Notes from the Open Path
Notes from the Open Path are short essays written by Pir Elias on aspects of the Open Path — an approach to living wholeheartedly and in clear awareness. The Notes are sent via email at the beginning of each month to those on our mailing list.
Recent Notes, starting with January, 2023, along with a few others, are posted below.
Collections of these essays have been published in Free Medicine — Meditations on Nondual Awareness and Love’s Drum — Sufi Views, Practices, and Stories. (For information about ordering these books, visit our Books page.)
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Notes from the Open Path
Loving Awareness
D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 4
A friend recently told me of a question used by a Zen teacher as he guides his students in meditation. The question is deceptively simple: how is it to be what’s happening?
You might imagine hearing it yourself as you sit quietly, your body still, peacefully breathing. The teacher asks this question — how is it to be what’s happening? — and you realize you’ve been following some stray thoughts even though you’re sitting there calmly. Instead of feeling uncomfortable with that stream of thoughts, you just accept that thinking is happening, peaceful breathing is happening, and your quiet body with its array of background sensations is happening. You might then ask, is it true that I am these happenings? What is he asking? Each of these happenings has already changed, they’re already gone, and everything that’s happening now keeps changing just as instantly, so how can I be them?
It's a pointed and disorienting inquiry. It has the power to loosen our identification with being located — located as a witness, located as a specific subjectivity who’s aware of the world out there. To be what’s happening is to be the very evanescence of the moment and its happenings. How is it to be that?
It might be helpful to pause for a moment as you read this and run through this inquiry in real time — your direct experience will tell you much more than my words can. You can probably do it in less than a minute. Simply ask yourself, how is it to be what’s happening?
For me, the subtlety of the question has the effect of both uniting me with what’s happening and freeing me from it at the same time. I am what’s happening, and I am its vanishing. When I can simply relax in this nondual paradox, I experience being present in a new way. Presence is how it is to be what’s happening — not fixed-in-place presence, but being the current of presence, being the river of it.
If you’ve followed me this far, you may recognize that what I’m calling “presence” here is indistinguishable from awareness. Our sense of presence, of being present with, and in the flow of, what’s happening, is our intimate awareness of it in the moment.
So how is it to be awareness? If we try to answer that question we end up with words like those I’ve used in other contexts: it’s open, and empty, and clear, and transparent, and awake. But these words only go so far, and the beauty of awareness trying to grok itself like this is that it drops the bottom out — awareness can only know itself by being itself — it can’t be a witness of itself. Awareness answers the question of what it is all at once — and it’s this simultaneity of question (how is it to be awareness?) and answer (this!) that for many of us is our first doorway of awakening or realization. I am this that is aware, and as such I have no boundary, no separate place where I am a “me.”
I imagine many of you reading this have welcomed this realization in your lives and have let it ease this not-always-easy experience of being human that we share, and you know it’s a blessing.
My intention here is to suggest what to me is another dimension of our primary question — how is it to be what’s happening? So far we’ve responded to that question — how is it? — with the reply: it’s aware, it’s present, that’s how it is.
Is there anything else we can report about it, anything else we can intuit as we question this most intimate dimension of our being? My sense is there is “something else,” but since it’s inseparable from awareness itself, it’s equally resistant to description.
I remember watching a film of Ram Das sitting in his wheelchair toward the end of his life. He was quietly repeating a mantra: I am loving awareness, I am loving awareness, I am loving awareness. The mantra touched me at the time with its gentleness, but I soon realized that what he was saying reached beyond that gentleness, beyond the obvious sweetness of the word “loving.”
Can we really say awareness is loving? Is that true? We think of awareness as being without qualities, and that quality-lessness ensures that whatever is happening can show up without being colored by anything. Isn’t “love” a quality? Isn't Ram Dass risking some kind of sentimentality here?
This is where we must drop again into our own direct experience and not rely upon words to guide us. One way that may help is to check if there’s any sense you have that your awareness is situated in your head, behind your eyes. If there is, you might allow that sense to gently open to include your chest, your heart center. This is a subtle, somatic move. Stay with the body, with the direct awake quality of awareness, its open, spacious, in-the-moment nature, and let it be equally present in your heart center as it is in your head.
As soon as you make this move, you'll find that the sense of a heart “center” evaporates. There is no center to your heart, it’s not like that. It’s somehow a radiance without a source, without a point from which the radiance comes. Sufis call this ayn al-qalb, the eye of the heart. When we see what’s happening with the eye of the heart, can anything be said about how is it to be that? Not much — only approximations like: it’s warm without temperature, it’s inclusive without need, it’s joyous without emotivity. It’s almost unbearable — how it is to be that.
Being what’s happening in this way, with the eye of the heart, with loving awareness, doesn’t ignore anything — it doesn’t ignore suffering or meanness or the wretchedness people are capable of. It sees all of it, nothing left out — whatever’s happening. And of course, we’re still capable of responding — responding even more accurately and powerfully and appropriately than we could without that sight. To say, “I am loving awareness” is to see through our everyday identity and self-sense and to simply be what’s already here, this shimmering, ungraspable, compassionate presence.
In the end, loving awareness is not something we have to get good at “producing.” We don’t make it happen. It’s what Sufis call “the secret of the secret” — the Great Gift, the indescribable love that gives all this, all this awareness, and you, and me, and everything everywhere, moment to moment. It’s a wondrous, loving mystery without end.
At least, that’s one way of describing how it is to be what’s happening.
At Ease with Uncertainty
N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 4
Here at this moment in America, we’re worried. The election could turn out badly, and then what will happen? Through the crack of that uncertainty all sorts of fears squeeze through, telling their threatening stories. Democracy is at stake! Decency is at stake! Justice, fairness, compassion are at stake!
They are, and they always have been. We’ve been through this before, and we’ve seen the disastrous results of bad choices throughout human history, choices propelled by fear, pride and greed. So now, for us, it’s the American election — it could go badly, or it may not. Either way we’re faced with uncertainty.
Our personal lives swim in the same river of uncertainty, moment to moment. We could have a stroke and die later today. A friend could be hit by a car. The project we’ve been working on could fail. Warfare between nations could erupt. We simply don’t know what will happen next.
So how can we be with this? Is there any way we can be at ease with uncertainty?
There is, and it’s a way that’s both easy and that takes constant practice. It’s not something we can accomplish once and for all, yet it’s easy because it’s already here, present to us, and doesn’t require us to make it real. It’s already real.
One way to describe this practice is that it’s a matter of becoming familiar and friendly with “the still point of the turning world” (T.S. Eliot). The still point (though it’s not actually a point) is where we begin, in this moment and this one and this. Initially — as I imagine you already know — we become familiar with it by sitting quietly and looking deeply into the beginning of the moment. Of course, there’s nothing to see there — it’s a silent, non-locatable quality of simple beingness, and yet there’s an energy there too, a becomingness inseparable from being.
To arrive at the place where you begin is simply to arrive to presence without you, without the story of you, without your memories and thoughts and identity. It’s a “place” both humble and majestic. But however we might describe it, the key is to become familiar with this place of quiet spaciousness directly, without any descriptions. Simply open to this placeless place where you begin, where the moment itself begins, and relax there, for a moment.
As you know, there are many ways to describe this move — for thousands of years it’s been the job of spiritual traditions to encourage us to open into this place of peace within us, in one way or another — this place where everything starts.
It’s not a place we can stay in very long, at least it doesn’t seem to be for most of us. The turning world calls us out, and it sweeps our lives and feelings along with it. But when we touch this place we are calmed, and the uncertainties of the big turning world, and the uncertainties we face in our private lives, for a while don’t have quite the same traction on us. Of course, at some point we lose the ease we’ve been given, and once again we may feel anxious about what might happen next. But we have this medicine now, we’re familiar with it and can touch this place where we begin whenever we feel anxious or out of rhythm.
A Zen master referred to these brief touches of the still point, the place where we begin, as “the bounce.” We sit quietly and open ourselves for a moment to pure presence, touching the egoless still point, and then we bounce back into the world’s turning and its uncertainties, steadier now from that illumination, at ease, less subject to fear and better able to respond to what is with love and creativity. And then, when the world becomes too much for us, we “bounce” — or return back — to remembering the still point, the primordial radiance where we begin. After a while this bounce happens naturally, without effort or conscious intent. You feel yourself getting out of balance and there’s an inner correction that happens by itself. Now the still point isn’t something that you have to find — it’s here — and the bounce happens almost instantly.
It’s a playful image, this bouncing, and yet it points to something many of us experience as we try to integrate our nascent spiritual realization with our concerns for the precarious world. Of course, our resilience to “bounce” from the uncertainties of the turning world to the peace of the still point doesn’t prevent things from turning out badly, but it does allow us to be present to what comes with a greater degree of ease and understanding, and not add to the general anxiety of our times.
Viva Sandino!
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 4
Nearly 40 years ago I took the photo above of a bullet-riddled street corner in Managua, Nicaragua. My wife, Rabia, and I had gone there as part of a Witness for Peace delegation to bear witness to the Contra war that our country was funding against the newly victorious Sandinista government. Despite the Contra war it was a heady time in Nicaragua — the people were at last rid of the Somoza dynasty that had oppressed them for 44 years. There was a palpable joy in the streets — people were so happy to be free! The future felt positive and wide open. The people! United! Shall not be defeated!
Of course, it didn’t last. The U.S. government and business interests kept suppressing them, internal jealousies and distrust divided the Sandinistas, and now Nicaragua isn’t so much better off than it was under Somoza.
When I think of all the other good causes for freedom and justice I’ve worked for in my life — civil rights, nonviolence, peace, defense of the natural world, indigenous land rights — I have to admit that all of them still face a daunting gradient. Is this Sisyphus’s mountain?
Having recently turned 80, I can’t help but look back and ask this question. All the courageous efforts of all the deep-hearted people I’ve worked with along the way, were they in vain? Is our species destined to devolve into endless skirmishes with itself in a degraded world?
No, in spite of everything, I don’t believe that’s our destiny. But how can I say that? What evidence can I point to that this world of ours is indeed evolving toward freedom and justice and goodness?
As you might expect, I don’t have much compelling evidence. Whatever progress I might point to could be countered by other forceful, damning evidence to the contrary. I can only appeal for evidence to something that sounds intangible and poetic, but to me is the only power that can overcome the violence and selfishness that’s rampant in our world.
It’s there in that photo. Do you see that silhouette figure someone stenciled on the bullet-riddled wall? That’s an iconic image of the revolutionary hero Sandino, slightly bent, his hands clasped behind his back, no weapon, standing peacefully, attending to what is before him. The figure looks somehow kindly and natural. And it seems to float there, both out from the wall and within it. As an iconic spirit it’s neither a religious symbol that redeems us from the hard struggle that the wall represents, nor is it a political symbol of resistance to the bullets that hit there. It says something else.
It says, to me, that this struggle is an old, old story — the story of domination and freedom, fear and love. It’s a struggle that won’t end tomorrow, and maybe not ever, not completely. But the very naturalness of that figure, almost nonchalant, says to me that our natural kindness and dignity does, and will, prevail, and the ferocity of those bullet holes will eventually be swallowed by the entropy that is their nature.
That figure on the wall is looking at us, and we at him. We are him, and we know it. His naturalness is ours. He stands, we stand, attending to what is, slightly bent by it all, but kind nevertheless. He’s kind. We’re kind. I believe it’s that kind, friendly, dignified spirit that will prevail, that will define our destiny as a species, and does so even now. It will be pummeled for sure — belittled, shot, gassed, bombed — but it will prevail because, in the essence of things, this very kindness and dignity is our true nature, closer to us than any fears we may harbor.
I don’t say all this as an appeal to hope, or to assuage my disappointment in the ways our world is breaking apart, and I'm assuming you share some of that same disappointment. I say it to remind us that this is an old story, one that our ancestors struggled with forever and now it’s our turn. They have bequeathed to us this moment when we can recognize what we are a part of, and be thankful for this kindness that rises so naturally in our hearts.
Good News
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 4
“…to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
— Walt Whitman
Why did Whitman say such a thing? Luckier? What’s lucky about dying? And yet, when we read that line, something about it makes us smile, at least for a brief moment. It’s as if we know what he means, even though we don’t believe it. To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
I’m an old man now, more “proximate to death” than I’ve ever been. Many of my friends are dying, this one, that one, and it looks like it’s going to happen to me too. It makes me wonder, once again, what’s it like to die? What happens? Of course, the standard answer is: No one knows!
That may be true, but the fact remains that dying and death are an essential event in life, an event that’s been shared by all creatures for millions upon millions of years. We don’t have to believe in reincarnation to imagine that some clues about this essential experience — death — might somehow be embedded in and even accessible to our intuitive capacity as living beings.
Now many people simply say that when we die nothing happens. There’s no consciousness, no experience, simply blankness, nullity. I’m not so sure. As I’ve contemplated this question for much of my life, and now more directly than ever, I want to report that I have a different intuition, even a “remembrance,” that death is not a blank nullity.
Stephen Levine, who spent much of his life working with the dying, writes that, “Those who know the process of dying refer to a point of remembrance… It is, just a little way into the process, the moment when something is suddenly remembered that it seems impossible to have forgotten.”
What is it? What happens? What is “remembered?” I have to admit that what I remember about death isn’t something I can convincingly describe, let alone prove. Every time I try to describe it, my words sound nice but fail to suggest the numinous essence they’re pointing to. I’m reduced to saying that the experience of death is… beautiful. In a way, that’s the heart of what I remember, that when we die we enter and merge with a “place” that’s so extraordinarily beautiful and loving and awesome, it escapes description. As Rumi writes,
I placed one foot on the wide plain of death…
I have felt nothing ever
Like the wild wonder of that moment.
Though it escapes description, I can at least say with confidence that what happens when we die is an experience that’s familiar, so familiar it feels like Home, a Home that’s made out of unconditional love and beauty and joy and... but you see? using words like that doesn’t approach it, they’re just words.
The other day I came upon a book that was just published called Lucid Dying,* written by a doctor who researched thousands of stories from people who were resuscitated after being pronounced clinically dead. I wondered, did these people who had returned from death — or from the edge of it — report anything similar to the familiarness and beautifulness and lovingness that I can’t describe?
They did. Listen to some of their words — and remember, these are people who had been declared clinically dead and then, in various ways, had been resuscitated and returned to tell about it:
One woman said, “It was a place that had nothing to do with any kind of earthly or material experience. I was floating in a dimension which was enveloped in a soft celestial light… It was a light full of quiet and peace… unconditional bliss without end…”
Another: “I simply had this profound experience of love, oneness, and freedom. I went from being in my body to being in a place of absolute Love.”
