Personal – Page 2 – Spontaneous Presence

Repose (as in…final)

If one were willing to confront the full impact of all the signs pointing to the future of life on this planet, a confrontation with the prospect of mass death is unavoidable. That prospect is inextricably entwined with the manner in which we hold the prospect of death right now–not in some nebulous future. A culture and economic model of infinite growth, illusions of permanence and control must include a denial of death, distorting the entire idea of what life is and what constitutes living. On the far side of these ramblings about mass death is the scenario of our own personal death.

Such a process might be marked by an inexorable advance into an increasingly evident material dying process, a relentless progression of conditions—or failed interventions into an increasingly complex collection of conditions—that might not rob us of cognitive faculties, but which would nevertheless be an increasingly evident reduction in the physical capacity to sustain life. Meanwhile, mind will observe from a greater distance. I might slowly leave my body as its control, to whatever degree I once had it, is wrestled from my grasp, leaving only Mind—if I’m lucky.

This progression will then likely be complicated by the presence of multiple conditions, each presenting complications for treating the others. The options narrow, for example, to a carefully tailored regime of drugs or perhaps outlandishly risky surgeries. The sense of gradual entrapment by inexorably limiting conditions rises, and the prematurity of it all begins to gain weight. But is it premature? We might reflexively consider every death to be premature, including our own, of course, but what does that really mean? The question is if these conditions ultimately describe the process of my own death, will my own death be premature?

Yes, there may be moments of fear along an uneven path of tests and treatments, appointments, the carefully modulated conversations. I listen as my body drops into a minor key, openly gazing inward and outward at whoever delivers the news and feeling that news reverberating—reconciling all the other factors impinging on life along the way. All of this depends on whether some other conditions come galloping along to raise my level of risk even further, limiting my capacities, adding variety and velocity to the drama, chasing a runaway herd of questions requiring answers with further complications.

One’s sense of time contracts. That is the inescapable message. I become the primary character in a movie depicting this inexorable process. I am driving a car downhill on a winding mountain road, on one side is a vast and unobstructed cloud-free view, with the mountain rising sharply on the other. In the gathering darkness, suddenly there is something amiss with the vehicle. It’s becoming difficult to control, swerving momentarily toward the precipice until I regain control in the nick of time. Then, further down the mountain, the brakes unexpectedly disappear; and then further on, the windshield is suddenly covered with dust. Now, the lights don’t come on. I am blind and helpless. Either I am engulfed in terror–or something else happens.

What is that exactly? What happens next? I cannot stop. I cannot depart the vehicle. What else is there? I let go. I no longer attempt to control anything. I am no longer driving. I don’t even see the road anymore. What is taking me down? Where is the bottom? Does it even matter?

It is in that moment when the most important decisions are made. I transition from realizing my time is shortening to a practice of collapsing into the timeless present–simply allowing this body to dissolve into the soil of countless other bodies nourishing and sustaining all else as we careen down the mountain together. One makes a conscious transition from abstract knowing one is going to die to comprehending being on a direct course of dying now. Prematurity no longer exists. I am on a course less and less under my control. Its conclusions are not up to me. We are capable of understanding we will die at any time. But that very understanding is itself an objectification–as if something will happen in the future, but perhaps not to me. And anyway, we don’t want to think about it. In the meantime, we will exercise whatever agency we can muster to forestall the inevitable.

It seems perfectly logical to say we will all be confronted with a series of moments tightening the grip of death in which we will have to decide what we believe and what our conscious role shall be in attending and adapting to a process that is both in and out of our hands, that is entirely real and entirely illusory. As we are living and dying in every moment, we are both separate from and in union with everything and everyone. Each one of these moments will be an increasingly intimate encounter, but at some point one will surely enter a dying process–one by which, if we are fortunate, we will recall that union.

The dying process may be described in detail by the medical professions, but for most of us, I suspect the process begins well before the rapid decline of cognitive function. As such, it is really an awakening process. We will discover whether animal survival mechanisms will leap over all the fences of containment and rationalization by higher brain functions and run wild, derailing us from refuge practices we’ve spent decades refining to restore and sustain equanimity, let alone what one could call resting in the vast and empty nature of mind. Or, perhaps we will comprehend the true nature of our relationship with existence in ways we never imagined possible.

Fear and anxiety may be expected, but not guaranteed, just as pain can be guaranteed, while suffering remains optional. I am steeped in a finely cultivated and detailed view of reality, life, suffering and death, developing confidence in the capacity to meet whatever arises. I’ve received the gift of gnosis, looking directly into the heart of existence, a view of emptiness, openness, inclusion and unity. The question becoming more present is whether I will continue to rely on these practices when they count the most, whether I’m going to plant my flag in that mountain of belief no matter what comes.

On the other hand, a significant part of these practices and preparations both implicit and explicit in the range and flow of Buddhist teachings; indeed, the orientation of all organized religious belief is to the existence of a soul or not, to an afterlife or not, interpreting death and preparing the believer for what is beyond life. Whether some part of us endures beyond this life, whether it’s eternal life inseparable from the divine, eternal damnation, rebirth or none of the above, true believers prepare (or hope) for whatever they long to encounter. What is sold as insurance guaranteeing the desired outcome is an unshakeable belief in what happens after death.

We stake our lives and our deaths on those beliefs. In whatever way we approach dying, particularly when we’re aware of what’s happening, no matter how much we might deny it, we cling to a belief in what happens next and mentally prepare for something like everlasting glory, perpetual luminosity or perhaps one of several intermediate states preceding rebirth into an endless repeating cycle. Such beliefs suggest there is consciousness beyond life and that steps can be taken here in the bardo of everyday life that will have a bearing on the condition of one’s rebirth.

It’s amazing to imagine navigating bardo states in the first place. Am I going to stake whatever remaining time I have on the details of how I might respond to a nebulous and fleeting dream state? Or will I focus on the dream state of this minute? Even considering sustained moments of absolute clarity about the true nature of mind, do I imagine those are a ticket to the bardo of becoming preceding rebirth? What if I decided to be satisfied with the effort I’ve already expended? What if every moment of this life is a rehearsal for and an investment in what happens after this life? What if that is precisely and only what this life is?

That could easily sound very Christian, but it’s also an unavoidable interpretation of Tibetan Buddhist bardo teachings. A preoccupation with whatever happens after death can become what Stephen Jenkinson calls an addiction to competence, getting it right. It’s really just another way of clinging to life, to the identity we’ve spent our entire lives crafting and convincing ourselves truly exists. It’s an artifact of hope, which in the final stages of life becomes another way of not being present for what is. Chögyam Trungpa would surely call that spiritual materialism.

Realizing I may come to a state of terminal disease or to an increasingly fragile condition sooner than I might have expected, I have to wonder if reifying such imaginings, diverting my attention to teasing apart nuanced states of post-death possibilities, imagining the exercise of intention even after the final breath has been taken, learning to recognize the signs described by centuries of teachers, exploring the likelihood of a continuation of consciousness after that final breath is the best use of my time. Staking my present life on what happens after death and exercising rituals of preparation is a preoccupation with the future, not an engagement with the unfolding present. I have to ask, holding back the guffaws, what I would think if I discovered I’d been misled?

