul resonated with the qualities of the near eternity I saw in the rock, and utter fluidity of the water. My muse led me further and further upstream both in my reflections and literally along the water’s edge. What intelligence my muse has, I thought, what magnificent depth!

Then it dawned on me. I am the muse! This voice of mystery is mine; not as a finite individual ridden with flaws and torments, but as the Self which seeks to wake up as me.

New headlines flower forth. Waking Up is Natural if One Steps Out of the Way, and Woman Discovers She is Not What She Took Herself to Be. I continue my journey upstream. It leads me to read, in the symbolism of our activities as humans, all the barely hidden mysteries of ourselves as Self. Each advertisement is presented as if it is an answer to a koan. Each psychic complaint that my clients bring me are poorly articulated and yet perfect descriptions of their disconnection from Self. I can’t bear that I have to die, or I must be perfect but I always make mistakes, and I wish I didn’t need anyone. The study of our representations of freedom and self-sufficiency, whether in advertisements, our dreams or our made up fake news all lead us inward to self- discovery.

Still Point Arts Quarterly.

On Throwing Things Away

9/28/2016

It’s not easy to throw things away. Not for some personalities. That ugly fabric, there might be a use for it. The sandals that don’t look as fresh as they did, maybe I’ll use them for a walk on a rainy day when I don’t want to ruin my new ones. Single bed sheets-I don’t have a single bed anymore but they might do in a pinch. Not the fitted one, perhaps, but surely that top sheet can be useful?

Throwing things away means so many things. It means that you no longer have a purpose for the thing, and maybe it was a mistake to buy it. The notion of ‘mistake’ is a loaded one. It suggests fault as much as trial and error; waste and a carelessness in decision making. Perhaps it is the refusal to admit an error that keeps one from throwing something away. Do we live in an environment of our own making? One that we have outgrown? Is our childhood dresser still in our adult bedroom? Does our clothing fit well, or did we miss the fact that it is no longer flattering?

Mistakes can weigh heavily on the soul. Maybe that’s why, when I am exploring fabric dying with a squirt bottle and a damp cloth spread out on plastic on my table I am reluctant to toss an ugly piece. It really was beautiful just moments ago, before the dye spread into such dark blotches. The mountain scene looked stark and powerful against the old tweed. The tweed was a previous mistake, dyed while being washed in proximity to one of another color and hence condemned to practice. Why don’t I declare ‘uncle’? Sometimes my art studio resembles the house where Dr. Seuss’s Thing One and Thing Two carried on a rampage.

Not yet prepared to toss my ugly fabric I wait before making the final judgement that is actually already obvious. I go through the motions of washing the cloth in cold water to set the dye. Then I dry it and iron it, my playful joy fading with each step. I still won’t let go. It’s as if my beautiful mountains remain there somehow hidden by the color’s violent expansion. Finally, with relief and determination, I toss the stuff. My good sleep the night before and the fresh morning light helps me. I am immediately relieved. It’s gone! I can begin fresh. There is a much nicer piece pinned to my bulletin board (a success by the way! I used a neutral fabric to upholster a half inch piece of foam insulation. With two panels I was able to create a wall-sized surface on which to pin my work.)

Art is a series of decisions. Which lines to keep, which to cut away or paint over. How to frame. The glass artist, Catherine Newell, showed me how to create a frame with four strips of cardboard. She showed me how to move it around on my image until I found the portion I liked. There is a moment, when you make a choice, that the soul says, ‘Ah, that’s it!’ This satisfaction, mysterious and certain, offers relief to the wandering soul. We seek harmony and meaning-the reflection of certainties deep within us that we long to see and express.

There is always a movement toward simplicity that acts on the underside of an acquisitive society. Perhaps it is the medicine needed by the capitalist world where every open public space is littered with advertisement. Marie Kondo urges us to keep only what ‘sparks joy’-ruthlessly tossing everything else. She is followed with ardent fervor. Those who succeed in attaining her stringent discipline of discarding are new people, converted, with thanks, to the Spartan school of beauty and need.

Others long for a tiny house, seeking a cure to their malaise by purging their excesses: get rid the thousand moments of self-indulgence that now lay scattered in ever too small spaces! In my art, I too, purge. That added bloat of spread dye, the extra embellishment that ruins a piece, the interesting turned grotesque by too much texture-all swept away once I resolve myself to the rule of rendering only what is needed, and not more.