Another: “I had no pain, wants, or needs of any kind. I had a sense of being home… There was an understanding of complete peace, happiness, and contentment without need or wants… I felt this was home, where I came from.”
Another: “It was immediate peace. Absolute, whole peace all throughout me. There was no pain, there was no fear, there was no shame. I felt completely accepted. Totally whole and loved. Loved beyond comprehension. Loved in my entirety. Loved with a Love I have not felt here. Loved with the purest love there can be.”
Another: “The light was love and understanding. It was outside of me, through me, and in me. It was home.”
Of course, reports like these aren’t proof of anything. It could be argued that these folks who “died” and lived to tell about it may just be reporting an initial stage in the dying process, not the whole story. That’s true, and yet…
Why love? Why absolute Love? Why Home? Why these words that strain to tell of an experience that’s so beautiful and loving and peaceful? If the universe is merely dust and photons, quarks and exploding stars, or if the ground of being is simply emptiness, what’s love got to do with it? “Death will be like that…,” Rumi writes, “a presence you have always wanted to be with.”
In the end, for me at least, understanding what happens when I die isn’t something I need to figure out. Any metaphysical stories I make up — and I do — are just that, stories. But something about this good news of “absolute Love” and “Home,” and “a presence we have always wanted to be with,” doesn’t feel like a story to me — it has another quality that feels true without needing to be proved. I don’t need a religion to back it up. Religions may be helpful if we don’t remember any of this, but when we do, when we get even a hint of it in a moment of openness and grace, we simply remember that there’s nothing to fear about dying and death. It’s beautiful. And it’s different from what we supposed.
*Lucid Dying, Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, Hachette Books, 2024
Joy to the World!
A U G U S T 2 0 2 4
I recently went to be with a dying friend. He spoke only in whispers, or none at all. Soon after I arrived he raised his hand from his bed, gesturing for me to come close. I took his hand in mine and bent over him. His eyes were wide and steady, holding mine in a gaze as piercing and intimate as any I have ever experienced. It felt as if we both stopped breathing, it was that quiet.
I’ve known this man for half a century. We’ve played, worked, and taught together, travelled to far-off dusty lands, argued and laughed, sung and prayed together, and now there was just this silent gaze that held the world between us. Of course there was sadness in our gaze, tears slowly welling up in our eyes as we felt the vastness of our journey together, knowing that now we had come to its end.
But there was something else too, within and behind the sadness. It showed in the slight smile on our lips. I want to call it joy — it’s the only word that comes close — a joy that encompassed the sadness and was struck through with thankfulness for everything we’d shared together, and for the wonder of our being here at all. It was an ancient joy, something beyond our lives, a joy as ancient as the sky and beautiful in its silence.
These kinds of tender, intense moments come rarely in our lives, but when they do they teach us something fundamental about life and how we might live intimately with each moment and free from suffering.
In the lojong slogans of Atisha, a list of 59 mind-training instructions from the Buddhist tradition, Slogan #21 always leaped out at me for its daring and seeming absurdity: Always maintain only a joyful mind. How could this be? Wouldn’t this instruction be the epitome of spiritual bypassing? In the face of all the meanness, sadness and suffering of the world, how could one justify maintaining “only a joyful mind?”
The word “mind” in this slogan doesn’t mean the “thought-mind” — having only pleasant, happy thoughts. “Mind” here means something more intimate that’s behind all that, something closer to the way of our presencing in the moment — how we arrive, here and now.
How we arrive, here and now — this how is the way and majesty of joyful mind. It’s not a cover-up or pretense that tries to mask the sadness and pain we experience in our lives. It just allows us to arrive to whatever is happening free from fear, with a compassionate, loving heart. And even deeper than that, it’s the joy of our cosmic mutuality, the joy that knows, in Kerouac’s words, “everything is all right forever and forever and forever.”
I’m not sure maintaining this ground of joy in our hearts is something that can be taught, especially because it’s so easily misinterpreted. It’s not some kind of spiritual trick to see the world through rose-colored glasses. I believe that fundamentally it arises from our recognition and openness to the unconditional love that makes all of this happen, the mysterious gift of anything being here at all.
When we’re open to the joy of being like this, the joy bigger than our individual lives, it allows us not to take everything so seriously. Yes, it gifts us with a great depth of communion, but it also frees in us a light-heartedness, a sense of well-being and ease, and of humor and playfulness. We’re able to sing out with each other that silly song:
Joy to the world!
All the boys and girls!
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea,
Joy to you and me!
Love in the Morning
J U L Y 2 0 2 4
I have a donkey whom I love dearly, and now that summer’s here, with the mornings as lazy as the cottonwood fluff drifting sideways through the air, I have all the permission I need to slip out early and take my donkey down to the banks of the creek where I like to sit and do nothing. My donkey loves this place too. I watch as she bends her head to drink, her big lips submerged in the water like an indecent kiss. When she lifts her head she looks at me for a moment, eye to eye, and I’m sure she understands everything I do. I put my hand between her ears and scratch her affectionately. She acknowledges me with a tip of her head and looks across the creek to the grasses that are nodding there in the morning light.
Okay, I don’t really have a donkey, except in this notebook where I imagine her, but we’re friends nevertheless. If I fooled you as you read this, I apologize; I don’t mean anything by it. I don’t know anything you don’t already know, but it’s good to have you here with us, you and me and my donkey. I respect your silence.
If you don’t mind I’d like to tell you what I was telling my donkey just now, before you came. I’m a philosopher — at least I like to wonder about things, if that’s what a philosopher is. I wonder about time, and space, and what’s real and not real, and how all this world is happening the way it is. My donkey seems to like it when I wonder out loud; she listens with one soft ear turned back toward my voice.
Today I’m wondering about love. My donkey and I pretty much agree with the Zen folks who say that “empty awareness” is the background and foreground of everything. When I get very still, and my donkey doesn’t move at all, the two of us barely breathing, I get that her empty awareness and my empty awareness are the same. We’re both this same quiet, empty, openness. Nothing there! It’s hard to talk about but I think you know what I mean. And it’s not just the two of us — the grasses nodding in the morning sunlight, and the water drifting slowly by, and even you — we’re all this same quiet emptiness underneath.
But lately I’ve been wondering if there’s something else that comes with the emptiness, something the Zen masters don’t talk much about, and probably for good reason, because as soon as you talk about it you start painting emptiness with colors. Still, I keep trying because it feels so important to try. (My donkey isn’t convinced, but she’s patient with me.)
It’s this: love. That simple little word — love. Empty awareness is for sure the ground of being, but what about love? I mean if it wasn’t for love, how could the cottonwood fluff even drift by? How could my donkey tip her head when I scratch her between her ears? How could you be listening to me?
I know we usually think of love as something that happens between you and me, or me and my donkey, but it feels to me it’s even bigger than that. Love is as everywhere as emptiness is. It doesn’t move, and it moves. It moves everything that moves, without moving! Well, maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. It just seems like there’s a great kindness in how everything appears the way it does, each moment given without anyone asking. It’s extraordinary how it happens and we don’t even notice the kindness of it.
Because we don’t notice we make all the troubles in the world. That’s how it seems to me anyway. But right now I’m not thinking about the world’s troubles — I do that a lot and it always makes me sad. Right now I’m watching my donkey. She’s waded out into the creek and is watching minnows dart in the dappled light beneath the water’s surface. Love moves her eyes, and mine. Love lights the shallows. Love waits for us to notice. Isn’t it like that?
The Intimate Practice of Welcoming
J U N E 2 0 2 4
When we sit quietly in meditation, inviting ourselves to relax into the silence of simply being, quite often we’re distracted by little thoughts that seem to arrive out of nowhere. Along with these fragments of thoughts may come currents and eddies of emotion, or stray images, or bodily discomforts that temporarily dominate our consciousness – little cramps or pressures. This is a common experience for those of us who seek to relax into silence for a few minutes, or longer, each day.
We know in our hearts that relaxing into “the silence of simply being,” for a few moments at least, is good medicine for us. Whatever stresses we’re experiencing in our daily lives, and even what old traumas and attitudes constrict us, are given a reprieve when we manage to open to the quiet of simply being — just this, just being, here, now, quiet and present. And yet this relaxing into the silence of just being, this move that sounds so simple, turns out not to be so simple for us to accept.
I suppose one reason for this is that we’re well trained in trying to fix the stresses we experience. The thoughts, emotions, and attitudes that arise seem to ask that we attend to them, figure them out, or just follow them wherever they lead. They parade through our consciousness, taking center stage, and obscure the silence we wish to open to.
In response we may try to resist them in various ways — through force of will and mindfulness concentration, or by focusing on our breath, or reciting a mantra. Or we may try to follow the advice I’ve often given: take no interest in them. But even that advice has a subtle element of negative effort — “take no interest.” It works, but it still implies a kind of “turning away” from the thoughts, emotions, and sensations that are arising.
There’s another response possible, a “turning toward” rather than “turning away,” a practice that is wonderfully intimate and that I find is both easy and natural. When thoughts arise as you begin to relax into silence, simply welcome them. Welcome anything that arises in your awareness, whether it’s a stream of thought, an emotional feeling, a point of view, a judgment, an uncomfortable sensation, welcome it. Let it come “into your arms” — so to speak — into your heart. Embrace whatever it is, receive it into your love. That self-judgment: oh I’m such a failure at meditation! — welcome it. I keep being seduced by these thoughts! — welcome that thought. I’m so bored! — welcome that thought and that sense of boredom. My butt hurts! My shoulders are tight! — welcome those sensations. Let them in, encompass them with your gentle welcome and love.
You’ll find that this “practice” becomes almost effortless. The more you respond with loving welcome to thoughts, sensations, or emotions that arise as you sit quietly, the easier it gets. It becomes natural, gentle, and sweetly intimate. You put up no resistance, simply welcoming whatever arises into your loving awareness. And then? Try it and see what happens.
Is God Dead?
M A Y 2 0 2 4
“God is dead,” the headline read. I was shocked. I decided I must go to His funeral. But the cemetery was difficult to find; when I finally got there the service was already over and everyone had left. I found the grave — it was marked with a simple stone that said: “God” and underneath were the words, “May He rest in peace.”
I stood there feeling a bit confused. I didn’t know what to feel. I closed my eyes. After a while I felt someone next to me. I opened my eyes and there was a little girl standing next to me, staring at the gravestone.
She looked up at me and asked, “Family, or friend?”
I said, “Both.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said kindly.
We were both silent for a while, and then I asked, “Do you know what He died of?”
“His name,” she answered, “and His pronoun.”
“Oh,” I said, “that’s a shame.”
“It’s all right,” she said, “it was bound to happen.” She giggled and then scampered off through the cemetery and was gone.
I felt more bewildered than ever. Could it really be true? No God anymore? My mind reeled with visions of all the people everywhere who would be so lonely without having God to comfort them, who would be deprived of His presence when things got rough. No more “Praise the Lord!” No more “Thank God!” No more “If God wills.”
Distraught, I sat on the grass behind the grave and cried — not just for God having died but for all the people who would feel bereft now without Him. The sadness felt so enormous.
I heard something and looked up. The little girl had come back and was standing in front of me.
“Why are you crying?” she asked. I told her.
I couldn’t believe it — she giggled! And then she twirled around in a perfect pirouette, and when she came to a stop, she looked straight at me and said, “Silly man!”
She laughed again and then broke into the most amazing little dance, first hopping from one foot to another in a big circle like she was playing hop-scotch, then the hops turned into skips interspersed with cartwheels — she was good at it — sometimes stopping in the middle of her dance to look right at me… and all the while she talked — half singing — and this is what she said:
“God isn’t really dead, silly man! How could that be? He just doesn’t want, He really doesn’t want to be called names anymore – not “God,” not “Lord,” not “Allah” or “Yahweh” or “Brahma,” or any of those old, made-up God-names. They make Him sound so — so — so there, like he lives in a house or up in the air. And he really really doesn’t like the name “He.” How would you like it, to be called a “he” if you weren’t one? I know I just did it, I said He didn’t like it and called Him a “He!” Silly me!
“I’ve thought and I’ve thought,” she sang as she hopped, “and I’ve wondered all night and I’ve wondered all day, wondering and wondering what name I could say. I know it’s not “He,” and I know it’s not “She,” and it’s definitely, certainly not “It.” Any name at all doesn’t fit!”
She plunked herself down on the grass beside me to catch her breath. We were both quiet for a while.
“There is a name I really like,” she said at last. “But it’s not really a name, not the kind of name people use for names, but I even like it because of that.”
“What is it?” I asked her.
She looked at me, and then at her little hands, and then out across the pleasant cemetery. It was springtime, the air was light, early green leaves were waving in the trees, a few people were walking along paths or standing by graves, some of them crying softly, some placing bright yellow flowers against the headstones, a few birds were sailing by.
When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. “This,” she whispered. “This. That’s — God’s — real — name. This.” She said it so quietly it sounded like the biggest sound I ever heard.
Then she jumped up and looked at me. “This!” she sang happily. She whirled around with her hands in the air. “This!" She began to skip again in a circle, singing “I’m This, and you’re This, and he’s This, and she’s This, and we’re This, and they’re This, and It’s — All — This!" She giggled, happy with herself, and then skipped away singing her new tune.
The Healing Field
A P R I L 2 0 2 4
NOTE: This essay — "The Healing Field" — contemplates the subject of "distance healing" or healing through prayer. In earlier days, the Sufi Way practiced a well-established "healing activity" that was inherited from a form developed in the 1930's. Over time we found that form to be too structured and ritualistic, and we let it go. However, interest in offering healing prayers — to others and ourselves — remains. This essay is an attempt to sketch both a context for healing prayer and to suggest a new form — a simple practice — for those drawn to offer love in this way.
A printable version of this essay can be found by clicking HERE.
Miracles
“As for me,” Walt Whitman wrote, “I know nothing else but miracles.”
I wonder if his words make us smile because we know what he means — we’ve felt it too — but we’re a little shy to state it like that, so forthrightly. We might sound naïve, or even frivolous.
But what is all of this if not a miracle? These words miraculously carrying meaning across space and time! Your eyes seeing the calligraphy of letters and making sense of them! This enormous earth-planet stirring itself in the light of a star to evolve your eyes and breath! And this awareness itself within which everything — everything! — appears! Where? How? From whence does it come?
Who knows? It’s a miracle! We don’t have to imagine a God behind the curtains who we conceive is making it all happen — we can, but that doesn’t make any of this less of a miracle. We can try to explain how everything works, like good empirical scientists, but that too doesn’t make any of this unfathomable reality less of a miracle.
We feel ourselves to be transient, fragile beings, and we are. Our wondrous bodies leap and gesture, love and enjoy themselves — and suffer. We hurt. Disease and old age diminish us. Fears constrict us. It can’t be helped. It happens. Our capacity for joy and our capacity for suffering are an inextricable part of the miracle of being here at all — energy and entropy, being born and dying, holding on and letting go.