This is a process of exploring and enacting personal justice, reconciling myself, balancing the scales, as it were, between what I wish to invest in the future when there is such abundance right here in the present. Whatever I have been taught, whatever I have sampled or believed in, the time I’ve spent assimilating it, exploring all the views and prescriptions about preparing for one’s own death have been an indescribable blessing. But there is really only one choice in this moment: to be present for whatever is here and not to worry about what comes later. This is always the Dzogchen teaching anyway. The Great Perfection is the recognition that we already exist as the seamless nature of reality. There is no creating that reality. It is already created…and in perpetual creation. There is no waiting for it, no hope of attaining it. It is always already here. We can’t ignore it or get more of it or find it or lose it.

And yet, I make no claim to any truth. I make no claim on the future. I plant no flag of belief. I anticipate nothing. I reject nothing. I renounce nothing. I simply put it all away and remain as open as possible. There is no other place or way to be. This was the primary prescription all along. There is no bridge to suchness. Whatever rituals we repeat, whatever antidotes to samsaric mentality we adopt, we are already there.

I am already enough now. I have always been enough. Whatever comes, I will be enough. All the self-examination, evaluation, climbing some stairway to heaven or belief in anything beyond this life falls away. If there is anything that does more to make peace with all circumstances we encounter, it is simply to be with what is, to walk and talk the knowing that we are already there. It is to be giving thanks in every moment for what we are given, to live within an aura of gratitude for every breath, every encounter, every emotion, every difficulty, every teaching, every suffering and every moment of celebration. Whether this is the only life we will ever have or whether it’s just one of an uncounted number of flashes in an endless unfolding of numberless kalpas, nothing can take its place. To live in this way is to balance the scales for whatever remaining life we are given.

Remembering & Relationship

Being in an increasingly delicate and uncertain state for the past year for multiple reasons, it’s time to reassemble the elements of one’s known and unknown universe, the pieces scattered over a troubled and troubling landscape, to rediscover–or recover–one’s place in relationship to the ones close at hand and the ones far from view. To a degree, we are each disassembling the flawed model of life on earth like a toy we have outgrown, this suddenly foreign image of a pyramid with humans at the top. Others are insisting it’s the only toy in the sandbox and we must continue to regard it as worthy of our attention as if it represents normal.

There is, frankly, no hope of re-visioning and becoming the post-sandbox human without acknowledging the mycelial model of relationship with all the more-than-human planetary life. A select few of us have dabbled beyond the confines of our sacred comfort for a long time, surely, but now COVID has redefined normal and obliterated the boundaries of the sandbox entirely. Conception has given way to material reality coming home in the most personal ways. Enacting a different view of living involving a great deal more listening and far less speaking, creating a much larger circle of care is the only defense against being thrown out of The Garden entirely.

Moreover, essential to changing the Story will be to dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, remembering reality is all subject. We are in porous connection with all that is. The notion that we are all distinct and separate souls on individual journeys is a dangerous corruption of the true journey. We are not here to be found in some homogenized mystical way. We are here to find and lose ourselves.

If you have been fortunate as I have to be offered imperturbable unconditional love at the most intimate level, consistent, unaltered humility and steadfast adherence to truth and consistent values, then you may count these blessings daily. While I crack open my own heart, awakening and encountering new veils, there is no going to sleep anymore. Allowing the armor to crack is like cleansing the windshield.

This is really the only thing worth doing now. I am drawing inward and simultaneously expanding outward, interpreting the arc of these events. I am being drawn to remember, to mourn and welcome the dying of the old world, to forgive the ways I have been corrupted, not believed in myself or tried to be someone I am not. There’s a great deal of striving and programming to address there.

The practice of remembering isn’t possible every moment of every day, or even daily, but it’s worthy of regular attention. It is a ritual of unwrapping the baggage of a day, a month, a decade, affirming somatic truth, the migration of spirit, giving just regard to the vulnerabilities and messiness at the heart of existence. It can be a return to the unobstructed primal territory of the heart, beyond individuality, beyond the stories we tell, beyond all the supposedly impermeable ideological, emotional or even biological boundaries.

The implication of remembering is that we can put ourselves back together, revise our agendas and strategies, re-evaluate what’s important. That will be different from one to another. But for me, remembering is to return to the physical, to emotion, to the currents of feeling, the sensations of relationship, to the one I left behind in the perpetual reaching for more—more information, more creativity, more awareness, more perspective, more knowledge and the urgency of purposeful action.

Planting one’s feet back on the earth in this way, one also remembers one’s place. This is the most difficult and unlikely remembering. I have been too much a nomad recently to fully relate to a place. And even now I’m not truly of this geographical place despite the family history. It was mostly others’ history, not my own. I’ve learned to take the trappings of place with me, that all places and people are essentially the same.

Except that now, having been here a year and a half, I already have a different perspective. This is a place I left behind long ago. It did not then suit the yearnings of a youthful soul seeking a much larger view. I did find other places and felt as much, if not more, kinship with California than I did here in the east, but there is a calming and satisfying softening happening here. The pace and the density have a subtle effect. Or maybe it’s only my lifestyle. Yet it’s also here and in the letting go that the widest view of all takes shape.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation carries an implication of justice, a balancing of accounts. In this case it’s an honest discovery of others’ suffering while realizing our own mortality, complicity and limitations. Reconciliation is a great humbling because intimacy with suffering is also a coming to terms with one’s own death. Most of the time we operate as if we cannot permit the intrusion of death into our view or conduct in life. Denying, misunderstanding or misrepresenting life or death to oneself at some point becomes another miscarriage of justice. This is happening at a cultural level and is an integral part of why we have gone so wrong on our environment.

I seek balance by looking at my assumptions and beliefs, whatever unconsciously corrals, misdirects and exhausts me of wildness, causes me to lose contact with the inexplicable essence of life, the spontaneity and unity of everything and especially my capacity for stillness. Narrow assumptions establish imbalance. They arise from a resistance to breakdown, an illusion of stability and a compulsion to preserve that illusion. In modern culture, instability is regarded as failure; yet ironically, that very stability is itself a distortion of reality. I have set limits on the degree, pace and character of change, all of which may interfere with or rob me of the benefit of failure, vision, connection or satisfaction. It is by failure that I discover balance. No imbalance, no homeostasis; only a brittle, narrow comprehension of complexity.