Aristotle compared good writing to the human body. In the body every part has a function. There is nothing in the body that is not needed. When we see the slim and fit we enjoy, not just lustfully, but as meaning. Socrates, when he described the levels of representation, used the body as an example of an early representation. What is wanted in the Form of the Good is first seen in the athlete.

The Shakers, too, discovered purity in vision by removing all excesses. Who doesn’t sigh in relief upon seeing their simple, elegant forms-inventions dictated by use and translated into graceful wooden tools, baskets and chairs. Their barns, tall and regal, stare out at us with faintly stern but edifying grace. We hunger for something that their song suggests, “Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free…”

One of my own feelings about art is that it should be beautiful. A simple enough statement, perhaps, but witness the expanses of idiosyncratic art. Art made as self-expression where beauty is not relevant. Art that is there to express the strange, or the different for difference’s sake. On the other hand, art that depicts the universal has staying power through the centuries. The essential in art parallels the universal in philosophy, where the mind can finally come to rest. Picasso’s mother and child is every mother and child. Rembrandt’s woman is every woman.

A temptation might be to throw out the idiosyncratic. Are the wrong lines of our lives merely self-insistences? Do we reveal our misguided visions by elevating out individual significance over the universal? Are we all just bad art?

To answer this we have to turn to the mystics. It is not our goal to eliminate ourselves in service of the real. That is the failure of religion. Rather, it is to step aside so that the real can appear. Here, truly, is the ultimate mystery. How are we ourselves representations of the Real? Can we know ourselves as both ‘this one’ and Self?

I throw out more of what doesn’t work. I am energized. I assign myself the task of finding peace in the balance of colors, the allure of space. I will work until my mind finds peace even if that means I will work for a very long time.

Shibori, an Exercise in Seeing

7/4/2016

I am sharing my upcoming essay for Still Point Arts Quarterly here as a teaser for a new group I am forming. The group is called Art and Perception. Each session will begin with an art exercise and be followed by a discussion exploring the meanings to be found in our work. If you are interested in this group, please contact me.

~

You’ve probably seen it without knowing what you’ve seen. You might mistake it for simple tie-dye, although shibori is much more exciting. It is showing up in clothing, pillows and sheets and even rugs.

This ancient technique of hand dying originated in Japan and comes to us through the centuries with the beautiful aesthetic of Japanese culture. As they did with poetry, refining and clarifying until they had created the most elegant forms (think haiku, the three lined jewel, tanka, a five lined poem which ventures to more personal themes than haiku, and haiga, which combines haiku with an image-just to name a few) the Japanese explored and refined shibori until they had created an elegant and surprisingly precise language of pattern. Using indigo dye and natural fabrics these patterns were dislayed in kimonos, robes and costumes. The modern fabric artist can borrow techniques centuries in the making.

Matsukaze arashi means ‘Wind in the Pines.’ It is a shibori pattern formed by wrapping cloth counterclockwise on a pole at a 45 degree angle. Thread is then wrapped around the fabric on the pole in the opposite direction. Then the fabric is compressed on the pole and the pole dipped in an indigo vat. Both predictable and yet random since the maker can not know exactly how the pattern will emerge, arashi is stirring, like wind, and evokes a feeling of both movement and detail.
Boards and clamps are used to create the kikko pattern, or tortoiseshell. Here the fabric is folded and clamped into a neat triangular stack. After submersion in an indigo vat, the fabric is unfolded carefully to reveal a precise but trippy pattern of hexagons with shadowy triangles meeting at their points in the centers.

Folds, clamps, resists were explored and cataloged until each pattern can be reproduced. The folds, clamps and various methods of resist prevent the dye from penetrating the fabric all the way, and hence create a pattern. Thread brings in another set of binding techniques. Midori shibori is a pattern called ‘willow leaf.’ It is produced by pleating and binding sections with thread. Modern shibori dyers can use rubber bands, but don’t picture the garish star-like patterns of 1960’s tie-dye. The refined resist and indigo work of ancient Japan transcends this splashy version.
In my own work with shibori I gratefully accepted the modern person’s conveniences. My indigo vat didn’t come from my own cultivated indigo plants, but was ordered from Amazon as a kit. Rather than thread and twine, I used rubber bands. My poles were pieces of drainage pipes and my binding wood pieces were the stir sticks givenaway by paint shops and squares of balsa wood from craft shops. My patterns emerged equally entrancing nevertheless.