As we witness the universe around us, one of the most obvious miracles we see is that the universe is radiant. Even the seemingly empty space between stars and planets, and between you and me, is filled with light. We also see that everything’s moving and evolving — the universe keeps making itself out of itself!
Is it too far-out to imagine that this whole miraculous reality is alive? That our awareness itself is alive? Not the aliveness of carbon-based organisms — that’s part of it — but the “aliveness” of time as well, of being and becoming, and of the way each moment blossoms out of what came before? It’s the aliveness that gives birth to everything — our bodies, our dreams, the sun, this moment.
When we ask ourselves to conceive this possibility — that we are sprouted out of, and within, a field of aliveness that has no edge — we realize that we can’t encompass it with our minds. It’s a miracle, a mystery. And yet, since we are of this miracle we have the capacity to open to its mystery in a way that’s part of the miracle itself.
I believe it’s this very capacity that can serve us when we seek healing for ourselves and for others.
The Healing Field
Among the many approaches to healing that we humans have devised — Western medicine, alternative medicine, Ayurveda, homeopathy, etc. — there has always been this enigmatic area variously known as faith healing, distance-healing, healing through intention, prayer healing, and so on. No matter how skeptical we might be about tales of healings achieved through these non-material means, the evidence is enormous that they do — sometimes — work. Not always, but often enough to make doctors and scientists wonder what’s going on.
What is going on?
My hunch is that this very “field of aliveness that has no edge” is what’s going on — that when the conditions are right and the people involved are open enough, this field of aliveness that is the whole in which we live and move and breath and have our being, can heal what needs healing. How it works is a mystery, like all the other miracles reality is heir to. Perhaps there’s something like a resonance established between the “field of aliveness that has no edge” — the healing field — and the individual organism.
But there’s a danger here. As soon as we conceive that “this is what’s going on,” we run into the question of why these forms of healing aren’t always curative. Many cancers and other diseases don’t disappear following distance-healing sessions, while some do. I don’t believe the reason lies in some failing in those who “transmit” the healing intention, or in the ones who receive it. That’s the danger of this view, and I suggest it originates in an incomplete understanding of what healing means.
“Healing,” after all, is rooted in the notion of “restoring wholeness.” If we limit our conception of wholeness and healing to the restoration of the proper functioning of organs and the circulatory, neurological, and other systems of the body, we’re missing the greater whole in which these physical systems are embedded — a wholeness that includes not only what we think of as matter but the vast “immaterial” systems that we envision as energy flows, natural cycles, psychological and spiritual well-being, the ways the cosmos unfolds moment by moment, and the nature of “spirit” and “well-being” itself.
For example, if you’re on your deathbed — your body succumbing to cancer or heart failure or a serious accident — those “praying” at your bedside would know not to insist in their prayers that your physical condition should miraculously transform into full health, back to the way you were a decade or two ago. Their prayers, their healing intentions, would instead reach toward a deeper wholeness — that you be at peace and free from fear, that your heart may open into a field of thankfulness and love.
As we contemplate what healing means, we might include this deeper wholeness, not only what we think of as the physical aspects of our being but the non-physical as well (and that distinction may not be as distinct as we imagine). In doing so we can free ourselves from the danger of considering healing in terms of success and failure, along with the judgments that come with them.
Praying for, or “sending” healing intentions to someone in need, sometimes does result in a cure on the physical level. How that happens is anyone’s guess. And how our loving intentions work on the non-physical level is equally mysterious. “I hope you feel better!” we say. “Please know how much we love you!” Those wishes are prayers too, and they “work” both within, and beyond, the physical dimension of things. Miracles!
It's not easy to describe this without sounding ungrounded and wu-wu. To think that the whole universe, all of reality, is somehow alive, upends our materialist view of how things are and “what’s going on.” And yet we say “amen” with Whitman — “I know nothing else but miracles!” So let’s suspend our disbelief, at least for a moment, and imagine that the entirety of reality is alive and whole, and that this infinite aliveness is a field of healing that does what it does way beyond our expectations of success or failure on the physical plane.
From this rarefied view we might realize that what I’m calling “the healing field” is simply another name for unconditional love. “Love,” this word that endlessly escapes our attempts to define it, may be the most fundamental miracle. Love is what restores our wholeness, whether physically or beyond the physical. It’s the healing field in which everything arises and vanishes. As Rumi tells us:
The sun of infinite love comes into your love,
and you are given more and more humble work.
The Healing Breath Practice
Offering healing prayers, intentions, or wishes — to ourselves and others — is humble work. There are many approaches to this work, some quite structured, some requiring belief in a religious narrative. The practice I’d like to share here involves a simple and easy rhythm of “healing breath” — it takes little practice and can be offered with gentle ease in many situations. You may choose to devote a specific time period for this practice, or gather friends to do it together, but you can also do it any time you can pause for a few moments from your daily activities and attentions. No one needs to know you’re doing it.
There are two phases to this practice — first “inward” and then “outward”:
1. Breathing in the Healing Field
Begin by imagining that with each in-breath you’re welcoming into your body and your whole being the healing field, this ineffable field of aliveness that has no edge — clear, fresh, spacious presence, or safety, or loving light — however it feels to you. Let it be sensate as much as possible — the kinesthetic sensation of welcoming the loving light within you. Now as you exhale, allow this clear, fresh, loving presence to pervade your body and your whole being. Let it heal you. It may feel wispy and insubstantial at first — no matter — just welcome it with each breath and let it suffuse throughout your body. There’s nothing you need to fixate on or hold still as an image. Remember that you’re not “requiring” this healing breath to heal a specific pain or illness. It may do that — or it may simply open within you the deeper wholeness we’ve been contemplating. Welcome that wholeness.
You may find that you need a little help in focusing your intention as you breathe the healing breath, especially in the beginning. For that you might silently repeat a simple phrase that has meaning for you, such as this line from Inayat Khan’s healing prayer, Nayaz: on the in-breath: “Through the all-pervading life in space,” and on the out-breath, something like: “May I be healed,” or “May love pervade me,” or “May light pervade me.” Whatever words you use, let them be momentary helpers and then let them go, opening yourself to the direct kinesthetic sense of clear, fresh, lovingness pervading your body and being.
It may be that you wish to stop with this first inward phase of the practice — it’s a simple and beautiful way to restore yourself. But once you’ve opened into this deeper wholeness, you may wish to continue by offering it to others.
2. The Offering
Again you will use the miracle of breath to invoke and direct the healing field, this time to a person or a series of people (one at a time), or to a situation in the world that cries out for healing. Begin in the same way as the inward phase: on your in-breath welcoming into your body the clear, fresh, spacious presence, or safety, or loving light — however it feels to you — and on the out-breath allow that loving light to envelope the one in need of healing.
You might want to silently say their name as you do this, or envision them, or invoke their presence in a less verbal or visual way. Often this “sending” of healing love is conceived transactionally — that we’re “beaming” the healing light to that person, that a stream of light is being sent from our heart to that person. I don’t think this image will do any harm, but it does create the sense that “we” are doing something “to” them, which isn’t what’s happening. We’re evoking the healing field that it may envelope and pervade them. This is a subtle business, but after a while you’ll get a sense of it. You’re simply opening your consciousness to the person in need, and then letting the healing breath do the rest.
If you know the person in need, and they’re open to it, you might suggest they do the first inward phase of the healing breath while you offer the offering. You might arrange for this to happen simultaneously, or just let it occur at different times.
You can also “direct” this offering of healing to strangers — someone you pass in the street or who you see is having a hard time, or to any number of painful tragedies in the world.
A Final Thought
Does any of this matter? What if there is no discernible change in a person’s health following our prayer, or in the violence and ignorance we witness in the world? I remember this question came up some years ago on one of our forest walks in northern Thailand. A group of us from a number of Asian and European countries had come to bear witness to the struggle for cultural survival and land rights of the Pagayaw indigenous tribe. We were camped on a hill above a remote village, and in the evening we sat in a circle along with several Pagayaw elders, praying like this for the well-being of the people and the land. After some time of silent and spoken prayer, one of our party asked if this kind of prayer really made any difference.
One of the elders responded, “You people have come from all over the world. Our people are suffering, and you’ve come to our land to pray for us. Does it make a difference? Imagine if you never came, if you never offered us your prayers. What would that world be like? Yes, it makes a difference.”
The Luminous Ground
M A R C H 2 0 2 4
It seems the longer we live the more we can feel there’s something unseen behind all that we see.
After a night of secretly falling snow, when the first sunlight of the dawn touches the peak of the mountain behind my house, it’s not just “mountain” or “dawn” or “snow” that I see, but something else, something invisible to my eyes, yet evident nevertheless — a wholeness in the nature of things, as if everything is lit from within. What I see is beautiful, yes, but that beauty seems to be arising from something generous and quiet that precedes or informs what’s visible. “Beauty,” as the 13th Century Sufi, Ibn Arabi, famously said, “Beauty is the welcoming openness of the truth toward us.” It’s this inner light in the world that touches us and that somehow reminds us of our own essential being.
Of course, to try to say much more about this inner light soon draws us away from the awe we feel in its presence. I think we each have to find our own ways to be reminded of it — ways that are personal and intimate to each of us, and that don’t originate in words or thoughts.
While it may seem intangible, the inner wholeness in the nature of things, the welcoming openness, isn’t abstract. It’s not a thought. It’s luminous, the luminous ground in the very moment of the world. Its luminosity isn’t the same as the luminosity of a lightbulb or the sun — it has no source. It doesn’t begin somewhere. And yet its nature is that it gives and welcomes and continuously opens toward us.
The word I find most useful for this sense of the luminous ground is love — that little word that seems to evaporate as soon as we touch it. Why love? Because there’s an innate generosity to the luminous ground that includes us, embraces us, and that reveals in a gentle, subdued way the luminosity of our own being.
Love is the luminous ground. Out of it comes all of our personal moments of love — ripples, currents, resonances of the unity of being we are within, yet only faintly remember.
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love,
says Emily Dickinson, pointing to the luminous ground, this Love, the givenness of things, reminding us how all we know of Love comes from the Love that is all there is.
Of course, we don’t have to call it “Love.” We could call it the Tao, or Suchness, or the Sambhogakaya, or the “Self-Disclosure of God” — whatever works. The problem with our words about “It” is that they so quickly remove us from the gift they’re trying to reveal. This may be why we so enjoy those moments in nature when the luminous ground offers us its impersonal love without words, like sunlight on the mountain.
While all of this may sound lovely and poetic, I believe it’s equally practical. Opening ourselves to the revelation of the luminous ground, to its all-inclusive love — whatever we call it and however we perceive it — can profoundly affect how we live. On a personal level it can release us from insecurity and anxiety. We get, in our bones, that we belong and that all is well. Interpersonally it brings life and freshness to our love and friendships. Our work in the world, whatever it is, becomes freer and more creative.
And on a wider, more global level — and this may sound a bit mystical but bear with me — I believe that the more each of us perceives the luminous ground — “feels the Love” — we are opening not just ourselves, but a capacity in the whole struggling mass of humanity to do the same. It’s as if evolution is happening both on a species-wide physical basis and on a species-wide capability in our hearts to open to this ineffable luminosity that is love. Every time we realize it, our realization resonates throughout the whole and deepens this capacity in our species.
Seen this way, our realization is a profound form of activism. In these days when the human presence on the planet seems beset by feelings of lost-ness and disappointment in ourselves for precipitating the climate crisis and the degradation of the biosphere, the power of this form of “activism” is as necessary as any changes in policy and social structure. It’s slow, yes, and often imperceptible, but it’s real.
Sometimes I imagine that 1,000 years from now, or 5,000 years, we humans will have finally gotten the point — we will know in the depth of our being that it’s all love. Then we will have learned at last to love one another and this beautiful earth, and in that fullness we will live.
There’s a famous poem by Ibn Arabi that ends with these lines:
My creed is love.
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief, my faith.
Although our individual lives may not always feel attuned to this lofty view, and the world may look hopelessly mired in turmoil, we can take heart that love’s caravan always welcomes us, and always will.
Finding Silence
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
Let me be quiet in the middle of the noise. — Rumi
For years I went into the desert alone to find revelation in its silence, far from the noises of the world and my everyday life. Sitting there quietly on a rock, or wandering slowly, the only sounds in the daytime came from small occasional breezes moving over the ground and through the junipers, or my footsteps, my breathing and sighs, the distant growl of a jet, or a crow talking in a language I didn’t understand. At night the quiet was even more intense — the immense darkness sprinkled with stars and the moon lifting silently over the mountains — the only noises then were the little rustles of desert mice finding their way through the brush, or the yelps of coyotes in the distance.
In that great silence I would sit and listen, yet what I heard was not silence, but my thoughts. They kept coming, some of them coherent, some just fragmented phrases without meaning. Were these thoughts really mine? Was I making them happen?
I would try to stop them but that didn’t work. I would repeat silent mantras, but the thoughts even found their way through those, and the mantras themselves were scarcely silent.
It was on one of those fasts in the desert that I discovered a humble practice that I have since written about and shared, and that I’d like to repeat here. I don’t know how it started, maybe I was trying to find where my thoughts were happening, or where I was, but I touched my fingertip to my forehead, and then touched a point opposite it at the back of my head, and looked into the space between those two points. What’s in there?
You might like to try it. See what you find when you look into the space between the front and back of your head. If you say it’s your brain, that’s a thought. What’s your immediate sense of what’s in there?
For me, the immediate sense is emptiness — I can’t find anything! What’s more, that space, that emptiness, is silent. Yes, thoughts seem to run through it with their little noises, but the emptiness doesn’t stop being silent.
What’s awesome for me about this “practice” is that it’s so quick and available, and it’s so close I can’t look at what I find. The silent emptiness I sense inside my head resists becoming an object in my awareness — it is that awareness. Whatever I am, wherever I am — in the middle of my head, in the middle of my heart, in the middle of the sensate noise of the world — is this mysterious, spacious silence.
Rumi’s little prayer — Let me be quiet in the middle of the noise — opens a window onto this same simple awe. He doesn’t say, “Noise, be banished so I can be quiet!” He knows that noise is always around — in the market, in our sensations, in our thoughts and emotions — it’s all noise. As long as we’re embodied like this, we’re in the middle of the noise.
I find that when I feel aggravated by that noise, when I feel it pressing on me with multiple demands, or self-judgments, or incessant thoughts, this simple practice of looking into the middle of my head, my heart, my being, and finding nothing but soundless emptiness there, that’s medicine. The silence at the heart of our being is healing.