For more than 18 months I’ve been engaged in a close encounter with a physiological disorder, a rare condition, which coincidentally, like climate change, is 100% fatal if left untreated. It arises in the deepest realms of my physiology, where life itself is produced in its most elemental form. This non-malignant dysfunction is instability personified, inexplicable to the layman, buried in background assumptions about how life is supported. And though it can be understood and explained in modern medical terminology, it cannot be adequately addressed according to these limited terms. They are just concepts, equally applicable to your car or your computer. It has emerged as my personal monster. It cannot be smothered by knowledge, technicalities or reason. There is no certainty or way of turning it into a monument sitting on a shelf. It’s an outlier at the frontier of medicine. It’s marvelous in that respect, transformative, daunting, life threatening and mysterious. Reductionist framing can’t possibly tell the full story.

Likewise, the marvel of climate change can be explained in the same reductionist terms, which don’t—and can’t—plumb the depths of the behavioral dysfunctions, the flawed outlook, the mechanisms of denial at the heart of such a condition, except perhaps by applying the analogy of autoimmunity: we are attacking ourselves, making a seemingly inexorable series of self-destructive decisions. Or worse, life is threatening itself with extinction, promising to change, failing to change, repeating the cycle, carrying immense guilt and then sloughing it off by dissociating. These are the behaviors of an addict. Not all of humanity is addicted, but the addicted are leading the rest of us into the abyss.

The term ‘climate’ should be applied to the context of all life including the social, not solely to atmospheric/oceanic conditions or the many thousands of biological effects. The climate of earth is deteriorating, but this is so in every sense of the term, not merely the weather. If we traced the acceleration of the global warming effect, the loss of ice, the acidifying oceans, the pending collapse of the food chain, the Sixth Great Extinction, all are paralleled by the massive concentration of wealth at the top, the degradation of civil discourse, the corruption of democratic norms, the influence of money in politics, pollution on an unprecedented scale, feudalization of the economy and the degradation of all forms of capital. None of us can breathe. Indeed, deep in the center of the earth economy, the engine of true vitality is being silenced. If we addressed the social and economic context of earth adequately, emissions would likely fall greatly, whereas focusing on driving down emissions alone is clearly not working fast enough.

I’m not an addict, though I surely am complicit. I could (by some sideways logic) relate to COVID-19 as a random invader, an alien agent, a force to be reflexively resisted as if it has no intelligence. We can track its adaptive capacities, disassemble it and understand its transport and replication systems. It has no mind, yet it has intelligence.

Beyond all that, I regard my personal disorder as an expression of consciousness. Which is to say it did not come from nowhere. I cannot extract myself from my environment or, as a Buddhist might say, extract myself from my karma, my spiritual continuum. There are known environmental (karmic?) factors linked to this disorder and perhaps unknown factors as well. I can’t be positive it’s unrelated to one of these. But regardless, it now functions as a self-generating disorder, an error in genetic logic. And since our entanglement with the environment is total, how can I ignore the possibility that not only was an environmental factor involved in my contract with this condition, but that I was complicit by contributing to the creation of that factor?

The dysfunction at the heart of this matter may be considered a corruption of purpose, an aberration, a crossing of elementary signals at an intra-cellular or genetic level. My immune system has turned against me, becoming a termite of my own construction, undermining the foundation of my life. Termites seek life or sustenance without consideration for any other life form or for the integrity of the host. They live as if there’s an endless supply of their prime resource. Does that sound a little too much like the human presence on this planet?

There is no such thing as a termite regulating its appetites to ensure the sustainability of its host. Such an invader would be called a parasite. Given a choice, I would rather be a parasite than a termite. Unlike the virus, the guest in my body is not some alien presence. And my encounter with it is not accidental. It is Being delivering a message to this being. I did not ‘catch’ it at the grocery store. Although, considering the massive overuse of fertilizers, food additives, preservatives, considering nearly everything in most grocery stores is either genetically modified or sprayed by carcinogens, is full of either simple sugar or modified protein, maybe the grocery store has finally caught up with me.

If I were to fully regard this disturbance as an emanation of self rather than as Other, I could regard it as a disturbance in my energy body, a gradual and unconscious—or worse–a careless failure to attend to my personal integrity. Current scientific knowledge may explain some of the mechanisms, but it cannot explain how it came to be and the prevailing treatments are not guaranteed to reverse it.

I have undergone the standard protocols. But again, this doesn’t come close to addressing its true nature. It is buried and then covered over, like ripping out offending weeds in a garden, but not quite extracting the roots, followed by planting new seeds and expecting proper germination. And later, if and when the condition again crawls out of its confinement, we have other measures at the ready to suppress it again. I submitted to a second round of the treatment protocol because blood markers clearly indicated a regression. I gamed out the consequences of failure, the probabilities for dancing again toward the edge of viability, a subtraction from previous estimates of my life expectancy, the extent of interventions necessary to sustain life and the possibility of my body rejecting those interventions, all the way to the ultimate conditions of my demise.

As I delve deeply into the energetic realm, the interactive and potential counter-intentions reflected in successive or persistent manifestations, I am mindful of the different realms of knowledge expressed as its tenacity and my responses to it, continuing to be a drag on my wellbeing. I am reminded of the declarations I made at the time of my original diagnosis, the doorways of consciousness it opened, the fresh awareness, even agency relative to the quiet and not-so-quiet suffering around me every day, the purity of intention necessary to meet this disorder, to re-focus and get on with my life: the continuous inquiry required to unearth what Being is attempting to deliver to me or elicit from me.

I even sensed one of those imperatives was, at least partially, a consuming attention to personal happiness altering processes at the heart of this condition, deep in my bones. Indeed, an imperfect affair of the heart. I’m not fully clear whether the inner messaging is in opposition to this condition or the result of a direct encounter with it. Am I fighting it or becoming friends with myself? Am I reflexively opposing it or becoming more acquainted with its nature? Is this merely the only way I can digest the discord all around me in the world? Have I unwittingly invited this? Most likely, all of the above are true to a degree, as merely approaching the object of inquiry, whether as self or as Other, inevitably changes our view of it. In other words, there’s no such thing as objectivity.

Some of this reflective process is itself a symptom of the human disease, our belief in intellectual primacy, human centrality, the inviolability of science, an infatuation with our reflective capacities, all exercises assuming there isobjectivity. In the ancient world and now as we reactivate and interpret that wisdom, it is said that every culture, to accompany the thinkers and doers, must have its mentors and guides, the ones we call dreamers and mystics, the keepers of gnosis, retainers of the collective raison d’etre, the guardians of tribal history. I envision myself as a product of both, perhaps a flawed hybrid, perhaps entirely presumptuous. But nonetheless, pressing on to my own version of reconciliation.

Revelation & Recovery

The appeal of post-activism–a walk into the desert beyond the last swimming pool, is an escape from human centrality, an intention to tend the wounds we have inflicted on our world, on ourselves, by presuming humans alone are the drivers of social change.

Deep Adaptation was a welcome revelation. I was suddenly relieved of pushing the rock uphill. I was diverted to more productive activity: facing unmediated and unfiltered reality and acting accordingly. These urgent times require that we slow down. I could put my full attention on the inner work of resilience and restoration, taking a slower and deeper journey into its meaning, simplifying and carefully extending myself to live a version of small-scale sustainability. Under current circumstances, as I’ve said, this seemed to be imperative.