I started with raw, slightly tinted sheets of linen. Washing the fabric first to remove any residue coatings, I bound and tied my pieces before submerging them briefly in cool, clear water in my sink. After pressing out the extra water, I dipped my wrapped pieces, one by one, into my vat-a cobalt blue Lowe’s bucket on my counter filled with the indigo dye I had mixed. In the indigo vat a foamy froth develops on the surface, a bit like the foam that can form in a homemade soup. This foam is called an indigo ‘flower.’ My instructions say I should remove it, but I am too reluctant to do so, as if this foam contained the essence of my indigo. So I leave indigo ‘flower’ that had bloomed on the surface of my dye and simply swish it aside as I dip my fabric. Careful to avoid introducing oxygen to my vat, I help my pieces down with copper wire hooks left over from some other project and now adapted to a selection of hooks in various lengths.

After dipping, I left my cobalt blue bundles to rest for a good hour. The excitement was pressing. Even as I did my other tasks, I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting back to the tight indigo presents I had made for myself, siting on my plexiglass covered kitchen counter.
When I finally rinsed and then unfurled my pieces I was delighted and awed. My inexpert handling of the fabric and dye yielded marvelous variations; shading and pattern repetitions with ghost-like octaves in fainter and fainter blue.

As I went on into my day (which in my case means meeting with my psychotherapy clients) the images of the shibori seemed to be whispering in the back of my mind. The cognitive understanding that I was undertaking with my clients as we explored their relationship patterns was haunted by an echo. This echo was the repetitious and varying patterns of the shibori cloth I had made. Pattern, so disturbing sometimes when to the person who has unknowingly been living one has the opposite aspect in art.

Later, ironing my jewels and marveling again at the indigo markings-strange, pattern-like yet shifting from the sterile regularity of factory made cloth-the conversations from the day returned. ‘Aren’t these the same patterns,’ I wondered. ‘Yes, they are the same, for sure,’ I thought. It seemed to me that the patterns of human relationship were replicated in the cloth. This is after all what concerns us. Working its way through the layers of our unconscious, the representation, like a lotus flower breaking the surface of the water, emerges in art. The swishy burst of Willow (yanagi shibori) is the pattern of closeness then distance between a husband and wife. The dizzying pattern of mokume shibori (Wood Grain) pictured a dense and conflicted family. Itajime, with its pleasant repetition of softened triangles is a healthy and restorative relationship supported by personal ritual. Here they touch, here they grow apart-painted in indigo the dance of our love lives finds its voice. The indigo shapes seem to shift in a comforting rhythm, almost like music. I felt quite sure that the patterns were communicating to me. Pattern is, after all, what we both hate and love depending on what is repeated.

Ordinarily, among the people who come to see me, pattern is frightening when discovered. Perhaps, as is often the case, you find that you married your parent. Of course, not your actual parent, but the pattern of your childhood has been instinctively reproduced against your conscious intentions. Perhaps this is the truth that Sophocles recognized when he wrote Oedipus Rex.

Not all patterns are stultifying. Some we create and will, especially, perhaps, when we create ritual for health or celebration. The body loves repetition. Sleep better when you keep a pattern for sleep. Be stronger when you build your body with a pattern of exercise. The moments of celebration we choose for the fabric of our lives can be happy repetitions. The generations themselves are repetitions of discovery. Each child discovers the butterfly, what walking and tumbling is, what love is.

There are dark patterns, too. The darkest blue indigo-almost black-you feel trapped as if guided by an unseen and diabolical hand. You are steered steadily and without knowing how to repeat what you so yearn to be freed from.

I don’t know where my explorations of shibori will take me. I feel that I am listening to a voice as much as I am creating. That which is beautiful in the abstract-repetition with small variations-can be frightening as lived. From where do these patterns arise? Could we, with great care and perception identify ourselves right there, in the pattern we have created? Is the distastefulness of a blotched pattern a strange representation of what it means to leave the security of a pattern that we live? If we venture too far outside of the norm of our society, is the life we encounter splotchy like an aborted pattern?

I am certain that pattern speaks of meaning. At the Johnson Museum on the Cornell campus, just up the hill from where I live, there is an exhibit of aboriginal Australian abstract art. Paintings in bold colors of line and dot are displayed with small typed explanations. What might appear to us to be a childlike drawing is in fact a story of personal history, or even a map of home and that which is not home.