Krishnamurti: “This quietness, this silence is the highest form of intelligence which is never personal, never yours or mine. Being anonymous, it is whole and immaculate.”
I remember the Buddhist nondual teacher, Peter Fenner, asking a question in class once that I have repeated often in my retreats: “What do you have to let go of so there’s no pressure on you?” In the context of what we’re contemplating here, the most essential “let-go” asked by this question is our fixation of being located as a substantial entity in here, in our head, in our heart, in our body.
When we look with fresh eyes in here and see there's no substantial entity to be found, that the immediate evidence of our being is empty silence, then the pressures that come have nothing to press against. The "pressures" of multiple demands on us, self-judgments and judgments from others, incessant thoughts and anxieties — they have nothing to press against. They go right through. We are quiet in the middle of the noise.
Note: Last month when I introduced a Thursday session of “Sharing Silence,” I described the dynamic of “finding silence” from a different perspective. If you’re interested, you can listen to a 9-minute recording of that introduction by clicking HERE.
“Returning to the source is Silence, which is the way of nature.” — Lao Tzu
Five Unexplainable Parables Featuring Lao Tzu
J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 4
Since it's the beginning of the year I went to Lao Tzu’s place to ask him what I should do with the rest of my life.
“How should I know?” he asked, not looking up from the figure he was carving from a stick.
“Because I heard that when Young Zhi came all the way from the ZigZag Mountains he asked you the same question. Your answer caused his life to turn around.”
“You are not Young Zhi,” the master replied.
“No,” I said, “but at least you could give me a blessing for the beginning of the year.”
“How should I do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“There you have it,” he said, blowing a chip off his carving.
We had just finished making love when I heard Lao Tzu’s footsteps on the stairs. He opened the door without knocking and came right in. That was his way. If he felt uncomfortable seeing our dishabille condition he didn’t show it.
“Do you know what Genuine Human just said to me?” he asked too loudly. Genuine Human is our daughter, nine years old and a force of nature. Everyone knows Lao Tzu is her favorite uncle.
Not waiting for our answer, he cried, “She said when I die I will be forgotten!”
“Why does that bother you?” I asked.
“It doesn’t!” he shouted, “That’s what bothers me.”
Lao Tzu and I were lounging in the grass by the river watching the current take bits of wood along with it. I wanted to say something wise at that moment but I couldn’t think of anything.
Without my saying a word, he volunteered, “Why don’t you say you can’t catch the river’s current in a bucket?”
“Because you already know that,” I replied.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I never tried to catch the river’s current in a bucket.”
“Shall we try?” I asked.
“That’s what we’re doing,” he said.
It happened that Genuine Human was riding her donkey to the market one morning while Lao Tzu walked beside.
“Uncle,” Genuine Human said, “you've lived for more summers and winters than I can count, and you’ve heard how the people speak as far away as the Yang Valley and the shores of the Eastern Sea. Tell me what you have learned so I can live a good life and not be confused.”
“Child,” Lao Tzu answered, “do you see the branches above us leaning over the road, each lifting a thousand leaves to the sun? The branches and their leaves have not heard the speech of faraway people, nor have they seen the waves of the Eastern Sea. Would you say they live a good life? Are they confused?”
Genuine Human was silent for the rest of their journey, except for whistling her made-up tunes.
The closer I come to my grave the less sense I can make of things. I’ve failed to bring order to the world. All I’ve done is wave my arms.
Just then I heard Lao Tzu laughing in the forest, so I went to find him.
He was sitting on a log. I joined him there, but soon it started raining. I suggested we go to my hut where I would make us some tea. He shrugged, not wanting to engage in purposeful action, but he came along.
On the way to my hut we passed my grave. Lao Tzu pushed me in, trying to make a point.
“Now why did you do that?” I asked.
He waved his arms and then helped me out.
“I don’t understand you,” I told him.
“I don’t either,” he said, and we left it at that. At my hut we sat down.
“I thought you were going to make tea,” he said.
I waved my arms and he laughed.
One Holy Land
D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 3
Last month I printed here the first of three "Letters from the Road" that I wrote from Israel/Palestine in 2003 — that one was titled "Talking Nonviolence with Hamas." My original intention was to print the next two letters in December and January as they give a glimpse into some of the conditions on the ground that have led to the current agony being experienced there, as well as a vision for the future.
I've decided to shorten that schedule and just conclude with the third of these letters: "One Holy Land." The second letter — "Jesus Wept" — is longer than the others and recounts a series of experiences and conversations I had in Jerusalem and Hebron with Israelis and Palestinians. If you're interested you can read it by clicking Here.
This letter — "One Holy Land" — points to a vision of unity rather than continued separation. It's a vision that's usually discounted by both sides — although a Palestinian activist and lawyer we worked with back then, Jonathan Kuttab, has recently published an excellent book that expresses this vision in depth: Beyond the Two-State Solution. You can hear him describe this vision in a short YouTube video by clicking Here.
Consider the Holy Land, trampled and fought over for thousands of years, blood on its stones, tears soaking into it, temples razed, Christ crucified, crusaders vicious and defeated, Turks, Egyptians, British, French, Palestinians, Israelis – consider the lineage of enemies who have claimed this place and how their agony and antagonism lives in the dust and rocks here, their blindness as dark and present as ever.
Yet a solution to their conflicting claims has always been present, just as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian fight over sovereignty here is present, and even obvious. It’s staring both parties in the face. This one clear, nonviolent move from either side that could precipitate a change in the polarized worldview that holds their long conflict in place. But that move will not be made by either side, and the reasons why tell us a lot about the root fears of the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and about the root fears of human relations in general.
Listen to the vocabulary of the conflict: “two sides,” “two states,” “two peoples,” “disengagement,” “separation barrier,” “apartheid wall,” “closure,” “bantustans,” “Green Line,” “’67 borders.” The entire subject is conceived in divisive, polarized terms.
Imagine instead if the Palestinians suddenly gave up their claim for their “own” state. What if they stopped seeing the situation divided into “us” and “them?” Or, conversely, imagine if the Israelis suddenly gave up their claim for their “own” state. What if they stopped seeing the situation divided into “us” and “them?” What would happen?
This notion is usually referred to as the “one-state solution” or the “bi-national state,” and was suggested as early as the 1930’s. It has received renewed interest recently by some Israeli and Palestinian thinkers, but in general it’s viewed as idealistic and dangerous.
Nevertheless — at least as a thought experiment — let’s imagine for a moment how that might happen. Imagine that Palestinians unilaterally announce they’re going to disband the Palestinian Authority because it has no authority anyway, not over its borders or its airspace or its resources or its streets. Imagine they say to the Israelis, “We give up our insistence to have our own country, and we give up all violent resistance against you. The land that you and we share extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, just as you’ve always said. That is a fact. Here we are together. There are some 7 million of us Palestinians, and 7 million of you Israelis. That is a fact. Our population is growing somewhat faster than yours. There is no way you can get rid of us. That is a fact. We are changing our struggle with you from one of national “liberation” to one of claiming our lawful human and civil rights, which we will do through active nonviolent means. Please know we want you to have your lawful human and civil rights too, and you have every right to insist on them.”
Or conversely, imagine the Israelis did the same, gave up their insistence on a “Jewish” State and instead extended to all Palestinians between the Jordan and the sea full citizenship, equal rights and responsibilities. Imagine they say to the Palestinians, “We are changing our struggle with you from one of fear and domination to one of cooperation. We ask you to join our government, our armed forces, our police forces, our hospitals and universities, our schools. Join us to build a peaceful, vibrant, and just society together, and help to protect all of us from extremist elements who would destroy this dream.”
One state. Diverse ethnic groups, diverse languages, religions, parties, points of view. Living and working together on the same holy land. Why not?
There are a lot of reasons why not.
For the Israelis, at a minimum the list of reasons against such a move would include: 1) loss of security – we would be targeted by Palestinian militants and would have given up total control of the means to stop them; 2) we would lose our Jewish State, the chance to establish in one place in the world a totally Jewish culture; 3) we would soon be a minority again in this country, subject to the same prejudice and oppression we have suffered elsewhere.
The Palestinians would have a similar list: 1) how could we trust them? we would be oppressed by the dominant Israelis, kept in ghettoes and denied our human and civil rights; 2) we would have to let go of our claims for justice for all the things we have suffered at the hands of the Israelis – their confiscation of our land, their killing our families; 3) we would lose our Palestinian culture, and the U.S. would make sure we were kept subservient to the Israelis, even in one country.
We might imagine Israelis would respond incredulously to these objections by Palestinians: “What do you mean? We have no interest in oppressing you! We don’t want to keep you in ghettoes, we know what that is like. The only reason we dominate you is because you fight us. We don’t want to destroy your culture or have you be subservient to us – this is against everything we believe in. As for your claims of justice, what about ours? You have killed us too!”
Palestinians might respond similarly to the Israeli list of objections: “Do you think we would continue to fight you if you protected our human and civil rights? As for your culture, we have no interest in destroying your culture or limiting your right to practice it. Throughout history, Arab cultures have been among the most hospitable for Jews. And as for becoming a minority, don’t forget, we Palestinians are treated as the minority now, so we insist that we create together a mutual national constitution that would protect the rights of all peoples, whether they are in the majority or minority.”
Of course, a further objection common to both sides would be, on the one hand, the question of “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, and on the other hand, the question of “the Law of Return” for Jews anywhere to come to Israel as a refuge. Again, the symmetry of these demands suggests reciprocity: either an open immigration policy for all Jews and all Palestinians everywhere, or a standard immigration policy with applications, etc., with the proviso that all Jews and Palestinians facing oppression in their home countries would automatically be free to immigrate.
Such a move, by either side, would introduce a nonviolent aikido maneuver into this “mother of all conflicts” that could topple not only the opponent but the whole antagonistic and historical basis of the conflict – the opponent within each side.
Would either the Israelis or the Palestinians venture to make such a move? Not likely. There’s too much investment in the old model of a win-lose outcome, one against another. The idea of one with another, or even one for another, awaits a future generation.
Talking Nonviolence with Hamas
N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 3
As a change of pace from the more familar themes of these Notes from the Open Path, for the next three months — November, December, and January — I’ll be sending shortened versions of three “Letters from the Road” that I wrote from Gaza and Israel in 2003. Regarding the present war it feels appropriate to share them now, as these stories give a glimpse into the feelings and conditions on the ground that have led to the current agony.
I spent much of the first decade of this century in the Middle East and Central Asia — Iraq, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan — bearing witness to the people and their struggles in these lands, and working with organizations seeking to foster peace.
This first letter recounts one episode in Gaza where I was interviewing people as part of my work with the Nonviolent Peaceforce. It’s a sad tale and offers no conclusions. The next two letters, in December and January, explore more deeply the spirit of nonviolence and its potential to heal that long conflict in the Holy Land.
• • • • •
“What reign is worse than that of militant virtue?” – Amin Maalouf
Our taxi drives south toward Gaza through the pleasant Israeli countryside. There are well-kept farms, villages, fields, and forested hillsides. After leaving the taxi at the militarized border crossing into Gaza, my colleague (the Jerusalem Representative of the American Friends Service Committee) and I are interrogated by the Israeli guards who finally let us through.
On the Gaza side we climb into a well-worn taxi and continue our journey. The view changes radically. The roads are rutted, and on each side there are bombed-out buildings and orchards in which the trees are bare sticks or chopped off at knee height. Within a few kilometers of the border the density of buildings and population increases, and soon we’re in a maze of streets with hanging electrical wires, the buildings in sad repair.
Gaza is a 10 km X 40 km strip of land surrounded on three sides by razor wire. The fourth side is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, where, three miles out, Israeli warships patrol, blocking any escape. The only way out is south, through Egypt, and that is a highly controlled crossing and a difficult journey. 1.6 million Palestinians live in Gaza [now 2.2 million], making it one of the highest population densities in the world. About a half million of the people are housed in refugee camps, the U.N. having set up these tented camps in the early 50’s to house refugees who had fled to Gaza during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. The tents have long since been replaced by labyrinths of concrete block homes separated by narrow alleys often less than a meter wide. Water, electrical, and sanitation services are minimal. Little kids scamper in the alleys barefoot. Something like 65% of the population here is below the age of 24.
In the afternoon I arrange for a van to drive me around. Ahmed, my driver, steers the van down rutted streets piled with trash. Groups of teenage boys sit in the shadows, flicking the butts of their cigarettes into the dust and waiting. A few old men stare glumly from their chairs by the doorways. The walls are decorated everywhere with Arabic graffiti and with portraits and memorials of local boys killed in clashes with the Israelis.
At one point we slow to pass three kids playing with a plastic ball. Ahmed shakes his head. “How can children have a life here?” he asks me. “This is not living!” He says he has to keep close watch on his own sons so they don’t go “make bombs” with some of their friends. “What do the Israelis expect? I know three boys whose father is out of work. The man just sits at home, he is broken. Now his boys go with the militants, they want to win back their father’s honor. Do you understand?”
Over the next three days we meet with a number of Palestinians — professors, medical workers, economists, folks on the street — and then we manage to secure an appointment with a senior Hamas leader, Ishmael Abu Shenab. Abu Shenab is on the political, non-military side of Hamas, though he is nevertheless a supporter of violent resistance. He’s an intellectual, an engineer, and a lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Over the past decade, Hamas, along with three other militant organizations, has used the tactic of suicide bombings to fight the Israeli occupation. To many Palestinians I’ve talked with, suicide bombing is an abhorrent and counter-productive form of resistance, no matter how oppressive the Israeli occupation may be. Yet many other Palestinians reluctantly accept it as a legitimate form of resistance, especially considering that they don’t have helicopter gunships, F-16’s, tanks, or other powerful weapons. Hamas itself considers these “martyrdom operations” very effective in inflicting a heavy human toll and psychological trauma on Israeli society, thus creating a relative balance of fear and giving them more leverage against the occupation. Without this distasteful weapon, they say, they would have no power at all.
I believe they’re mistaken, and this is what I want to talk with Abu Shenab about. I want to talk with him about the power of nonviolence. I want to ask him if Hamas wouldn’t succeed in its goals more nobly by renouncing violence and adopting nonviolent strategies, as Gandhi, King, Aquino, Tutu, and others have done?
A single bodyguard sits on a chair outside his modest home. We are led into a waiting area where, after some time, Abu Shenab comes to greet us. He is surprisingly shy. He apologies for keeping us waiting, setting down a small tray with glasses of mint tea. Soon his three-year old son climbs into his lap.
After some pleasantries the conversation turns to the conflict. I say something critical about suicide bombings, both as a moral issue and as a strategy. He replies, with some irritation, “Do you think we want to send our sons and daughters to be killed? We want peace as much as anyone. You tell the Israelis, please stop killing our children, and our children will stop killing you!” He then launches into a long rationale for the armed Palestinian resistance, drawing on the history of colonialism and its economic and political roots.