Deep Adaptation has been criticized as a regression into despair, doom and disengagement. But I’ve never seen it as refuge of defeatism, more like a dispassionate assessment of reality. Parallel to this shift in attention, is the appeal of post-activism— a walk into the desert beyond the last swimming pool. It’s a cognitive jailbreak from a belief in objective reality. It’s an escape from human centrality, an intention to tend the wounds we have inflicted on our world, on ourselves, by presuming humans alone are the drivers of social change. It’s a turn toward recovering and redefining community away from the parameters of Progress. Conventional activism is an attempt to escape the prison (a diffractive prism?) of prevailing conditions. How is it that despite all our efforts, we largely remain in that prison, redefining ourselves over and over according to terms we can barely grasp. We are like fish trying to find water, immersed in it so deeply, so completely that we can only speculate about its nature. Post-activism is somewhere beyond all of that.

At the same time, as my health drives my attention inward, my sense of conventional (inner or outer) agency ebbs. To a degree, my definition of agency still resides in the conventional realm. If I tried to unravel this mystery, I could easily turn to despair and fatalism. As my world shrinks, I recall the vast spaciousness of mind, allow the boundaries of ego to expand and loosen, reconsidering influences steering life far beyond any imagined boundaries I might normally contemplate. I puzzle over whether and how the entire course of life has prepared me for its closing chapters. Or whether, more likely, there is no such thing as preparation, only incrementally deepening encounters with the reality of our material limitations. Clearly, there are still revelations to be had. That, revelation, if I could name a clear intention governing all of it, is what it shall be for me.

Upon arriving in Durham in October 2019, I was pressed to make my housing choices quickly, taking my health into consideration. I chose easy, low maintenance, self-contained and accessible. Any possibility of participating in building much resilience into my community or immediate surroundings was marginalized. Taking a wider view, making a commitment to a slower, smaller lifestyle requires opening to revelation from sources not previously considered. I have found these in familiar sources as well as in new voices now propagating via online communities connecting in ways we might not have explored if Covid had not come along.

We are entering territory never previously occupied by humans—of multiple catastrophic events (Covid, climate change and Trump) arresting, rupturing and reversing the entire course of human progress, stopping us in our tracks—like a massive volcano erupting and darkening the global sky, like Nuclear Winter. This is the precipice of Peak Humanity. In some ways we’re already on the downside, heading south. The possibility of arresting the inertia of the Industrial Growth Machine is a small sliver of light barely escaping the massive black hole of Business-As-Usual.

There’s further revelation—and recovery—in realizing the depth and nature of our entanglements with the natural world and each other. We are arrested by boundaries suddenly becoming much softer than we normally realize. They are mutable and transient, more like filters, permeable and highly specific, both protective and yet facilitating communication. Less foreboding. COVID is a messenger of our porosity, a call to examine our intimate relations with the micro-biome, with ecologies interrupted, sundered and thrown into chaos.

In this respect, COVID is also more of a revelation than any previous fugitive organism leaping across the boundaries of its normal habitat because of its deadly nature and global impact. It’s bringing us crashing back to earth from our drunken binge of extraction, acquisition and destruction. Investors and futurists may call it a Black Swan, but it’s more than that. It’s the latest event piercing the myth of separation. A more significant event propagating greater collapse-awareness could not have been engineered by any deliberate effort. We are now glimpsing a version of the future and being clearly shown what measures will be necessary to respond to similar events in addition to whatever the climate has in store for us.

To enter any recovery, all of these revelations must be digested. Also revealed are our capacities of trust, compassion, courage and a new purpose. It’s time to recover, dust off and refurbish these exiled capacities to embody our reliance on each other, to remember we do not exist outside of relationship. Nothing is itself, by itself. As Zach Bush mentioned in a recent interview, COVID has awakened and spurred us to move from an adrenaline society to an oxytocin society, restoring the inner landscape, awakening to reciprocity. This is what we are finding in the streets, online, in wider collaborative initiatives. Every awakening is a recovery, stimulating a desire for more.

Rage & Resignation

I’ve been in a rage since before the financial collapse of 2008. Well, actually, a good deal longer than that. Perhaps since Bush v Gore. OK, let’s say I was tuned into the truth about Bill Clinton before it became patently obvious: a neoliberal excuse-maker, prevaricator, manipulator, triangulator, blah, blah, blah. There was a reason he was called “slick Willie.” I’m not even mentioning Vietnam, Nixon, Kissinger, and the thieves and sociopaths of the GOP operating ever since the early 80s, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War.

Plenty of reasons to be in a rage. But never mind. If I just picked 2008 as a base, it was the bailout and Obama’s (or should I say Eric Holder’s) failure to stand up for the rule of law by never prosecuting or even stepping on the toes of the financial elites. Not one. That was when “too big to fail,” was unveiled. An amazing piece of PR. Now we’re pondering whether humanity is too big to fail. Spoiler alert: nope.

Over the past 10 years, this rage alternately morphed into despair, denial, resignation and dropout about the climate issue as we’ve witnessed one failure after another, one milquetoast policy after another and terminal prevarication. I even had some words for Obama (2012) about his pursuit of America’s endless foreign wars:

your words fall
like an avalanche of dry bones
once resounding against the sky
now empty echoing in our foundations
once the sinuous awakening curvatures
of smothered and gasping values
now falling into an abyss
of conflict and easy temptation
stunted flowers becoming bitter fruit
they fall away from your stunned mouth
knitting together only shame and excuses
for all the death they foretell

I couldn’t have said so at the time, but about 2014, I reached the end of my rope when I went to congress to lobby for a carbon tax. If that’s not enough to pull the rug out from under any remaining spark of inspiration one might have, nothing is. It is and always was Kabuki, steeped in an august veneer of propriety, sanctimonious deliberation, the worship of barnacle-encrusted tradition, self-serving appropriation of mythology and rhetorical sleight of tongue. Dishonesty, thy name is Congress.

For a good while now we’ve been able to name the entire criminal gang, the ones most responsible for our predicament. We know what they knew and when they knew it. We know their tactics. We know who sold out humanity for profit, who has lied, deliberately and expertly clouded the issue and mounted massive misinformation campaigns. We know their henchmen and how they obstructed popular sentiment, cherry-picked and distorted climate data, attacked experts, threw faux experts into our path, sentenced billions of earth’s most vulnerable beings to deluge, displacement, deprivation and death. All expendable. The greatest crimes against humanity, bar none. The Holocaust times 10,000. Species-suicide promulgated by sociopaths. Not one of them has been seen or is ever likely to be seen in the familiar orange jumpsuit.

But then, parallel to the rage, coexisting in strange symbiotic temperance, is my denial, my rage about having to be angry about any of this in the first place and my cynical desire to run in the opposite direction and live a life of careless oblivion—which at times gets the better of me. Resignation. And why shouldn’t it? I’m entitled to do that simply based on the fact that I’ve already lived most of my life, a simple life as it is now. I’m not wealthy enough to afford a real high emission lifestyle. Well, except air travel. There’s that. At the same time, living that smaller footprint life, I remain complicit.