Perhaps, by undertaking a study of pattern we could indeed discover depictions of relationships. As I iron my cloth, letting the deep blue become a permanent part of my fabric, I reflect on the nature of choice and artistry. As if some unseen hand guides us, we follow our muse and determine what seems beautiful. We are not the source of our determinations, however, any more than we are the source of what inner workings have led us to love one person and not another. Our freedom, in as much as we have it, lies in discovering the meanings that are already present. Our actions and our art reveal our hearts.

I am indebted to the book, Shibori, The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Mary Kellogg Rice and Jane Barton for technical information about shibori.

You are the Mountains, You are the Sky

4/11/2016

In the field of psychology there is a famous test known as the Rorschach. You’ll recognize this test by the ink blot images it is known for. In the test, the recipient is shown a series of abstract, roughly symmetrical shapes and asked to comment on them. The test taker might see two people kissing, or a couple of horses galloping, or simply a storm cloud threatening on the horizon. It is the imagination of the test taker that offers information to the tester. The beauty of the ink blot test is that the images don’t actually represent anything! The tester witnesses the recipient’s mind directly and intuitively in the remarks and imagery that the recipient offers.

Another tool from the field of psychology is the identification and analysis of human defense mechanisms. The terms that psychologists use to describe these mechanisms are now so common that they are easily, and often accurately, used by lay people. We speak of denial, rationalization, and displacement in our ordinary language, but the terms originated in psychology. The most significant defense mechanism, in my opinion, is projection. A well known discussion of this psychic mechanism is described by Jungians who discuss it as the shadow. The shadow side of a person is his dark side. He may project this side onto another person. Hence the animosity one may feel towards someone who exhibits one’s own flaws. The 1940’s fictional character, the Shadow, was inspired by the Jungian discussion. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Projection plays a role in all of our relationships. In Jungian psychology the discovery of and analysis of these projections is key to psychic health. We project psychic meanings onto others. The goal of analysis is to help the person reintegrate the aspect they have projected. Bringing back into oneself what one has projected precipitates an internal conflict. Where previously the individual attempted to work out contradictory traits and interests through projection, the reintegration of projections shifts the conflict from the interpersonal realm to an internal one. This is true whether one loves or hates one's projected aspect.

Archetype refers to universal human qualities. For example, there are feminine and masculine archetypes. The warrior, or the nurturing mother may reach the elevation of archetype. An individual person may represent an archetype to us, and this picturing of a meaning in an individual is another sort of projection. The failure of actual person to carry the value of the archetype can be a source of unhappiness. Take ‘mother’ for example. There is the particular person who is our mother, but there is also the archetype, mother. Relative to the archetype mother; the great nurturer, many mere human beings don’t measure up.

The artist works intuitively with imagery. The images that the artist chooses can, with care, be traced back to psychic meaning that concern the artist. Even the abstract artist who attempts to use only color and not image cannot escape psychic picturing. Color itself relays meaning. Rarely would the artist undertake an analysis of their imagery, perhaps even eschewing such an effort as an obstacle to the dream like lure of the muse. For me, though, reflections on projections illuminate the dream and lead me further along my spiritual path.

It is also inevitable that we project our own visions and thoughts onto a landscape, or scenes in nature. This is as common as projections onto a person. Take, for example, a small tree growing ‘bravely’ on a precarious precipice. We have all seen those miracles of nature. Perhaps you have been as struck as I by the lone pine tree at a cliff’s edge, or the hardy mountain laurel nestled in a tiny crevice surrounded by wind and rock. What do these real life images say to you? Do you momentarily project human attributes onto these plants? Do they seem ‘lonely,’ ‘strong,’ or ‘frightened’? They do to me.

My extensive exploration of orchid pots in my work as a potter was stimulated by a projection. How brave the little orchid, needing so little, offering so much in its luscious and subtle blooms seemed to me. I spent months devising the perfect orchid pot. I left openings for the ariel roots that would extend and intwine. I patterned my hand built pieces with impressions from Indian wooden print blocks. I fired them in a raku kiln so that they would suggest the rustic environment that the wild orchid thrives in.

I felt that I myself was a kind of orchid. Raised with little, I learned to be self-sufficient and imaginative. Living on air and the micronutrients that travel by air, I am content in a small place. Like a cat, I can make a home anywhere. Sturdy, self-reliant and, with my words, or in my youth, lovely. In a way, the orchid is both showy and hidden. I am like that, too. The orchid seems to do so well what I aspire to do: thrive on nothing, bring beauty to those with the patience to seek it.