His response to my promotion of nonviolence is respectful, but he doesn’t believe it will work in the Palestinian context. He makes two points. The first is that the situation of Gandhi’s movement against the British was very different — the British were in India for trade, and when India was no longer profitable for them they left. But the Israelis are not here for trade, he says, they’re here for the land. He refers to a map on the wall showing the spreading settlements in the West Bank and Gaza [at that time there were settlements in Gaza but they have since been abandoned.]
His second argument is that he doesn’t believe the world media would report on Palestinian nonviolent resistance. He understands that media attention is a critical element for the success of nonviolent struggles, but what if no one sees it?
He gives a number of examples of the media ignoring peaceful Palestinian protests and we come close to arguing. It’s a sensitive point, I know, but I have more faith than he does that world media would pay attention if massive nonviolent actions were done in a spirit of peace and not rage. “You say the first Intifada was nonviolent,” I tell him, “but young men throwing rocks and shouting curses is not nonviolent. What if instead of throwing stones they were blocking the progress of tanks by holding hands, everyone dressed in white, singing gentle Islamic songs, or Jewish songs for that matter? If the IDF harmed them they would be ashamed of themselves before the world.” Abu Shenab is unmoved. He says “the big machine of the media” is controlled by Jews or people on their side, and they will not show such things. I tell him I think he’d be surprised.
My colleague and I describe to him several projects we’re involved in that support nonviolent alternatives to the conflict and training programs in nonviolence for Palestinian youth. Abu Shenab is curious about them and asks good questions, but says he doesn’t have any confidence in the power of these efforts to end the occupation or to bring justice.
I ask him, “Isn’t your loyalty to violence just a continuation of countless centuries of people insisting that blood and fear are the only weapons to combat blood and fear? Humanity’s loyalty to violence has obviously failed. Isn’t it up to us to find a more pragmatic and humane loyalty to create a better world?”
Abu Shenab sighs. He’s tired. I sense he wants to agree with what I’m saying, but he has no faith it can happen, at least in Gaza. When we get up to leave he says, “Good luck,” and I think he means it. We bow slightly, wishing each other God’s peace, hands on our hearts.
Note: I learned that the following year Abu Shenab’s house was hit by an Israeli missile, killing him and his family.
A further sad note: Though I still believe in the power of nonviolence to break us free from these cycles of vengeance and hatred, it would be dishonest of me not to remind us of "The Great March of Return" that Palestinians in Gaza held for 45 days in 2018. The Great March was a nonviolent protest at the Gaza-Israel border, described by its organizers as an "unarmed, direct, civilian-led mass action." Yes, there were some young men who threw stones at the IDF who were hundreds of meters away, and one report of a shot fired by an errant Hamas sniper not connected with the protests that killed an Israeli soldier during that time. Israel's response was brutal. According to Amnesty International, "Over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition."
Perhaps Abu Shenab was right — although the New York Times did post this moving piece by a Palestinian in Gaza at the time. It's worth a read.
Embodied Openness
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3
This mud-body is clear epiphany. — Rumi
We who are drawn to the spiritual life know this dance well, this dance with a partner who is, one moment, sensuous and touchable, while we feel ourselves to be unfindable, spacious, and simply enthralled, and then the next moment it is we who are the touchable one — this familiar density of body — while our partner is without form, holding us with no hands.
We keep wondering, What am I? What is this? The evidence of our bodies is everywhere. Surely we are this body, like the crow who just flew by my window is that body, her flight assured by the unseen air.
Yes, body I may be, and yet — what can I call this that wonders about it? My dance partner just now is the ground of the farmer’s fields I see out there, and I am this simple faceless wonder without location. I want to touch that earth, make it real to me, and I do, but in that moment my partner dances away from my hands, becoming wonder herself.
And you? Are you real? Of course you are, and me too — so real, so here, so bodied. And yet, is the one who knows — the one who says so — is that one bodied?
This is the dance I mean, these questions and how they live through us, as we live. Look! I am present, now, as you are. Present? What counts for my presence? Where do I look? I look behind my eyes and find — nothing! Just space. Emptiness. Openness. Quiet.
Openness is the word I like best — better than “nothing” or “emptiness.” This openness behind my eyes, inside my chest, has no edge even though my body has its edges. Strange. I am embodied openness. My head is hollow. My heart place, hollow. My whole body, hollow, its seeming density no more dense than a thought.
I walk around, go to the grocery store, say hello, feeling myself embodied and real. No one sees the openness behind my eyes. I can’t see theirs.
This is the dance I mean, the partner delight of embodiment as it appears and vanishes in openness, and openness itself as it flirts with us behind those lashes. Not one, not two.
We can be hurt, yes — our bodies can, and all the ways we identify with them can — but not this openness we are: it is free from hurt and fear. When I worry about what you will think of me, this spacious hollow empty openness behind my eyes frees that worry without the slightest concern. My worries are, as the Tibetans say, self-liberated.
Let’s call this the practice of the hollow open head. Move through your life knowing that behind your eyes is hollow open space, and that inside your chest there’s nothing solid. Try it. The things that worry you, invite them in.
Sometimes it may even happen that you see the whole world’s body is open — hollow and spacious and not even there, though it obviously is. This mud-body is clear epiphany.
Autumn Reverie
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
Now September comes with her resolve, waking from her summer dreams, brushing her hair, taking the children to school. The children open their books and furrow their brows, trying to do what’s asked of them. Up in the offices meetings are entered in the calendar, agendas agreed. It’s time to balance the books. Delivery men and delivery women start their trucks. It’s time to get busy.
Out on a creek a leaf sails down and lands, its edges curled, on the quiet water. The slow current takes it. The sun slips sideways through the sky, moving south. Geese honk.
It’s happened before. And terrible things are happening too, somewhere. Refugees are trudging across hot sand, hoping to cross the mountains before it’s too late. They don’t care about September’s name, they just want help.
You and I seem to be waiting — waiting as we watch all this, waiting as the morning ends, and then the afternoon. Everything is bigger than we can comprehend.
We feel something is being asked. What is it? It’s not about getting busy or about a project. But something is coming toward us as we wait, asking that we stop thinking in the ways we’ve been thinking. And what?
We leave early, making some excuse, and walk to where the creek is making its way out beyond the streets under low-hanging branches. There’s a stone there large enough to sit on. Slanting light moves through the leaves and glances on the water and on what we’re feeling.
And there, in the small privacy of that place, we stop. We stop trying to make anything happen. Though rush hour tires swish along the streets not far away, we hear a silence beneath that sound, and beneath our wondering what to do. It's a silence that feels like it’s always been there.
We wait without waiting. And all of a sudden out of that simple place, out of the quiet beneath, out of our small hearts by that creek, we sense a light without source, not a light that can be seen but generous and wide nevertheless, a kindness in the stars, in the leaves, in the rush hour tires and the people going home, in our own presence there by the creek, a kindness that gives us to happen and the vast moment to happen and the refugees’ steps and the children’s fingers turning the pages and the slow current of the water before us, and in that very kindness, that invisible light, we feel what is asked, the primal love within all this, within us, asking us and showing us how to bless.
The Lesson of the Hippos
A U G U S T 2 0 2 3
I was talking with an articulate twenty-something recently about the fate of the earth and humanity. Like many of these kinds of conversations, ours began with sharing some alarming statistics and predictions, and then moved to expressions of uncertainty and worry. I asked if she saw any ray of hope.
“Not really,” she said. “I want to feel hopeful, but it feels like I’m trying too hard, like I’m trying to put a happy face on the whole mega-industrial sprawl of humanity that’s desecrating the planet. My hope seems like…” — she looked for another metaphor — “seems like a little migrating bird that’s lost its way flying over the obscene Anthropocene.”
“That’s pretty dark,” I said. “The obscene Anthropocene – did you make that up?”
“Yeah. It is obscene. Did you know that the markers they’re using to establish the start of the Anthropocene are the spike in plutonium residue from atomic bombs in a Canadian lakebed, along with carbon particles from fossil fuel use? Not much to be proud of for us Anthropos. What about you? Do you have hope?”
“Yes, I do,” I said, “but I’m not sure the word ‘hope’ is so helpful — it does seem like your little lost bird. I think we’re in for some very hard times, and those hard times are going to force us to confront some serious, basic questions about how our species might live in harmony on earth. Deep questioning like this is already happening; I suppose we could say it’s been happening with increasing frequency for the past century or more as the dysfunction of industrial civilization has become apparent. We’re fouling our nest, yes, but we are trying to find out how to stop, and that’s forcing us to ask these serious, basic questions.”
“What do you mean, ‘serious, basic questions?’” she asked. “What kind of questions?”
“I mean essential questions like — What is life for? What do we love? What do we care most about? How shall we live? How can we “dwell in situations of inherent worth,” as deep ecology asks, rather than seeking increasingly higher standards of living? Arne Naess, the Norwegian sage who first articulated deep ecology, described deep ecology simply as an approach to the human-nature relationship that asks deeper questions.
“What I’m saying is I think this deep questioning is our hope. As systems collapse we will, by necessity, ask deeper questions and gradually, gradually, we’ll discover an ethic we can be faithful to that’s universal and obvious. Humans are not only ignorant and destructive, we’re also incredibly wise and creative and caring.
“That does sounds idealistic,” she said, “just like hope. What do you mean, ‘discover an ethic?’ What ethic?”
“Okay,” I said, “maybe ethics are idealistic by their very nature, but that doesn’t mean they’re ungrounded. I remember a little story about this that touched me deeply when I first heard it. Back in 1915 when the First World War was raging across Europe, Albert Schweitzer was pondering this same question. He was tired of his own incessant critique of civilization and wanted to find a simple ethical precept that might state, once and for all, what he called ‘the elementary and universal concept of the ethical’ that could guide humanity out of its abyss.
“During the days when he was focused on this search, he had to make a long journey upriver on a small barge in Gabon. Sitting on the deck of the boat, for three days he filled his notebook with unsatisfactory phrases and thoughts trying to formulate this precept, and then at sunset on the third day the boat came upon a herd of hippos in the river. Suddenly, unbidden, the ethical precept he was looking for came to him, as if the hippos themselves had offered it.
“Reverence for life. That was the phrase he received. Reverence for life. Commenting on it later, Schweitzer said something to the effect that: ‘In this principle the affirmation of the world and ethics are joined together.’ Reverence for life became the touchstone of much of his subsequent writings.”
She smiled at the story, but I sensed Schweitzer’s precept didn’t have much traction for her, considering the odds against it as she imagined what the world would look like when she reached my age. So I went on —
“What I find most beautiful about Schweitzer’s precept, I said, is his use of the word ‘reverence.’ He could have said ‘respect life,’ or ‘protect life,’ but he recognized that the power and durability of this ethic comes from pointing to a feeling for the sacred, a feeling for the holy mystery of life itself. He knew that reverence is something that’s available for everyone, whether religious or not. Reverence is at the heart of what we love, it’s at the heart of our love of beauty and communion and kindness, and everything that makes life worthwhile. Think of the look on a mother’s face when she holds her newborn baby, or the tenderness of that same baby when she’s an adult and sits beside her dying mother. Reverence for life is something innate in us, it’s why we care about anything.
“If I have hope it’s because of this innate quality in the human heart. Hard times are coming and are already here, and hard times, like I said, will cause us to question the whole arrangement of how we’re living on earth. I think it will take several hundred years, maybe more, but gradually this innate reverence for life will guide us toward more harmonious ways to live within the living earth. Anyway, that’s my hope.”
We stopped talking then, both of us just gazing out the window, wondering.
Wonder
J U L Y 2 0 2 3
When I feel pressed down by the weight of the day — the sad news of a friend in pain, my body aching with its age, or the big world and its endless troubles — I’ve found a way to lighten that weight without ignoring it. I’d like to share that way with you if I can. The process seems to involve two phases.
First, I stop. Mid-stream, just stop. I stop asserting the primacy of what I’m feeling, however prominent those feelings may seem to me. Sometimes this isn’t so easy because sad news is sad news and I feel identified with that sadness, or with the aches of my body, or whatever it might be. Stopping asserting the primacy of these things doesn’t mean I try to disprove or relativize them; I just stop affirming them to myself, emphasizing them, taking a position in relation to them. I let them be what they are without comment.
Curiously, the “stopping” of my assertiveness most often begins with letting the assertiveness itself just be, as it is. I sense the emotional weight of my world pressing down — how that feels — and only then can the stop happen, usually within a few seconds. It’s like I drop out of the equation. I stop being the one holding that position.
In these moments I sometimes get the passing sense of “seeing” myself in that emotional position, as if I’m having an out-of-body experience for a moment and see myself as the one holding that position. Then the stop happens. Stopping like this doesn’t change the sad news, the aches, or the world’s troubles, but it’s like I’m no longer their victim. I stop holding whatever it is, I stop doing anything — asserting, believing, having a conclusion about it. I stop trying to figure it out.
In a way this stopping feels very natural and familiar. I just become present, just here, but without being a something that’s here. Simply present, innocent, fresh. This “state” isn’t something esoteric or difficult to find — it’s what we are naturally when we stop reacting personally to what’s happening.
Now the second phase of this “way” comes, and it’s a little harder to explain because it’s not something I invite, like stopping. It’s grace, it just happens. It seems to happen to the extent that I open to the present moment, not as a witness of the present moment but as a spontaneous part of it. It feels to me something like gliding, like that line from Rumi: “Think that you’re gliding out from the face of a cliff like an eagle.”
I experience this sense of gliding as wonder — I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s like there’s wonder in the very moment of now — in how it is that everything shows up, now, everything! — my body, my presence, the whole presence of reality itself, the sad news, the aches and the troubles of the world, the compassion I feel — the whole unbelievably vast spontaneity of things appearing and interweaving, mutually interpenetrating and sharing their being together in the moment, the gift of it all, unknowable and beyond anything I could encompass with my mind. Wonder!
Trying to describe it like this I realize that the sense of wonder simply comes by itself to the degree that I manage to just stop, without bias of any kind, in the clear awareness of now. As it says in an early Tibetan scripture:
This groundless, baseless, reality,
Just left alone, is utterly awesome;
This unmoving pure presence,
With no destination, is utterly awesome;
This immediately available awareness of the now,
Irrepressible, is utterly awesome.
A glimpse of the “utterly awesome” usually happens just briefly for me when I stop. The glimpse doesn’t last long, but it’s enough. It’s enough for me to carry on, carry the weight of the day and the sad news and the aches, but now I know and feel I’m being carried too.