Even though my personal mitigating measures are so miniscule as to not even register on a lifetime scorecard, I fall back into my cultural upbringing commanding me to repair the world (tikkun olam), even though not making any mitigating gestures makes about as much negative difference as any positive difference I could measure by making such gestures. Perhaps these are the terms of a new post-activism. But post-activism cannot make promises. It can only expand to define the problem. And even that is a risky proposition. The dilemma lingers—believing we can individually make a difference, which allows us to feel good–without really making any real difference whatsoever?

Which brings me closer to the present moment. Having realized some years ago we are heading toward, or have already passed, critical tipping points guaranteeing the worst climate impacts and having exhausted my taste for barking up the same old trees and being painfully aware, despite all the promise of zero-emission technology (which was not catching up to fossil fuels fast enough until the appearance of COVID), of the nature and power of the fossil fuel lobby and the sociopaths of Wall Street driving the economic machine inexorably killing us, I stumbled upon Deep Adaptation, which doesn’t quibble about our remaining chances to throw any serious wrenches into the gears of Business As Usual or place false hope in persuasion by rational argument.

Instead, Deep Adaptation names the Anthropocene as already an era of failure, a colossal crashing to earth. It could also be named the era of The Planet Striking Back. Unfortunately, our dithering miscalculations now threaten human viability. On some world which remains foreign to me, it may suffice to burrow deeper into Buddhist practice to discover non-confrontational or non-aggressive ways to address these issues, and they may well exist, but most of the time I lean more toward channeling rage into creative pursuits–and this is not a time to drop out. Fortunately, a significant cadre separating itself from the homo sapiens death cult realizes the only sensible response to climate impacts we’ve been failing to forestall for 40 years is by utterly re-shaping the ethos of human presence.

Not that Deep Adaptation is a pioneering idea in this respect. There are collapse-aware people all over the world, still massively outnumbered by the oblivious, but nevertheless creating new institutions, small and large-scale adaptive and resilient communities everywhere and propagating new thought. Technology provides the means to accelerate these ideas as never before. Unfortunately, it also provides the same benefit to counter-narratives. But while those local actions and personal transformative ideologies are taking hold, the mass resistance and uprising necessary to slow down the carbon emission juggernaut had never fully made itself known until the twin conditions of the pandemic and mass resistance to systemic racism became the means to realize in a new way how one condition is all conditions and that justice for some cannot be separated from justice for all.

Rather than an invading alien, Covid-19 has proved to be the monster under the bed, a goblin from our past and a message from the future, humanity’s zombie rejected Other. We are impossibly entangled with the biological world, having corrupted ecological codes to such a degree the system is coming back upon us. Covid has put us on pause, mirroring our failure, hubris, ignorance, arrogance and the inequality on which they all depend. And how do we respond? Reflexively, automatically, identically to the medical approach, pitting humans against all invasive organisms, the easy way, the only way we know: War! Demanding a reinforcement of human centrality and control.

‘All we know’ is a perfect example of how our responses to problems perpetuate the problem: War against the virus (social distancing and other measures) followed by a popular uprising against the measures taken to defeat the virus. To view the virus in this way is bring us even closer to the next pandemic…or at least a perpetuation of this one. We have no idea how to do with-nessing, stepping all the way back from our imagined control and being with, quietly enough, even if only for a moment, to realize we are the source of our deepening agonies and that the conventional model of responding is only making things worse. These are moments when resignation overtakes me.

Personal Justice

I could be pushing myself into ‘activism,’ reaching out to interact in a larger process or to articulate a view of what is important, communicating with others and formulating strategies, a timeline of objectives. But all of that is falling away.

My focus has turned away from external engagements and activities to a more internal process directed to the remainder of life. Entering into a new intimacy with approaching mortality has been partly imposed by COVID which took precedence over collapse, catastrophe and all things future. But the underlying condition remains. As such, I have an uncertain future—or at least, I don’t know which future I may hang my hat on. I have a past, but I’m accelerating away from it and I certainly can’t live in it. I have this moment and I’m not entertaining life much beyond this moment. As Lama Keith Dowman said in an online meditation session, “Time has nothing to offer us” except as a reason to continue grasping for the trappings of achievement. The only refuge is the timeless present.

Here the framework of Deep Adaptation facilitates the more immediate issues of my personal situation. I didn’t have to do that a year ago when I was entering the field of Deep Adaptation because I thought I was recovering. Now, I hang in a limbo whose next move is shrouded in mystery; the illness is becoming more complex and limiting my activity. I’m not cowering in fear, but I’m noticing what I’ll call my constellation of avoidance behaviors. I am noticing all of them almost immediately and deciding to let them dissolve into a background of expanding patience.

I could be pushing myself into ‘activism,’ associating with others who hold a longer timeline and objectives for the collective, reaching out to interact in a larger process or to articulate a view of what is important, communicating with others and formulating strategies, a timeline of objectives. But all of that is falling away. Instead, I’m reaching inward in a different form of activism, retreating into a space between collapse and recovery.

Every outward extension of interest, all associations and intellectual activity, every step backward into a rational or linear frame of mind feels not only like an overextension of my limited resources, but a misdirection, an exhaustion of formerly predominant and unquestioned ideologies of modernity and the typical responses to the collapse happening all around us. I am reverting to holding myself in my own lap as I would a newborn and feeling slightly helpless in that way as if I have to be exceedingly careful about everything I do—not too fast, not too hard, not focusing on a distant future. Just staying here, listening intently, taking refuge in the expanse, resting slightly beyond discursive mind in a space not defined by any boundary whatsoever. The bardo of ever moment. Therein lies its appeal.

I do not regard or accept any of this as denial. What I’m doing now is an imperative. No other choice seems possible, or for that matter, healthy. My intention is to live at the marrow level and follow its dictates. Unfortunately, at least at the biological level, not much is happening there. For all practical purposes, it’s dead space. At the same time, the framework of Deep Adaptation and particularly the list of the associated R-words (Restoration, Relinquishing, Resilience, Reconciliation) combined with a few I’ve added (Revelation, Rage, Recovery), do offer a way into this territory to explore how I can Reconcile myself to the many issues and questions arising at this crossroads.

Justice stands blindfolded, implying a balance. It’s a slippery deal, begging the question, “Whose justice?” It’s uncertain, but the elusive definitions of justice don’t stop us from pursuing its appeal. How I (or any of us) navigate and comprehend the imperatives of the moment, happiness, fulfillment, relationship, intimacy, community, death and especially the accumulation or discard of beliefs are all in the balance now. How I interpret and meet (or not) the imperatives of the world around me, reconciling them with the world within, defining the lodge pole supporting my abode while attending to what is emerging, making decisions among the many competing realities demanding bandwidth is the topic here.