Natural scenery offers an infinite number of opportunities for discovering one’s mind-because that’s what it is to clarify one’s projections. Imagine yourself at an overlook in the Blue Ridge Mountains. From where you stand you see an ocean of space with waves of silent, still mountains fading into the distance. You see the gradations of color; first deep green, then blue green and finally a whisper of gray fading into cloud. Are you not yourself as wide and as expansive as space when you see such a scene? Don’t you, by the magic of projection, imagine the freedom of soaring through the skies, unlimited by the hundred contingencies of your daily life? For a moment, with your inhale, aren’t you yourself space?

What if this spaciousness that you feel were an aspect of who you truly are? Better yet, what if spaciousness is the visual representation of yourself as free awareness? We know the mystics use that word when describing their consciousness.

We can inquire into our projections onto scenes in nature for the health of our own spirit. The expansiveness of a vista might call on us to experience a loving expansiveness toward others. Discovering the direction our muse wants to take us might also be understood as coming to understand our own spirit voice, or inner teacher. For psychic health and self-clarification, we can learn to identify and then internalize our projections. As I suggest this, please don’t recoil into an intellectual stance. If you do, you will be disappointed. Remain with the imagery alive. Then notice, no, recognize yourself in the imagery. Doing so will galvanize both your spiritual and artistic energies.

turning my eyes
to my shoes
from the mountain vista
I notice I’m pretending
to be a woman and not the sky

Solve or Dissolve?

3/21/2016

When people come to see me they hope to solve a problem. It is possible to solve certain orders of problem. For example, you can make a decision. With your decision you hope to make the best choice and you understand that you may be eliminating certain options that were also attractive. For example, you buy a house, or marry a particular partner, or decide on a degree program for your education. In each of these cases you solve a problem with a decision. What you cannot do by decision is retain all options. Nor, ultimately, would you want to. You marry a particular person in part because a monogamous relationship with one person seems richer to you than relationships of less depth with many.

There is a dark side to every decision. The options which you don't affirm in making the decision are lost. The other person, the other career, the other house. You accept this loss because you are making a bid for satisfaction along particular lines.

Other difficulties don’t yield to decision alone. Let’s say you have contradictory interests, or the decision you are required to make by circumstance will eliminate something that is very important to you. You love a particular person, but in order to be with that person you have to live in a place you hate and leave a place you love. The conditions are such that you cannot have both the things you want. If you are not able to transcend or abandon one of these desires you become depressed. Depression is just the psychic aspect being “stuck” wears. Such a situation is truly painful, but it is not the one I want to address, because even in this case the remedy is decision, if a painful one.

The problems that I want to address are even trickier. The root of these problems are your way of seeing. Your way of seeing is constitutive. In other words, the very mind that is trying to escape the problem is itself a case of the problem that it tries to escape.

I once saw a show that illustrated this point nicely. The main character was a paranoid man who spent years building an underground shelter in case of a nuclear holocaust. At a certain point in the movie, he believes the holocaust has begun. Frantic to find his family, he is forced, finally, to take shelter himself without them, and seals off the communication with the world. As the story ends, we see him with his supplies prepared to live out the fate he has so feared. What the audience knows that he doesn't is that he brought it on himself. Outside of his shelter the conditions of life are as they always were-green trees, fresh food, and so on. It was his mistaken understanding of what was happening that caused him to imprison himself in his shelter. He believes he is the lone survivor, but his family mourns him from outside.

Although not a perfect fit, this story suggests what I am trying to describe. In my example the man’s paranoia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Attitudinally the man saw a holocaust. There wasn't actually a holocaust, but because his mind was prepared to see it, he did and his life unfolded accordingly. Mind form is like that, but it is much more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mind form, or way of seeing, is constitutive. It shapes your life so that your life appears to conform to your un self seen vision of life.

So when I ask the question, solve or dissolve? how can I apply it to this problem?