Terra Nuova Interview
J U N E 2 0 2 3
NOTE: The Italian magazine, Terra Nuova, recently asked to interview me for the publication this month of the Italian translation of The Open Path book, Il Cammino Aperto. This interview is a bit longer than my usual essays, but since I'm on the road at the moment I don't have time to write anything shorter! I hope this text may serve as an introduction to the Open Path for anyone interested. We are currently planning the first online Open Path training starting in 2024.
• • • • •
Elias, you talk in your book about a path of "awakening to the spontaneous presence of awareness" by walking, in fact, along an Open Path - which also gives your book its title. What do you mean by "awakening to the spontaneous presence of awareness"?
Awareness is our most intimate and essential nature. It’s the ground of our being. If I ask myself, What am I? I could describe my character and history and the work I do — for example, I’m a carpenter, a jazz musician, a mother, a son, someone who likes to cook, I’m shy or confident or I’m someone who doesn’t feel I’m as good as others, but these are all perceptions that I’ve come to identify with, and they’ve changed over my lifetime. What hasn’t changed? What is the essence of my being, the essence without which I would no longer be? Awareness. The essence of my being, and yours and everyone’s, is awareness.
What is this awareness that we are? When we look to find it, we don’t see anything. Whatever awareness is, it’s transparent. It doesn’t appear as an object we can describe. It seems to be wide open, without any edges. It’s also completely clear — it has no color or feeling-tone to it. Awareness resists all definition and yet we know we are aware — it’s self-evident. It’s spontaneously present.
Recognizing that our basic nature is awareness, rather than all the stories we have come to identify with, is liberating. This is why it’s called “awakening” — we awaken to our natural state, a state that’s known has Pure Awareness, Selflessness, Nonduality, Oneness, Original Spirit, and many other names.
There's a dilemma in saying that here’s a path to awakening, a path to our natural state. The dilemma is that we already are awake — there’s nowhere to go. Our natural state is our natural state, and we don’t have to do anything to make that be so. To the extent that there is a path, it’s a path of letting go, of relaxing into the awake openness of our original nature, free from assumptions about who we are or conclusions about what is real. I often say that the essential instruction of the Open Path is simply: relax — relax from compulsive doing and mental commenting and recognize the immanence of the here-and-now for what it naturally is.
With this simple recognition we experience release from our insecurities, self-doubt, and judgments of others, and as a result we’re able to respond spontaneously to whatever comes up for us with equanimity, creativity, and with a kind heart.
Your experience and training has led you to learn about and explore in depth different approaches and philosophies, from Sufism to Buddhism and many more. What have you drawn from it and what open "synthesis" have you arrived at?
Back when I was a young man looking for the “truth,” I came upon the teachings of the extraordinary Sufi, Inayat Khan, who brought Sufism to the West in the early 20th Century. At the heart of Inayat’s message was what he called “the unity of religious ideals.” To me, that phrase points to what all of us humans have in common, no matter who we are or what culture we’ve been born in. It’s a way of naming our common longing for fulfillment, happiness, love, meaning, joy, beauty, belonging, and communion. After all, the root of the word “religion” means to “re-bind” — it’s the universal desire in us to re-connect our individualities with the heart of what makes life worthwhile.
Recognizing this universality has inspired me to study and pray with Sufis, Buddhists, Jews, Native Americans, Muslims, Catholics, and others around the world. Actually I think my experience is not so unique — after all, nowadays Buddhists read Rumi, Muslims honor Jesus, and Jews read St. John of the Cross.
I should add that this commonality of our ideals isn’t just about religion in a formal sense. It includes the moment when you hold a baby in your arms, when two people fall in love, when you hear a cellist playing a Bach sonata. We are a wondrous species, united by our love for communion.
A very important and peculiar aspect of the path of personal evolution that you explain and suggest is that of coming to recognise the "non-duality" of us, of life and of what surrounds us; whereas today the tendencies go towards the exasperation of duality, of division. What are the profound implications of these two very different positions and conceptions?
I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the word “nonduality.” It seems to imply there is duality over here and nonduality over there, which doesn’t make sense. All this seeming difference between inner and outer, subjective and objective, here and there, is just that, a “seeming.” Our bodies are wonderfully made to interpret reality in this way, but, as it is said, All is One. How are we to understand this?
Nondual recognition isn’t really a “position” or a mental “conception” — it’s not located in that way. It’s more like a free-flowing appreciation of many-ness and one-ness, and their simultaneity. To the extent that we experience that free-flowing sense we are released from the illusion that we’re situated in a “me” that is distinct from the world “out there.” Everything is happening at once. That “at-once-ness” reveals our essential identity with all that appears, and it is that revelation that is the source of love, communion, or what Buddhists call “the Great Compassion.”
When we’re stuck in the subject-object, me-you, us-them interpretation of reality, that stuckness is the cause of our sense of alienation, separation, and anxiety. Recognizing our unity with all that appears doesn’t mean that we don’t also recognize distinctions. We’re still careful crossing the road. It’s not that we abandon the perception of duality — how could we? We’re just not stuck in that interpretation of what is real.
If you had to explain to a neophyte reader what the path of "self-awakening" to the awareness of non-duality consists of, how would you explain it?
This path of awakening, what we call the “Open Path,” is simply a path that unveils the direct experience of pure awareness, free from religious interpretations and obligations. Usually this experience begins with short glimpses of its lucid clarity. As these glimpses are pointed out, you learn to open to them again and again. The natural ease they reveal becomes increasingly familiar. This familiarity gradually allows you to sustain and integrate the realization of the natural state in your daily life.
A central aspect of this process involves noticing the stream of assumptions that accompany our moment-to-moment experience of life, and that obscure recognition of the natural state. Most of these assumptions involve the sense of our being an identifiable entity – a self – who is the agent of choice and action, and whose well-being is dependent on getting the phenomenal world to line up in a certain way.
We inquire into the truth of these assumptions, looking for the evidence upon which they are based. This deconstructive inquiry, or “unlearning” as the Sufis call it, becomes a natural part of our everyday experience as we proceed on this path of opening.
There’s nothing aggressive about this process. We acknowledge the mind’s tendency is to make up stories and interpretations about what is real, and that these interpretations give us a measure of security. We try to be gentle with ourselves here, neither blaming ourselves for objectifying our experience with concepts nor exerting tremendous effort in attempts to stop our habits of thinking and conceptualizing.
While we do explore many exercises and practices, and share many “pointing out” conversations and written material, the heart of this path is not didactic. Our explorations are primarily devoted to evoking each person’s direct experience of the natural state – timeless awareness – without relying upon belief or cognitive understanding to convince ourselves of its presence.
How does the vision of self and the world change by embracing the awareness of non-duality?
Wonder! We are embraced by wonder and awe at the beauty and mystery of being here at all. We live intimately, not vicariously or virtually. Intimacy is love. We’re inside this love and made of it. In essence, the awareness of nonduality is love, the great play of the universe discovering and celebrating itself.
This may sound ecstatic and extraordinary, and it is, but it’s also ordinary and everyday in the most gentle way. We simply become alive, truly alive, awake, and loving.
How much and how do meditation practices help on this journey?
Meditation practices can help slow us down and quiet the busy distractions of our lives and minds. They can help us settle into the silence that is the nature of contentless awareness. In this way they can be a useful precursor to awakening. However, to the extent that we’re still “doing” meditation — forcing ourselves to be mindful or looking for some kind of epiphany — they stop short. True meditation — sometimes called nonmeditation — happens when we’re no longer doing anything, when we simply relax into our natural state, free from the illusion of being a separate entity, an agent, a decider, the one who is willing actions.
A recommendation and encouragement for those about to read your book?
This book began as a manual to accompany 9-month trainings, with classes of 30 to 40 people at a time. While it’s fine to dive into the book alone, it can be beneficial to explore the Open Path with others — the companionship and guidance helps to keep the focus and deepen the process of self-inquiry that occurs along the way.
Here in Italy, you’re lucky to have one of our senior guides, Michael Wenger, who offers Open Path trainings in Italian each year. It’s due to Michael’s enthusiasm and skill that this book has come to Italy. Let me add that I know Michael to be a brilliant teacher as well as a warm, delightful, and humorous character. Information about his programs can be found at https://camminoaperto.tumblr.com.
Awakening in a Troubled World
M A Y 2 0 2 3
As an old man I have the privilege of looking back over the terrain of my life, as if from a height, and seeing the turns and hesitations of the path I took. The world always seemed to me so beautiful, so wondrous, and at the same time, so troubled and hurt. It kept calling me to do something to help.
I know I wasn’t alone in feeling this — most of my companions along the way felt the same. We became activists or artists or teachers or organizers, each in our own way trying to heal what we could, each of us joining the long fight against injustice, oppression, racism, war, patriarchy, and the degradation of nature. “Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight,” we sang with Marley.
At the same time, we were challenged, not just by the enormity of what we were up against, but by the counsel of the spiritual ones in our midst who said, “If you want to bring peace to the world, you must first find peace in yourself.”
Back then this seemed like a contradiction: turning inward vs turning outward, enlightenment vs activism, a spiritual life vs an engaged life.
On the one hand, as Advaita teacher Rupert Spira has said, “The single most important thing any of us can do to serve and heal the world is to recognize our true nature.”
And on the other hand, as Zen teacher John Tarrant writes, “To connect, to help, to be of use in this world, you have to walk with people.”
As you probably realized sooner than I did, these “two hands” are the hands of one body. They’re not polarities. Recognizing our true nature is not a private act, it’s radiant. It reveals our interbeing with all of creation, and that revelation blossoms into care.
What does it mean to “recognize our true nature?” Usually when we think of recognizing something, there’s a thing “out there” that we perceive “in here,” in our subjective sense of self: I see that. True nature isn’t like that, it isn’t an object we can perceive in the normal way we’re used to perceiving things. Happily enough, it’s not hidden — well, in a way it is hidden, as Ibn Arabi points out: “It is hidden by its oneness.”
What is it? What is “so close we can’t see it?” as the Tibetans say. We learn that any attempt we make to find it leads us in the opposite direction. “This that we tell of can never be found by seeking…” says Bistami. We can’t find it out there because it’s right here in the intimacy of now, the intimacy of our seamlessness with all being. When we realize this, not just intellectually but directly, our actions in the world become naturally compassionate and caring. This is why Rupert tells us that recognizing our true nature is the single most important thing we can do to heal the world. The inner ignites the outer.
I think it’s the same with activism, with the engaged life, but in “reverse.” Our outer gestures of caring, our “walking with the people,” have a wonderful capacity to reveal and celebrate the awesomeness and peace of our true nature. Compassionate, loving, selfless, joyous, and kind acts, even the most humble ones, can remind us of our seamlessness with all being. The outer ignites the inner.
Here’s a story to conclude that shows this happening. It’s taken from a journal entry I wrote 20 years ago when my wife and I went to Iraq with the Iraq Peace Team just prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003:
Yesterday several of us went out to the U.N. headquarters on the edge of Baghdad to hold a vigil, a daily occurrence. We stood next to the busy highway holding banners which read, No U.S. War on Iraq!, Peace! in English and Arabic, and Let Iraq Live! Cars honked, drivers waved. The Iraqi guards around the U.N. building were solemn-faced.
After about 15 minutes two cars pulled up delivering several reporters hung with cameras and microphones. A bit later a bus drove up and spilled out a most amazing sight — twenty Italian musicians with drums, saxophones, violin, tambourines, and they immediately greeted us with rambunctious, infectious gaiety! In a moment they were wailing away wild jazzy tunes, dancing up and down, laughing and grinning. They had come to Iraq for the week as ambassadors of good will, and good will it was!
The scene quickly became something out of the sixties – everybody grinning, dancing, the guy on the saxophone bopping and hopping, his eyes squeezed shut. Cars pulled over, people got out, more soldiers came out of the buildings to keep a lid on things, but the Italians were irrepressible.
Soon even the soldiers were grinning and clapping to the music, posing for photographs with the musicians, and everybody was interviewing everybody, the buttoned-up lady from the Christian Peacemaker Team was surrounded by Italian drummers, each taking snapshots of each other, everybody was laughing, swaying, clapping – as if, for a moment, all of us forgot the poverty, the need, the threat of war, and peace just broke out, happy careless loving peace, right there on the side of the road.
Silver Linings
A P R I L 2 0 2 3
If it’s true, as the old proverb tells us, that “there’s a silver lining to every cloud,” what can we say is the silver lining to the climate crisis? Heat waves, rising seas, droughts, floods, extinctions, soil loss, acidic oceans, climate refugees, societal collapse—what possibly could be a silver lining to this darkening cloud of suffering and loss that’s looming over us?
Humbled by the great cracking glaciers falling into the sea, unable to stop them, humbled by the rain that never comes, or comes too fiercely, humbled by forests in flames, by bewildered families trudging northward, by whales washed dead on the beach, we are humbled and will be humbled.
So, humility then, a hard lesson for a silver lining.
One day, by necessity, we will have less, less on the shelves of the big box stores, less on Amazon, less options, money, comfort, independence. And less will teach us, like it did our ancestors. Less will force us out of our doors to ask of our neighbors and to share. Less will teach us, by necessity, what we need and what we don’t. Wendell Berry:
Those who will not learn
in plenty to keep their place
must learn it by their need…
So, having less, we will find what is more. Another hard lesson for a silver lining.
The child asks, looking at a photo in a magazine, “Why does that polar bear look so sad?” And you try to tell her about the exhaust from your car and how it joins all the other exhausts from all the cars and trucks and houses and power plants and factories of all the world, making the air hold more heat from the sun and the planet gets hotter and the polar bear’s home is melting, so that’s why he’s sad. “You mean the way we live touches the polar bear, even though I’ve never seen one?” Yes, the way we live touches even more than the polar bear, it touches everything. Like a wise man once said:
When we try to pick out anything by itself,
we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
So, we learn, too slowly perhaps, how nothing is separate from anything else, and how what we do touches everything and is touched in turn. We are one whole intertwined unbelievably mutual life, here together.
As things fall apart we learn this, the most beautiful silver lining.
Accepting What Is
There’s a story about Margaret Fuller, a brilliant 19th Century American feminist, who, after a period of seclusion and contemplation, emerged and said, “I accept the universe.” Her comment is remembered because the Scottish philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, responded cuttingly, “By Gad, she’d better!”
When I first heard that story as a young man, I smirked along with Carlyle at Margaret’s seeming arrogance, but now I wonder if Carlyle understood what Margaret meant. “I accept the universe” is simply another way of saying “I accept what is,” which implies a fresh and creative way of living, free from our likes and dislikes and judgments.
In recounting this story in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James remarked:
“At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? …If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission,—as Carlyle would have us—"Gad! we'd better!"—or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent?”