Notes On This Body

The story of this body is written in an ever-refreshing pixilated environment, an ocean of shifting light, multitudes of biochemical gates constantly opening and closing. There is no permanent story.

There are a thousand doors to presence. We may ask penetrating questions, risky and ambiguous, provocative, even dangerous. Or we may simply inquire into the workings of the mind and the emotional body evoking the most sublime or painful material.

One of these ways has been to journey into the body itself, to perform a deliberate inventory of physical reality, into what we take for granted most of the time. There are many different internal landscapes: the feeling world of instantaneous response, the intellect assessing and planning, the influence of history, habit, biological imperatives, learned behaviors, the open gates of ease, others long closed, all changing in every moment. The inner imagery is a constant kaleidoscope of light and sensation, color and function, pleasure and pain, conflict and resolution, excitement and calm, space and fullness. And always seeking comfort.

We distinguish ourselves from others by both instinct and conditioning. My personal habit of attention will go to the establishment of safe boundaries. My default focus is on feeling and sense perception. Setting myself at an appropriate distance is completely automatic. I barely think about it; but when I do, I am usually horrified by how absent I can be at times and at the superficiality of habitual distancing—marking space. The more closely I investigate, the less sure I am of a true boundary between what is and is not my body. In practical terms, I will immediately attempt to differentiate what is and is not me.

Science does inform this view, but only in a limited way. But taking the science seriously renders the entire question of what is and is not me into a radically different light. The more influence given to scientific reality versus popular assumptions, the more accustomed we can become to a different view that feels more accurate.

This body is a ‘thing’–what we are and also what we are not, both foreign and intimately familiar. Divergent energies operate in every moment as polarities holding the world together by separating everything from everything. The story of this body is written in an ever-refreshing pixelated environment, an ocean of shifting light, multitudes of biochemical gates constantly opening and closing. There is no permanent story. There is only a whirlwind of accumulation and shedding around a seemingly constant and ever-mysterious core of sentience, practice and belief, light undergoing re-creation, temporarily held in a limbo of semi-existence.

The relations of inner space are as parts, a multitude of languages decoded and interpreted by a central governing force and reinterpreted for assimilation by the various “nations” that we are. I am a united nation of diversity, the instability of an old knee injury, the quietly desiccating column of intervertebral discs; declining sight not seeing the fine print clearly, random and accumulating restrictions of motion, and an ever-advancing weakness and loss of stamina.

I live in an inner space somewhere between the roof of my mouth, the center of my cranium, relaxing in the bony four-poster bed of the pineal gland. I am also a nuisance of the winged sacrum, my diaphragm a parachute, rhythmically lifting and settling. I rest in the muscular hammock spanning coccyx to pubis, mediating generative relations to the earth and the sky, the gross and the subtle, the energetic, the electro-magnetic, the phenomenal and the metaphysical, taking and giving away, becoming and dissolving, arising and disappearing.

I am consciousness as structure, this structure, in one moment creating a towering edifice of ‘self’ and in the next, collapsing in abject surrender. I am the spontaneous execution of learned motor tasks, symphonies of coordination, millions of motor neurons singing in distinct and unique patterns as if nothing else exists. I continue to swim through this world, forever modulating timing, length, effort, relaxation, rotation, drift and unrestrained falling.

All these domains operate at once, the microbes in my gut, the transformation of water and food into consciousness, of breath into presence, of gravity into movement, conflict into work, of rest into gnosis. The outside is turned inside, the inside turned into a dynamic exchange with everything, the formless giving back in form. Sometimes a shout within, contorted by the implied fullness of a thwarted explosion, touches the pink-orange sky at dusk to salve some old wound. At times a seeming stillness on the outside hides the teeming beneath, nourished by and dying into all that surrounds me.

When I gaze into the dying light of this Balinese sky, the vitality of an ongoing massive emergence lurks just beneath awareness. Birds, geckos, bats on automatic pilot make impossible course adjustments in a constant search for dinner, not unlike the random maintenance-level neural activity of discursive thought. The silence beneath houses a quiet beyond all quiet, a vast uninterrupted place of no time, no beginning and no end. To suggest this body is no more than a spontaneous construction beyond conception, ineffable, measured against the felt sense of my reality, is an impenetrable paradox, whose unwinding forever occupies great minds.

I undergo the common physical changes associated with aging. Holding a self-image as a model of attainment is a form of vanity, but it’s not entirely driven by cultural standards as it is also by standards of personal comfort. Thus, I resist the physical changes of aging, though not compulsively. I am accustomed to a level of vitality regularly rejuvenated by active and passive practices. Am I attached to that self-image? Well, yes. Sometimes a bit too much. Yet that too is softening with time.

This is also “my” body, after all: the complexity of unique signal interpretation, response, inhibition, reasoning, resolution, intention and action. The body is indeed illusory, a vehicle of the greatest sense pleasures and the greatest pain, heaven or hell, sooner or later. But like the durian fruit so plentiful in some parts of the world, at once hell and paradise, the skin and the flesh are inseparable, sometimes indistinguishable, different sides of the same face. There are days when I must overcome the repulsive odor, the teeth of this demon life, before I can experience the incomparable succulence of its inner sweetness.

This is also my body, the one having no substantial boundary. Separation from the elements is indeed illusion. Connection arrives as a heron dive-bombing for frogs in the rice paddy, as the setting sun filters through the Maya trees or as grandmothers pass by, bravely riding side saddle on the back of a motorbike.

I have spent most of my life creating and cementing boundaries with the world and other people, differentiating the individual identity and the trajectory of a chosen life. Having been released from most of the common imperatives, realizing entropy and mortality, I am spending the remainder loosening my grip, allowing those boundaries to dissolve. As intimate as that day at the Mount Madonna Center, overlooking Corralitos, California, if I’m lucky, when I die there will be nothing left besides devotion, generosity and compassion, a celebration of impermanence. Every act is potentially a step toward realizing our true condition, a rehearsal for that moment. Authentic compassion requires unflinching presence.

Beyond this, I listen to the unending internal conversations between disparate territories. They speak to each other quietly at all times of the day and night in language I may not always comprehend, requiring adjustment, refreshing attention to position, alignment and breath, continuously attending to the structure and energetics of presence. They drift across my awareness like distant strains of devotional music, hammered strings and practiced voices wafting across the paddy outside my window each morning at sunrise. They are a waking and an awakening ritual, the heartbeat of community, invoking spirit in the language of both gods and demons. Beneath all the conventions, the programming and the colonization of modernity, this flesh is vast. That is the reality of every moment. Insofar as I may live in this awareness, I am more vitally engaged with the truth of what this body really is: a vehicle of both time-bound and timeless relationship.

The Awakened Embodied Self

This is the imperative of evolving spirituality, realizing Sufism’s unity of fanaa and baqaa & of Buddhism’s Two Truths, to be here and everywhere at all times, to simultaneously be emptiness and embodiment.