Imagine that you are the type of person who always questions him or herself when something goes wrong. You have a self-faulting personality. If something goes wrong or falls short of your or others’ expectations, you blame yourself. You do this for years. If anything goes 'wrong' you respond by trying harder, not by asking whether or not human failing alone could even be the cause of the trouble. Then one day, in what might seem like a miracle, it occurs to you that you can not yourself alone be the source of the failing in your or others’ lives. I don’t mean that you just get tired of it all and say, in effect, 'the hell with it' (which people sometimes do at a certain point in their lives). I mean that you realize you are attributing to human capacity something does not belong to human capacity. Its not that you don’t have failings. You do, probably many. It’s that what you imagine you can correct by ‘trying hard’ simply can’t be corrected that way.

You begin to feel great relief. You are no longer burdened by the weight of the world. Neither anger towards others or yourself is appropriate to the frequent and commonplace failings of life. You feel relief. Your attitude of self-blame lifts. You have dissolved a problem rather than solved it.

There are many other examples I can describe. Imagine that you are a person for whom the notion of community is central. When you attempt to explain what goes wrong in life, you do so along the lines of this notion. Either you or the other is failing the community. Or, on the other hand, either you or the other is giving too much to the community and failing yourself. Back and forth you go, over and over, attempting to find that elusive balance. How much do I give? How much do I take? How much did that person give? And so on and so forth.

Then you meet a person who has no community notion at all. That person simply sees 'a bunch of people’ where you see a world. You don’t know whether this person is a miracle or a curse. Your chastisement bounces off them like so many rubber bullets. Your praise is absorbed into their own notions of what might be praise worthy about them. You discover, in essence, that you don’t even speak the same language.

What do you do? Do you go to marriage counseling to try and elicit the help of a third party in enlightening your partner as to the nature of community? Or do you return to a self-inquiry, seeking clarity about your own explanation for the negative in life?

Obviously I am a proponent of the latter. We need other people situationally, but we also need them in order to come to see ourselves. It is only through this endless bumping up against one another that we have a shot at identifying our own constitutive ways of being/seeing.

Problems of this order cannot be solved. I’m telling you that but I know you will ignore me. Most likely you will try again and again to redouble your efforts to make right what seems wrong. You will do this along the lines of your own mind form without noticing that you have a mind form.

If you do listen to me I can tell you a secret. The problem of limited seeing is not open to solving by persisting in seeing limited by mind form. You cannot keep your mind form and solve your problems any more than the man in our story could solve his problems without dropping his expectation of a holocaust. His mind form prevented him from asking himself whether the bang he heard so loudly could be anything other than the beginning of the end he was primed for. The problems that arise due to our being limited in our capacity to see are not open to being solved but only repeated endlessly until the mind form itself is dissolved.

An Invitation to a Tea Party

2/21/2016

Early in our lives, my sister and I developed the ability to call a sort of psychological ‘time out.’ Whatever the turbulence of our family life, we could create a hiatus in which to converse cordially about all manner of things. Even during times when we were sworn enemies, we were capable of discussing the nature of our opposition as politely as civil war generals over a pre-battle breakfast.

Sometimes these sessions took place as formal tea parties. One or another of us would extend an invitation. This capacity to set aside the ordinary parameters of our relationship allowed a kind of meta friendship to develop. A dialogue would unfold between us like a dialogue between passengers on a bus: completely frank, impersonal and deeply intimate simultaneously. These conversations were made possible only by abandoning our usual orients. Both my sister and I understood this intuitively. Ours was a precarious meta friendship- it could be violated by either of us with an involuntary return to ego-consciousness. An unduly harsh adjective, or a proffered remark about a too-fresh wound, could interrupt our truce. Yet, balancing on a razor’s edge, with self-concern set off to the side somewhere, we could engage in the most remarkable and edifying conversations. Painful honesty, like mountain air, only heightened my love of the glorious transcendence possible on these occasions.

“Will you have tea?” I would ask my sister in my most formal pseudo-British tone.

“Why yes. Yes I will,” she would respond in a pince-nez voice.

So began our philosophical dialogues. Our themes were the nature of life, the various positions of our family members in an ever changing mobile of conflict, and the divvying up of the talents we had each been granted with our birth. She, it was agreed between us, had the musical talent as well as a mind for math, and a softness that gained her favor with adults. Were she to act outside the wishes of our parents, she could do so with skillful secrecy. I, on the other hand, was the artistic one, with an unfortunate propensity to be abrasive with too-direct interactions with the world around me. While I lost points for my tact-free behavior, I gained for my ability to be honest under all conditions and for my courage not to faint in the face of danger.