To accept the universe “heartily and altogether,” with “enthusiastic assent” — can we honestly do that in these grim times with their consistent news of injustice and inequality, the possible collapse of civilization and the biosphere, and the prevalent view of the universe as a vacant infinity devoid of anything sacred?
I'm reminded of the ancient koan that Zen teacher John Tarrant relates:
A student asked, “When times of great difficulty visit us, how shall we meet them?”
The teacher said, “Welcome.”
Accepting or welcoming what is doesn’t mean we’re blind to great difficulties when they visit us. It simply means we don’t restrict our view and presence in the moment by maintaining “fixed reference points” — points of view, opinions, likes and dislikes, or attitudes that narrow us into reactivity. As the saying goes, “No one ever won the battle against what is.”
If someone abruptly cuts in front of us while driving, can we “welcome” or “accept” that? If we can’t, we know what happens — we constrict into our reference point, we shout and curse the other driver, and our suffering is acute. “Suffering is resistance,” Rupert Spira reminds us. To the extent we resist what is, the car cutting in front of us, an irritated comment from our partner, a rainy day when we wanted to go on a picnic, news of a violent war or a devastating government policy, our constriction and resistance makes for more suffering.
Welcoming what is, accepting what is, without withdrawing into a fixed reference point, frees us from self-protection and defensiveness. When our hearts are undefended we no longer have to react out of fear, dislike, or disappointment. “What is” is accepted as it is, even our feelings of fear, dislike, or disappointment, but we don’t need to take a stand with them or act from them.
When a group of ISIS bandits pounded on the door of the desert monastery of Mar Musa in Syria, intent on pillaging the place, the Abbess, Sister Houda, opened the door and welcomed them in. She prepared a meal for them and asked what they needed. Those tough men, so used to resistance, were embarrassed and tenderized by her welcome. When they left they promised not to steal anything or attack the monastery in the future.
Of course, meeting times of great difficulty with welcome doesn’t always end up so happily, but that’s not the point. Accepting what is doesn’t guarantee happy endings. Commenting on the koan above, John Tarrant writes:
“…the first task of the inner life is not to amplify the delusions, not to add hatred to hatred but to head in a different direction, to be openhearted without being gullible. The little story about welcoming the times we are in offers a path when we don’t know what to do. It’s not about drawing conclusions as a way to freedom. Instead, this koan is an environment.”
An environment, not retreating into a reference point, an openness to what is — these are ways of describing being present without strategy so that our experience, as Khyentse Rinpoche tells us, “our experience becomes the continuity of nowness.”
Rinpoche’s observation points to the heart of accepting and welcoming what is. Our acceptance is not something static, not a conclusion about what is. Indeed, what the universe is, and what any situation is, will always escape our knowing. Accepting this not-knowing opens us to a natural humility and innocence in the moment, in the continuity of nowness, from which we can respond spontaneously — compassionately, or passionately, or humorously — to whatever comes.
F E B R U A R Y 2 O 2 3
A New Year’s Vow
J A N U A R Y 2 O 2 3
Because this day is special
and we are together,
because the year’s starting
and we want to say something,
because it’s never been here before
and we have,
because the year is asking
and the children are asking and listening
for what we will say
and what we will do,
let us vow, let us make a vow,
now, because we can,
because we’re still breathing,
and the old year hurt,
and the animals are anxious,
and the children are waiting,
and the air is listening,
let us vow, now,
to the mothers who bore us
and the millenniums before us
and the millenniums to come
who are waiting and listening
for what we will say
and what we will do,
and because it matters
and we are together,
let us vow, now,
to love more.
Gentleness
M A R C H 2 O 2 3
If we’re lucky, at some point in our life’s spiritual journey we may hear the news that the realization we’ve been seeking is already here in this moment.
Where? How?
We’re told: Just relax. Open. Stop doing anything. Stop searching for anything. Simply be the presence of now.
Guidance like this can be helpful, but it can also feel abrupt and bewildering. How do I relax in such a radical way? I can tell myself to relax and to open, but by what signs will I know the way? To simply be the presence of now without doing anything or searching for anything sets me adrift. What will help?
We can find a hint in response to these questions in the work of the 3rd Century Greek mystic, Plotinus. Plotinus often called God by the name “the Good” and recognized that the numinous reality of the Good is all-pervading and ever-present. Here he gives us his hint:
“The Good is gentle…and is always at the disposition of whomever desires it.”
Let’s hear that again: the gentleness of the Good is always at the disposition of whomever desires it. Pierre Hadot, the great French historian, describes it this way:
“Plotinus’ entire life consisted in the experience that gentleness, like grace, proclaims the presence of the Principle of all things.”
The guidance here is that we can learn how to relax, how to open into openness, and how to simply be the presence of now, by following the scent of gentleness. Gentleness is the sign and the assurance, and we can feel this “gentleness” spontaneously and directly in our body.
Try it. Next time you sit in meditation, doing your best to relax and to open, follow the gentleness. You’ll know it by its welcome. “There is a sun warmth inside, nurturing the fruit of your being,” Rumi tells us, “…a love-breath that lets you open infinitely.” Let its gentleness pervade your mind and heart and body. It’s already present so you don’t have to make it up.
If you feel stuck in old patterns of self-identity or nervousness, you can start by noticing the gentleness of your breath, especially how gently each breath appears and disappears so subtly. Let it assure you.
Gradually the gentleness of your very presence will reveal itself. Let that gentleness take you. Whatever stories, fears, or grief might trouble your daily life, whatever pains or depressions you may feel, give them to the gentleness.
The gentleness of the Good is not a thing. It’s more like a fragrance, a familiar love, a warmth, acceptance, safety. It’s completely kind. It’s why Sufis call it “the Friend.”
You might ask, “The Good, the Friend, this gentleness — do I have to believe in all this?”
I think it helps, at least to begin with. If you don’t naturally feel what this “gentleness” is, start by pretending you feel it. After a while it will be evident. Then believing won’t be necessary.
Toward the end of his life, Plotinus became increasingly aware of the importance of learning how to live our day-to-day life guided by our contemplation of “the gentleness of the Good.” As long as we’re embodied in this human form, he saw that our task is to bridge our experience of the purity of the Good with our experience of daily life. Gentleness is that bridge.
When we notice, for example, that we’re being judgmental, irritable, or out of rhythm, what happens? Through the very gentleness of our noticing, our irritability and self-preoccupation subside. We apologize. We become simpler, gentler.
Following the gentleness of the Good is indeed a simple and ancient ethic. The Vedas said it: Let all the world be my friend! Jesus said it: Love one another. The Dalai Lama said it: My religion is kindness. The Quran said it: “The servants of the Merciful One are those who walk gently upon the earth.”
In the turmoil of our times, learning to walk gently upon the earth, following the gentleness of the Good — by its grace we will find our way forward.
Selected Notes from the Open Path below:
The History of Love
Impermanence and Love
World Worry
The Welcoming Practice
The Beloved Community
The History of Love
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 0
As the story goes, 13.77 billion years ago the universe was born from a “point” of near-infinite temperature and gravity, a point described as a “singularity” appearing before time and space had any meaning. And then, woosh! from this impossible-to-comprehend love the entire universe of energy-matter expanded in all directions, which it apparently keeps on doing even now. Yet as it expands there’s another movement — the energy-matter obeys a call of mutual attraction, a drawing together into stars, galaxies, planets, and us wondering about it all.
One of the things we wonder about is the nature of these two “forces” of expansion and attraction — what are they? what moves them? The “woosh” emerging from the singularity — what propels it into becoming? And conversely, this attraction — what causes it? What’s inside the “wish” of isolated particles to come closer, to draw together into stars and planets, you and me? We’ve named that wish “gravity.” Astrophysicist Brian Swimme calls it allurement — a sexy word for something so vast!
The woosh and the wish — let’s play with these words — the woosh is the divine, holy halleluiah! and the wish is its desire for intimacy and connection. The woosh in the Koran is Allah’s universe-creating decree — kun faya kun — Be! and it is! and the wish is Allah’s statement overheard by Mohammed, “I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known. Hence I created the world so that I would be known.” The woosh in Buddhism is the light-body of the Buddha called the sambhogakaya; the wish is the Buddha-body of everything we see around us, the nirmanakaya. In Christian mysticism the woosh is the flight of the Holy Spirit everywhere, and the wish the incarnation of Christ as the world.
All these metaphors — a singularity, a Big Bang, Be! and it is! Buddha bodies, Holy Spirit, Christ, the love to be known — ultimately they’re all poetry, flinging us into a wordless space where we might glimpse what we’re made of, what calls us, and what guides us.
From this perspective we witness the history of the universe revealing both the forces of unimaginable generosity — the woosh — Here! a universe for you! — and the desire within it — the wish — toward connection, inter-relation, intimacy. Generosity — the gift of becoming; intimacy — the joy of communion.
What can we call this but love?
The history of the universe is the history of love. We can feel how the universe’s love story is alive in our own experience, in the feelings of expansiveness and intimacy that simultaneously appear in our hearts when we love. We might think these are strictly personal feelings, our own good luck, but in fact they’re the life of the whole universe as it comes into being. As above, so below. As everywhere, so here.
I realize this vision of a universe made of love may seem like wishful thinking, especially as we witness in our time so much selfishness and injustice, and so much of the beauty and life of our planet being destroyed.
But it is not a wishful vision. It’s evident in the history of the universe, in its boundless generosity and its desire for communion. We’re made of it. We’re made of its generous and intimate love. Knowing this is true, not just intellectually but in our bones, in how we experience our becoming moment by moment, can give us the courage to carry on, no matter what happens. The force — of the entire universe! — is with us.
A little child runs across the lawn into her mother’s waiting arms. The mother cuddles the child and makes cooing sounds, and then the little one slips off her lap and races around the yard again, tumbling and showing off.
That was many years ago. Now the child no longer exists; a grown-up person has taken her place. The mother is no longer waiting with her arms open. She, too, no longer exists.
This is the hard truth of impermanence, and it’s how we usually think of that word — the endings it forces on us, the goodbyes, the losses and poignancy of never again.
The old Buddhists tell us the nature of impermanence is ultimately unsatisfactory. I imagine that’s doubly true if you believe we’ve had countless lives before this one, all of them marked by the losses we’ve endured. We come here, we get attached to these beautiful bodies, to our loved ones, to the places and activities we love, and then they change and disappear. Impermanence tears at our attachments and makes dukha, suffering — this is the reason they say impermanence is “unsatisfactory.”
Of course, impermanence doesn’t only work at the level of human attachment and suffering. If we look closely at the fine-grain of our experience, we can see impermanence acting in every instant and in every place. Each moment yields to the next and never returns. The events we are experiencing right now — physical, thoughtful, emotional — have already changed. You breathe. Your attention moves. Your body shifts. Appearances arise and vanish. Nothing stays the same.
We might think that “I” stay the same through all this change — but what is this “I” that stays the same? When I look closely at the evidence of the moment, at the point-instant of transience, what kind of “I” is really there?
Looking directly at impermanence like this is not easy. But when we can manage it, when we can look clearly at the transient nature of our experience, that recognition naturally floods back into us and erases our sense of being something outside of transience, something substantial and separate. As an early Buddhist scripture reports the Buddha saying:
In one who perceives impermanence, the perception of nonself becomes firmly established; and one who perceives nonself achieves the elimination of the conceit “I am” and attains nirvana in this very life.
And in the words of the Koran: “Everything is perishing except God’s Face.”
God’s Face, nirvana — what are these scriptures pointing to? By perceiving the continuous flow of impermanence (the perishing), the conceit of our isolated selfness is washed away. But we don’t vanish, just as the universe doesn’t vanish because of the impermanent nature of each moment. What’s holding everything together? What isn’t perishing?
This is where the deeper secret of impermanence is revealed. As we come face-to-face with the fact that everything is perishing, that our lives and all appearances are thoroughly ephemeral, the realization of what’s called “nonself,” or “emptiness,” or “openness” is born. In that realization we sense, beyond our senses, something that resists all description, something that we might variously call God’s Face, or nirvana, or holy intimacy, or simply, love.
Whatever we call it, this-that-does-not-perish is what connects us with everything — each other, the trees, the mountains, the sky, the stars, and all beings who have ever appeared. We remain the unique beings we are, but we recognize we’re not alone in our beingness, we are with the entirety.
I think of this “with-ness” as love— love that’s both complete in itself and endlessly creative, a holy intimacy that is cosmic, inconceivable, awesome, and at the same time ordinary, everyday, and particular. It’s the primordial generosity and ecstasy of light flooding the universe, and it’s the energy of the little child running to her mother.
Of course, impermanence is painful for us too — there’s no way we can escape loss and grief since everything we have ever been given in this life we will lose. But our grief too is love, it’s the form love takes when great loss comes to us, the cry of with-ness as it breaks free from particular love into universal love.
Knowing this doesn’t avoid the sorrow that impermanence visits upon us, but it embraces it in a larger order. People, things, and experiences come and go, but the truth of our connectedness is the reality that doesn’t.
Impermanence and Love
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
In the early 20th Century the American philosopher Josiah Royce coined the term “the Beloved Community” as an ideal of social harmony brought into being by those loyal to goodness and truth. Later, the notion of the Beloved Community became central to the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., who envisioned it as the ideal human community of love, solidarity, and justice that was “not yet” but that would eventually be actualized through our commitment to nonviolence and the sacredness of life.
It’s a beautiful notion — the Beloved Community — stirring in us a sense of hope that humanity is indeed evolving toward a promised land. And it is just this towardness — “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” — that inspires us, encourages us, and gives us the strength to believe we shall overcome some day no matter how bleak things look at the moment.
I say “amen” to that. We need hope, we need the faith in ethical progress that this vision offers us. But because it’s a hoped-for ideal it can also feel a little abstract; because it’s “not yet” — while the dysfunction of human societies is in our face — we can doubt that it ever will be.
I’d like to suggest that we might understand the notion of the Beloved Community as not only a beautiful future ideal toward which we are called, but that it’s also a reality that’s here, now.
The Beloved Community is all around us and within us. It’s how our bodies function — the community of our organs and blood, nerves and bones, all functioning together in a wondrous wholeness. The air we’re breathing, the water we drink, the food we ate at our last meal, are testaments to the Beloved Community we are part of. Everything is working together; everything is hand-in-hand.
The trees on the hillside draw sustenance from the earth through their roots, from the air and sun through their leaves. When their individual lives end, they give back to the soil and to the bugs and birds the richness their bodies have collected. The Beloved Community. When we walk on a path through a forest and feel calmed by the beauty of the dappled light, we are welcomed into the Beloved Community of beauty. When we say “thank you” to a stranger at the grocery store, those words rise up from our gratefulness for a small kindness, and — for a moment — the ideal society we hope for is made real.