Anyone inquiring into the meaning and process of spiritual awakening undoubtedly encounters conflicting ideas about consciousness. Where does “I” come from and where does “I” reside? Western psychology and religion are deeply concerned with defining and preserving the Self as a separate and fixed entity with (or in) an eternal soul, while eastern religions deny any absolute reality of a separate identity. What’s a seeker to do?

When sitting to meditate, one of the first instructions we receive is to become aware of the living process. In some traditions, we are guided to bring attention to the breath and gradually to the physical sensations that come and go from moment to moment. We can dwell on these sensations for extended periods, but an essential practice of meditation is to focus on one thing while developing the capacity to notice everything else that arises in the background.

A second level of this process is to notice how—and how easily–our attention is distracted from the singular focus we started with. This noticing and the repeated return to the original point of attention is the development of presence. A third iteration of attention is to notice the different feelings that arise in the course of being distracted and returning to our original intention. Do we have judgments about ourselves for leaving? Do we have expectations about how we return and how long we ‘should’ be able to maintain the original state? Are we trying to achieve something?

A fourth iteration might be to ask who (or what) is the one meditating and who is the one presumably not meditating while being distracted. In asking these questions, one enters the territory of distinguishing between Self and Not-self, the psychological (ego) self and the (super-ego) witness. From here it’s a short linguistic shift in attention to a witness that is itself a non-entity. In fact, unwinding this thread of consciousness to its logical conclusion would require we investigate who is witnessing the witness, realizing that a further iteration of witness arises as soon as we establish an awareness of the immediate one. Tracing the witness all the way back to its origins is what, according to Robert Thurman, Buddha himself did on the way to his own awakening.

What is found when we go ever deeper into the layered constructs of cognitive awareness? Nothing? No self? In Buddhism, what is found at the root of the ever-elusive identification of the witness, is emptiness. Emptiness completely undermines any notion that there’s objective existence of anything. The appearance of everything is dependent on something else, a precedent. When investigating the existence of the precedent, one inevitably realizes there is no single independent source of anything.

We also create otherness internally in relation to “self” when we identify with unworthiness. We are also confused about who or what is the Self—is it a container of all the internal voices we may hear at any given moment? Is it a core truth, an identity around which all these voices orbit incessantly? If the former, then who is the witness, the part to whom critics address their assessment, their directives and imperatives? If the latter, then what is their true role and value?

God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

—The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers (12thC)

Reducing the complexity of the human psyche to a bit of spiritual geometry casts some light on the concept of Self, defined by behavioral therapy, which, unlike an entity with no fixed center and no boundary, implies a more actively engaged and focused energy. Self has been described as the equivalent of ‘flow,’ a ‘sense of deep concentration without distracting thought, a lack of concern with reward; confidence, mastery and well-being.’ Sounds just like being embodied in the moment.

The term “self-leadership,” carries connotations of action, forethought and calculation. But wait. Wasn’t self just described as being completely in the moment, merging with phenomena without analytical preconception–or planning? What does the term “leadership” mean? Is the self still? Is it in motion? Is it an expansive boundary-less playful state of mindfulness? Or is it a kind of executive identifying and bringing various voices and intentions to heel, establishing and re-drawing its boundaries to expand its domain of influence, micro-surgically distinguishing itself from the masks of persistent sub-personalities?

What is the source of its energies? Is it a still point distinct from the surrounding disharmony? Or is it a primary organizing principle–a magnetic north, for a being negotiating its way through Being? Is it even distinct from “I” at all? These questions are addressed by suggesting it is not a matter of determining whether self is an active center or an expansive, more passive presence. Like light, self is neither wave nor particle, but both, or either one, like the famous double-slit experiment of 1801, depending on who is looking and when, constantly transmuting from one to the other depending on the conditions of the moment.

According to Coleman Barks, the Arabic words fanaa and baqaa are used by Sufis to describe the intersection of the human with the divine, a ‘constant and profound interplay full of paradox and movement, breathing in and out of every soul.’ These are seemingly opposing forces; or perhaps more accurately, the yin and yang of consciousness, the particle and wave of light; forces influencing our sense of connection to ourselves, to each other and all that is.

Fanaa is the impulse to surrender, allowing oneself to become ‘annihilated, as if disintegrating into a vast magnificent sky, dying in order to become one with the infinite.’ Not unlike non-dual presence, the extinction of self, fanaa is the ultimate expansion, the dissolution of every boundary, every circumference. Mind-lessness. Paradoxically, this is also the highest form of concentration at the pinnacle of Buddhist ati-yoga, The Great Perfection itself. This is the ultimate devotion, realizing the truth of emptiness.

Baqaa, on the other hand, literally means permanency or embodiment. Perhaps the word discipline more precisely approaches its practical expression; the intention to be here, as opposed to being everywhere else but here. Not dissolving or shrinking from the mundane, but exploring its deepest nature, focusing one’s energies completely in the service of being exactly what we are. ‘Baqaa is the relative truth of appearance, the undeniable materiality of existence. Instead of melting into that whole sky, one aspires to nothing more than becoming one of the stars in it, experiencing the nature of one’s unique place in the sky’ or one’s place here on earth.

True baqaa is also the fruit of a lifetime of devotion. This is where the attributes of self fully rise in dignity and durability. This is the self of Richard Schwartz’s familiar C-words of Internal Family Systems (confidence, creativity, calm, curiosity, compassion, clarity, confidence, courage) the self that becomes a mirror of clarity and purpose in every act, connected to and relating from its own ever evolving essence. Baqaa is the realization and containment of a refined skill. The pinnacle of progress on the incremental spiritual path.

The more discipline we exercise in discovering self and the more time we spend there, the closer we come to the invitations of fanaa, the ability to rest in our own essence, and increasingly to connect to the essence in others as well. And even beyond that, to the essence of all that is. Full realization.

We become, as Barks says, “the dreamer streaming into the loving nowhere of night.” This Self, the one that can live simultaneously in both fanaa and baqaa, is the self that is both particle and wave, both completely here and simultaneously nowhere, constantly transmuting appearance and emptiness into a continuously shifting torus of space. At the pinnacle of Tibetan ati-yoga practice, this is The Great Perfection, living beyond both samsara and nirvana, dissolving the Two Truths into One. This is not a Self that cannot be found, merely one which is not fixed, which cannot be pinned to either the relative or absolute. More by choice than by accident, one flows back and forth, as Barks puts it, between “visionary radiance” and the “level calm of ordinary sight.”

These are the terms of awakening arising from the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam. This is the imperative of evolving spirituality, to realize the unity of Buddhism’s Two Truths, to be here and everywhere at all times, to simultaneously be emptiness and embodiment, to live in single-pointed awareness/aliveness within vast and timeless space, or at least available to transmute one’s capacities to the requirements of the moment, to seek both refuge in the specific and in the general, to slip the bondage, delusion and suffering of dualistic mind…and to live from a bottomless and source-less joy at any moment.

The Root of Happiness

Bodhicitta is a way of connecting to other lives, of saying we are nothing without that connection and that our connection to each other is deeper than we can ever truly know.