After such revelations, when we left the sanctity of our tea party, we would each tiptoe carefully around the edges of our divided up world. I never touched a musical instrument, nor did she take an art class. While in our current lives the joys of any artistic pursuit is free game, during childhood this subtle mutual respect helped us avoid an unhealthy competition. In other ways, too, the wisdom we wrought together with our explorations would inform our lives. Now, many years later, I think on these moments fondly and, startlingly, recognize them as my first experience of what Martin Buber calls the I-Thou conversation.

In adulthood, our world and ourselves seem less fluid. Gone is make-believe and easy transitions between play and responsibility. Some keep the spirit of play more alive than others, and probably most want to, but as we go on in our lives the intractability of our struggles is trenchant. Perhaps my invitation to tea even seems flippant. How can one carry the spirit of play through divorce, or illness, or the impossibly contradictory requirements that we find ourselves subject to from both within and without? Honesty is one ballast. The I-Thou relation is another.

People differ. They differ in their tolerance for conflict and in their aspiration. Some are self-disciplined. They are able to see their goal in a tiny point trembling in the distance. Others fade quickly, unable to stand the desert that lies between them and their desire. Your fate is who you are.

My invitation is an invitation to sit down and frankly explore previously un self-known agendas, and to do so without hedging. People taking a risk in life often have a plan B. The exploratory effort I am suggesting undercuts plan A as well plan B. Ordinarily, since you have a stake in sustaining your make-shift solution, you will hesitate to discuss them. Honesty might blow them apart. In fact, the only reason to do it at all is because you value self-discovery over comfort and persona, or you are so desperate that you are driven to make a leap of faith. Self-discovery may make it impossible for you to continue your resolution. Having discovered the tenuous foundation of your structure, you scramble to reinforce or abandon it. Now would you like some tea?

It is a rare breed of person who develops a taste for the kind of dialogue I am advocating. This dialogue is as tricky as the tasks any hero in an adventure show faces. (In fact, the adventure stories are all based on these psychic truths.) On the other hand, this dialogue is the easiest form of talk. To undertake it, all you have to do is let go of everything. You don’t have to come up with anything. You only stand in the light of truth.

I cultivate the spirit of these careful dialogues in my work as a teacher. My work is an invitation. Join me. Let us prioritize the crisp, dangerous honesty of self-inquiry over emotional responses, self-protectiveness and conflict based agendas. Let’s open ourselves to mountain air, delicious truths with life-changing import, and honor one another as seers and helpmates-we are together in the marvelous mystery of life as a human being. Living the word, Namaste, let’s gentle our wills so that our hearts can soar.

Decision Making as Spiritual Practice

2/2/2016

One symbol that haunted me as a child was the symbol of the cross. It was the central image of the religion in which I was being raised. There, in front of my eyes every time I entered a church, was the representation of a man being tortured to death. I came to see the cross, even the benign ones that lay sweetly on the throats of young Christian women, as a symbol that signified not just a man’s tortured death, but my own inexplicable crime. I was implicated, I was taught, in this man’s death- a death which took place many hundreds of years ago, by a sin I did not consider myself the source of and did not understand. I asserted my innocence, and only after some decades of life came to understand the dialectic of fault and responsibility in my own life.

The cross is the intersect of horizontal and vertical. The horizontal dimension represents the here and now, the expanse of our lives in space and time. The vertical is the line of our aspiration. Reaching beyond ourselves toward the heavens and the azure blue of transcendence, our aspiration draws us upward toward wisdom and peace. I experimented with these lines as an artist. I reflected on them from a psychological and philosophical vantage point.

Our lives are lived out at the intersect of these two planes of being. Our aspiration on the one hand, and our physical, creaturely aspect on the other. Each moment we have the opportunity to adjudicate the forces of horizontal and vertical in our lives. When we face decision, and even when we avoid it, we are casting our vote.

It is a striking feature of human consciousness that we must make decisions. Sartre rightly pointed out, if with a dour attitude, that man is condemned to freedom, and must make decisions with limited knowledge and time. We do this daily. Yet, looking closely, perhaps we can use decision making as a spiritual opportunity.

It is necessary to cultivate inner strength to face the difficult, if beautiful, truths of life. Turning away from truth and weakening oneself in the hundred distractions whittles away your chance. Your chance is your birthright. Your chance is the chance to deepen your awareness, see the mystery of your life and life itself. It is also the chance to attain, through a succession of insights, another order of human reality.