From age to age, mothers have cuddled and sung to and protected their babies. The Beloved Community. Every day the distant giant planet Saturn attracts stray asteroids that enter our solar system, shielding planet Earth from devastation. The Beloved Community. Scientists look for ways to produce clean energy, poets look for ways to express wonder, children laugh as they’re carried on their father’s shoulders. The Beloved Community. It’s here, and at the same time, it’s not yet.
When we perceive, even for a moment, how we are held in the community of life, how we are sustained within the vast web of all our relations, we gather strength to carry on and to serve the advent of the vision we dream of. Yes, the web of our relations can be torn — we see evidence of that every day — but with care it grows back.
Each act of kindness, selflessness, generosity, compassion, and communion heals and creates the Beloved Community. These acts, however inconsequential they may seem to us at the moment, are like seeds that contain within them our not-yet realized goal. As theologian Paul Tillich describes it in the language of the Old and the New Testaments, “the coming of the Kingdom of God [the Beloved Community] does not come in one dramatic event sometime in the future. It is coming here and now in every act of love, in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy.”
Our ancestors, for all their failures and wars and missteps, longed for what we long for, and succeeded in bringing us to life and to this recognition of the better world we are capable of. We can draw strength from this gift of our ancestors — it’s a strength that’s here, now. The generations of humans to come — our unknown descendants depending on us and cheering us on — we can draw strength from their encouragement too. It’s a strength that’s here for us, now.
Let us take heart in the Beloved Community, not only as a hopeful vision of the future, but as a vivid reality that arises "in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy." It's both a reliable compass that will guide us through the dangerous times ahead, and it's here, now, our good home.
The Beloved Community
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0
A disturbing litany of disasters confronts us in most woke writings these days, and for good reason: our planet and human civilization are encountering conditions in which the earth’s capacity for nourishing life is endangered at a magnitude unknown in human history. You polar bearsknow the litany: polar bears lost on melting ice floes, songbirds vanishing, soil depleted, poisons in the air and our bodies, countless trillions of plastic fragments floating in all the oceans, forests burning and diseased, extractive industries gouging into mountains, a fierce ambition in human economies to grow past all limits, populations of refugees fleeing from social and climate disruption, and ever-increasing injustice, distrust, polarization, and domination of the many by the few. All of this is stirring in us world worry, a sense of foreboding that is draining the vibrancy of human culture as well as our physical, psychological, and spiritual health. We see a menacing cloud over the future and feel helpless to do anything about it.
World worry is not something we can avoid. Even if we try to shut it out and just devote ourselves to the demands and pleasures of our personal lives, the storm gathering over us and over our children and their children is a portent we can’t ignore for long. While we may realize that world worry is sapping the energy from our lives, at the same time we feel if we don’t worry about what’s coming down, we’ll take no action to forestall it. Releasing our world worry would mean giving in, giving up.
How can we be with this? What is our responsibility in this fateful time? What is asked of us?
And then there’s this troubling question: Can we be awake to the enormous ecological and social disruption that’s happening now and that’s ever increasing — disruption that, I repeat, is on a scale that no generation before us has had to face — can we be awake to it and still live happy, beautiful and fulfilled lives?
There are no easy answers to these questions, and no easy fixes. As the days and years pass, each of us will have to contend with this intractable challenge in a manner suited to our own lives. Here are a few thoughts of my own in response to these questions — culled down to three basic “principles” — offered not as definitive answers, but more as a starting point for your own contemplation and questioning.
Keep an Undefended Heart
In my own life I try to accept my world worry not as a looming horror that makes me want to shut down, but as a “necessary angel” that keeps my heart open. For example, at the moment I’m aware of the 900,000 Syrian refugees escaping the fighting in northwestern Syria; many are without shelter, huddled in the freezing weather. I’ve been to Syria many times and I feel connected to those people. Though I know I can’t really imagine the desperation of a father or a mother trying to keep their children from freezing, or the scale of suffering there (900,000 people!) and everywhere in the world, I know if I close my heart to it, my own life and the greater life I am part of will be diminished. Even though I’m in no position to do anything about their suffering, that very helplessness becomes part of theirs… and somehow within it we share a mutual presence. That might sound like a feeble response that makes no difference, but consider the opposite — if I closed my heart to their suffering, refusing even to be aware that it’s happening, would I not be abandoning those people a second time? My helpless caring matters.
I wonder if the extreme of world worry, when we become overwhelmed by the anxiety of knowing the earth’s life-support systems are collapsing, isn’t in itself a kind of defense, a way to defend our hearts from being present. Being overwhelmed, we curl into anticipatory grief and the certainty that everything’s hopeless.
I think here of the prayer-words of Etty Hillesum a year before she was murdered at Auschwitz: “These are times of terror, my God. Tonight for the first time I stayed awake in the dark, my eyes burning, images of human suffering parading endlessly before me. I am going to promise you one thing, my God, oh, a trifle: I will not let myself weigh down the present day with those fears that the future inspires in me…”
Those are the words of an undefended heart, open to the hurt of the world without letting that hurt crush her heart’s presence. An undefended heart is in this way the requisite condition for survival, maybe not physical survival but survival of the most noble aspect of the human spirit. If, in the end, the earth’s human experiment does fail, at least we will have succumbed with our hearts alive and loving.
Find What Matters
When we experience our world worry not through the lens of fear but through our undefended heart, something very intimate changes in us. Our life comes closer. Worry and despair open into compassion. Our undefended heart reveals to us that we are the world, undivided from it. Then, in the moments of our lives, we do our best to be faithful to what matters. As the novelist Barbara Kingsolver once remarked, “In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”
Making things “right,” in however small a way, asks that we discover, in each life situation we encounter, what matters. Finding what matters isn’t an intellectual exercise, like making a list. It’s more alive than that, more immediate to our moment-to-moment experience. For example, we might say that “kindness matters,” but the living quality of kindness is something that we must find and open to, again and again, as we live.
Given time, this “finding what matters” becomes a natural, intuitive move. It doesn’t need to be thought about, although sometimes thinking can help us remember what’s at stake. Say you find yourself getting irritable about something — at the moment that you notice your irritability you might ask yourself, “What really matters here?” This question might come verbally like this, or it may be a subtle shift in your heart. Either way, it creates a pause, and in that pause you make things as right as you can.
In my own life I experience this process of “finding what matters” in the day-to-day situations that arise — in how I respond to and care for others, care for my household, care for my health, care for the work I do. In fact, finding what matters is the very yoga I try to follow as I write this essay and look for the next sentence or word. What matters here? In an earlier part of my life when I designed houses for a living, the same questioning guided my design process — what matters here? What is the life that wants to happen here? How can this design be faithful to that?
But finding what matters isn’t only something that’s active in the details of our lives, it can also guide us in their larger trajectory — what work we turn to, how we determine our life's priorities, and what we give our energy to. Here our question about “what matters” resonates deep into the future, not only in our own lives but into the lives of our descendants, into the seventh generation. How will what I devote my life to nourish the life that is to come?
But whether in the details of our lives or in the fundamental directions our lives take, finding and following what matters is the very current that will heal the world. We can be sure of that.
Do the Beautiful
Following what matters is the essence of the Sufi principle of ihsan, which translates as doing the beautiful.* When Dostoyevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world,” he was saying, among other things, that beauty matters. Here beauty is not simply understood as something that has an aesthetically pleasing appearance. The beautiful act — doing the beautiful — is an act that fits what a situation calls for, an act that arises spontaneously when the heart recognizes what matters. The beautiful act nourishes and calls forth the life that is nascent in a situation.
Doing the beautiful doesn’t come about from thinking or planning. It happens naturally to the degree we have devoted our life to “undefending” our heart and finding what matters. “Let the beauty you love be what you do,” Rumi famously told us, an advice we cannot remember too often. In the context of transforming our world worry — our concern for the perilous condition of the planet and human civilization — into a path of healing, I cannot think of a more succinct instruction.
Here we might find an answer to the question: Can we be awake to the enormous ecological and social disruption that’s happening now and that’s ever increasing, and still live happy, beautiful and fulfilled lives? I believe this is exactly what we must do. I don’t have any illusions about the suffering and loss we are witnessing today, or the magnitude of the threats facing the community of life on earth in the future. But if a world abundant with life is to be seeded by us, it will not grow from anxiety or despair; it will only thrive in the fertile soil of our undefended hearts, finding — and doing — what is beautiful.
*See previous Notes from the Open Path: “Doing the Beautiful,” “Medicine Beauty,” “Beauty Will Save the World,” and the essay “Following Beauty” in Seven Contemplations on Awakening.
World Worry
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The Welcoming Practice is a fusion of guidance from several mystical traditions: Christianity, Sufism, Zen, Advaita, and Dzogchen in particular. It has its most direct antecedents in the Christian Centering Prayer practice as developed by a number of Catholic mystics (Merton, Keating, Menninger, Pennington, Bourgeault, and others) inspired by the 14th Century text The Cloud of Unknowing and the practices of earlier desert ascetics. However, this Welcoming Practice is a distinct variation drawing from the praxis of several traditions, which is one reason I’ve started calling it the Welcoming Practice — it welcomes these various forms of guidance that are united in their devotion to the same mystery.
The Welcoming Practice has three aspects which I call: Bow Inside; Consent to Silence; and Welcome Love. Though I’ll describe them here in sequence, you may find that when you engage in this practice these three aspects mingle and occur within and through each other, and are not as separate as they might sound in this description.
Bow Inside
It can happen that when you sit down to begin your meditation practice, a subtle pride sits down with you: See, now I’m a meditator, now I’m doing my practice. I’m a proper Sufi (or Buddhist or Christian). This subtle pride, which may be hard to spot, is a veil of identity that can obstruct one’s simple presence. When you sit down with your identity as an adherent of a particular tradition, you can’t help but see through its lens. To “bow inside” means to relinquish that identity as best you can, to give everything away that you think you know or have. As an early Sufi advised, “Put your forehead on the prayer mat and don’t presume.”
The “move” of bowing inside isn’t a physical movement, although it can have a kinaesthetic feel to it. Like a physical bow, this bow is a move toward self-effacement and unpretentiousness, a giving-over of one’s insularity: “Take me away from myself!” as Ibn Arabi cries in his beautiful prayer. To bow inside means to offer yourself in all humility, in your simple presence, during the sacred moments of this practice. Just your clear presence, nothing more.
In her wonderful descriptions of Centering Prayer, Cynthia Bourgeault points to a single line in The Cloud of Unknowing that suggests the essence of what I mean by bowing inside: it is to have, as the anonymous author of The Cloud writes: “Naked intent direct to God.” It is this “nakeding” that is the interior bow, an unclothing of your personhood to its simplicity and readiness, for in this practice you are inviting “God” to be with you, to open yourself to the unspeakable mystery of the numinous. To welcome its presence you cannot come adorned with self-identity; you have to come naked. Here you may wish to replace the word “God” with some other signifier that means the same thing — Naked intent direct to Pure Awareness, or Naked intent direct to Buddha Nature, or Naked intent direct to Silence.
Consent to Silence
“Consent to silence” is Father Thomas Keating’s concise instruction for this process of “nakeding.” To consent is to allow, to open to the openness that is silent, that is the background of every moment of our lives. One way to consent in this way is to recognize that our very capacity to listen is silent. Whatever listening is, it is silent. This is why the Advaita nondual teacher Jean Klein advises, “Listen to listening.” We recognize that pure awareness itself is silence. God is silence. Or in Father Keating’s words, “Silence is God’s first language.”
Now to the degree you have managed to bow inside and to consent to silence, you will soon experience distractions, mostly in the form of thoughts, or perhaps images, emotive currents or bodily sensations that draw your interested attention toward them. This is not a failure. In a way, it’s the heart of this practice, for each thought or sensation that attracts your attention gives you a chance to let it go, to relax the tension that your attention fixes upon it. That relaxing is the key. It will present itself as an opportunity again and again. Each time you notice you’ve attached your attention to some property that appears, relax. Consent to silence. As Zen master Dainin Katagiri points out, “… just put aside all kinds of imagination fabricated by your consciousness. Don’t attach to thoughts and emotions; just let them return to emptiness.”
Let the silence swallow them up. Consenting to silence means letting whatever has captured your attention return to emptiness. You don’t have to do anything to make this happen. As it is pointed out in Dzogchen texts: “All thoughts are self-liberated.” They vanish by themselves as soon as you relax your interest in them. This is why Sufi Inayat Khan called meditation mystical relaxation.
Welcome Love
At first I hesitated to use the word “love” to describe this aspect of the practice, since love is a word that so easily can seem sentimental or denote personal affection. In saying that, I don’t mean to disparage sentiment or affection — praise them! they are human resonances of the “divine” love that gives us this moment that blossoms everywhere as everything. To welcome love in the context of this practice means to welcome in our hearts a glimpse of this divine love — though again, to use the word “divine” may be just as perilous as using the word “love,” for it seems to imply a divinity or entity from which love is dispensed, and then we are caught in thinking dualistically about what is in essence not dualistic. Divine love is the radiance of Being, not something that issues forth from a God that is made into something separate in our minds.
But how can we welcome this vast, unspeakable love? Happily, it emerges by itself and welcomes us to the degree that we have consented to silence, which means we can’t make it happen through our insistence. And yet, “we can put ourselves in the way of it,” as Ibn Arabi tells us. Here we can take to heart an instruction from Plotinus, speaking of the same unspeakable love:
Let those who are unfamiliar with this state imagine, on the basis of their loves here down below, what it must be like to encounter the being they love most of all.
“Imagine what it must be like…” — that’s where we can start, in the imagination of the heart, not the mind. By grace such imagination breaks us loose from conceptions of love, and then divine love like an awesome wind takes over. Here we can no longer talk in prose — Sufis are especially enamoured of this kind of love poetry, and the 11th Century Persian Sufi, Abdullah Ansari, in his Book of Love, goes so far as to say Sufism is simply another word for love:
Love is the mark of the Tribe, the title of the Tariqah (Way)… It has three degrees:
The first degree is a love that cuts off disquieting thoughts, makes service enjoyable, and offers solace in afflictions…
The second degree is a love that incites preferring the Real to all else, elicits remembrance on the tongue, and attaches the heart to witnessing it…
The third degree is a dazzling love that cuts off expressing, makes allusions subtle, and does not reach description. This love is the pivot of this business…
I quote these love words to remind us that in this Welcoming Practice what we are inviting ourselves to be in the presence of is so awesome, sacred, and of a radiant, loving mystery so unknowable that we can only bow inside. To me, this practice has the capacity to take us beyond the quiet composure of recognizing nondual awareness — it passes through that doorway, yes — and then reveals to us a loving sacredness that is at the same time infinitely awesome and purely intimate.
The Welcoming Practice
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