Man is afforded a finite number of opportunities in which to act. The act I refer to is the ability to choose. He has no control over the fact of his limitation as a mortal, physical being. He will never attain complete knowledge. He has little influence over his fellow man, and seemingly only variable success with self-control. He does, however, have the opportunity to make decisions.

To make a decision is an act of will. Several attainments must be achieved in order for an act of will to qualify as decision that is also spiritual practice. I think that first it is necessary to be deeply and fully honest about the matter at hand. You must not turn away or hedge your bets when an opportunity arises. Your goal is to cultivate inner strength as much as it is to make a decision. It will be through your decision making that you will become who you are to become. Honesty means to take a full measure of yourself and your circumstances and the others whose concerns pertain to the occasion of your potential decision. You must not exaggerate nor diminish the facts available to you, including the facts pertaining to yourself. This is not the time for rose colored glasses, although that does not mean that you must cast aside optimism. It may be part of your decision; you may choose to affirm the possibility of success even when success is remote.

An act is only possible when the individual sustains the full awareness of limitation and opportunity. He must bear in himself the horizontal and vertical of his moment in time as he makes this decision. Here the cross takes on a new meaning, new beauty. It is the spirit shining courageously. Facing the contradictions involved in the desire to be infinite when we are finite, sustaining aspiration when we see fully that we are humble- this is the chance that we have been granted. It is a fiery experience. Being honest here means fully facing the costs of any unanticipated outcome to your decision. You may fail. You can make a good decision which turns out badly. You can make a bad decision.

It is necessary that you attain the ability to sustain your decision through time. If you actually made the decision, you will do this. It is possible for an individual to mistake intent for decision. You might, for example, have the intent to change your diet, but when the dismissed food appears, you falter. This is because you didn’t really make the decision. What you did was consider making a decision without affirming that decision to the core of your being. The appearance of the food doesn’t matter. If you made a decision, you already rejected the option of the unhealthy food. There are a hundred reasons to fail in the moment, all of which may have superficial merit. My experience with decision is if you made the decision on a deep enough level, the options are gone.

A third attainment, along with honesty and the ability to sustain your decision through time, is the ability to understand the window of opportunity available to you. Certain decisions must be made within a certain time frame in order to have any meaning. You must decide whether or not to get the surgery, or where to move to when your lease is up. Other decisions are developmental. It may be time to move out of your parents' home, or end a relationship. With these decisions it may not seem so easy to know the exact moment to act. At some point you may become aware that you have avoided making a decision. You waited too long. The window of opportunity, which is not merely circumstantial, is closing. You can’t always see when this happens to yourself, but sometimes you can see when it happens to someone else. This is true in the world of time and space, of moments and things. It is also true inwardly. In language learning it is often said that there is a period of time in a person’s life when learning a second or third language is relatively easy. All capacities are aligned; the brain is at the right moment in development; the social confidence is strong enough. Waiting to learn the language until later in life will be much more difficult, and most likely the person will never develop a native’s accent.

The inward critical timing is harder to describe since we are speaking not about a particular decision but only about decision per se. It seems clear that you can wait too long. The moment for decision can pass. Recognizing this moment involves another sort of personal power. If you fall asleep you will miss your chance.

The final attainment necessary to make a decision is the ability to accept the limitation implicit in the decision you make. You may fail. You don’t want to underestimate this possibility. Don’t use the prospect of failure to weaken your decision. Rather, bear it as truth. While the cross of decision is a cross of opportunity, it remains a cross.

Most of these considerations seem to rest in the horizontal of life. The spiritual dimension, the vertical, is your desire to wake up. When you make your decision, you can make a decision that will help you wake up. By asking yourself, "Will this action help me wake up?" you may find an answer arises to your awareness easily and clearly.

It is a paradoxical question. How can you know what will help you wake up? You don’t know what it is to be awake, and therefore you don’t know what you are trying to wake up from. If you are alert, you are aware that you are suffering. Nevertheless, as we learned from Sartre, we do not have the privilege not to act. We must make or refuse decision. We are forced to consider our circumstances, our intent and then seek an answer with our highest intuition.

When you decide, take the direction you have decided on as fearlessly as possible. Affirm your own gesture by committing yourself to your act. It is through successive efforts of this sort during your lifetime that you gain personal power. Refusing decision does the opposite. It weakens the spirit. For me, making decision is like hearing music from afar. It is a beautiful sound and I want to hear more of it, but I know I will only reach it through a leap of faith.

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