Bodhicitta is a way of connecting to other lives, of saying we are nothing without that connection and that our connection to each other is deeper than we can ever truly know.

Four years ago, we were suddenly dropped into an alien landscape, akin to the toxic atmosphere of an alien metropolis. All plans, intentions, contemplations, associations and actions were transposed into the era of Trump. Was this a dream, or was I waking into a nightmare? The landscape was familiar, but somehow different, no longer safe. Everything, values, lifestyle, morality and an ever-fragile peace, balanced on a knife-edge.

I went through the motions of normalcy, repeating familiar patterns of activity. Yet nothing was familiar anymore. Everything seemed to require a little more intention, a little more clarity to become real. Insofar as I could become absorbed, focusing on something compelling or becoming temporarily lost, I was happy. But upon emergence from that condition, drifting back to the larger awareness, I was reminded in the next breath of a less stable and more threatening world, not merely in a physical sense, but in a deep moral sense. As we know, that condition has gotten much worse beyond whatever I might have imagined four years ago. Grief remains just below the surface. Happiness–true equanimity–has become much more elusive.

There are those who would surely have said then, “Welcome to reality, dude!” As if not much had really changed. After all, we’d been on this trajectory toward dissolution for a long time, they might say. And I would have agreed. But no, with the election of Trump, dissolution went geometric. Ever since, we have amplified the suffering of the many for the sake of the happiness of a few. The great irony of that electoral decision made by so many is the belief that they would be spared the consequences of the agenda they had just endorsed with their vote.

Which brings me to ponder happiness itself. We might well ask what that was or how those who regarded Trump as a threat multiplier of unknown proportion would know it when they saw it. In truth, however, when it comes to happiness, all of us fall into the same category. Those who voted for Trump would have been mostly unhappy for a long time (never mind how they might have defined happiness), though if I ever suspected they might have seen that Trump could not (nor was he inclined to) resurrect the American Dream for them in the way they most desired or believed was possible. Or, if he had made a serious attempt, it would have come at great cost to the cohesion of the nation (as it is now), not to mention our international stature, all of which happened anyway.

More precisely, I think about how I think about happiness–because the answer to that question has a lot to do with whether I am happy or not. The intention to be happy is innate to many decisions every day; but what does happiness now mean as the era of Trump has taken so many significant and profoundly disturbing turns? We’d better know what it is, because we’re gonna have to work harder for it.

Dharma regards everyday happiness as transient since it’s entirely based on a dualistic view. Happiness is defined as the absence of suffering, but for there to be happiness at all, there must be something we call suffering. Happiness may be a benefit we wish for others by our aspiration and our action. We may wish everyday happiness for everyone, as if the satisfaction of having “enough” is sufficient, even if it’s temporary. Beyond that, we wish for a release from the cyclic behaviors that drive us to seek happiness in ways that are not satisfying…or may even damaging to ourselves or others.

The metaphysical perch from which we view happiness is bodhicitta, a comprehensive compassionate view. We want to enjoy the relative happiness that flows from realizing the Four Noble Truths: the universality of suffering and the fact that there is a (Eightfold) path through suffering. We extend that wish to those who are experiencing the suffering of pain and the suffering of change. We extend these wishes to those closest to us and can also extend it to everyone in general.

Beyond our immediate circle, there are those to whom we do not feel close. We may feel neutral or even indifferent, but we can extend a wish for happiness to them. There are still others with whom we have a negative history and residual negative emotion. It’s more complicated to erase negative emotions completely, to extend a genuine wish of happiness to such a person because negative feelings don’t just dissolve upon request.

To transform negative emotions into unequivocal, refreshing, clear and unlimited positive regard is not trivial. Not is it an act of mere will. It is a deliberative process, sometimes a sharp reality check requiring that we go beyond what we merely wish to be true to true forgiveness and compassion– for ourselves as well as for another. At the heart of those judgments about others, I am likely to find a judgment about myself, which may itself arise from a painful incident buried in the past. It is only in looking at the origins of those judgments, at the emotional anchors and core beliefs that hold them, that they can be seen for what they so often are: self-cherishing stories, baseless assumptions, limited beliefs.

I’ve practiced this with romantic partners, family members, a former spouse, a former supervisor, co-workers and even former friends. Admitting the deep attachment we have to our judgments about others is often slow and careful (not to mention uncomfortable) work, especially if we believe we have been personally wronged. But working through the resentment or anger to an authentic clarity is possible.

We can form honest intentions about others that we disliked at one time. Yet some measure of animus might creep back. One might manage an authentic wish for a moment but find it difficult to remain in that clarity for an extended period. It’s unsettling to realize that if I was standing in front of someone I disliked, transmitting an honest wish for their happiness, they might get the idea that I liked them. Kinda like the way the Dalai Lama refers to the Chinese: my friend, the enemy. Could I do that face to face with a Trump supporter, a racist neo-Nazi? They might think we could be friends, which would present even more challenging circumstances. With certain people, I’m not so sure I could tolerate that. We simply resist letting go of the hardened ways we see certain people. This gets tricky, doesn’t it? But neither does it mean I have to agree with or condone the views of any random Trump supporter.

Shantideva famously said that there is no such thing as happiness in samsara. He was referring to a previous statement he made about happiness in which he declared that the only true happiness derives from completely renouncing self-cherishing. Any wish for happiness or action toward happiness based on self-cherishing (What about ME??) would be dishonest, illusory and ultimately futile. Everyday happiness is a product of causes and conditions, meaning it is bound by time and therefore impermanent. Shantideva is saying that any such happiness is not true happiness. From the absolute perspective, anything that arises from causes and conditions has no intrinsic reality. No matter how much we avoid suffering and no matter how successful we are, the entire charade is a product of the fundamental mistake of believing in the existence of our separate identity. Removing ourselves from that view, suddenly neither happiness nor suffering have ever existed.

Of course, this is an idea that runs directly counter to our sensory experience. But again, neither our perceptions nor emotions have ever had independent (permanent) existence. Yet, neither are they non-existent! We are left with a perfectly clear choice to continue cultivating the bodhicitta of compassion that doesn’t take sides–which is to say, no matter how we voted, we are all equal in our lifelong dance with suffering and change.

If letting go of judgments seems difficult, it’s likely because those judgments reinforce our sense of a separate identity There is no need to deny the reality of our feelings and emotions so long as we don’t get hung up believing that there is any true substance to them…or, for that matter, to the feeler. By continuously reinforcing separation, every “self,” becomes a unique pattern of inattention to the larger reality in which it lives.

We can hold the great paradox of the truth of appearances while still being mindful of their ultimate non-existence. True compassion, without making any distinctions about who deserves it or not, views all emotion, happiness and suffering as equal in nature, arising from a trance-like belief in the reality of opposites. We can still be happy…realizing that suffering will inevitably be a part of that relative happiness.

Taking this view into the practice of aspiration or active bodhicitta, we can project our compassionate intentions knowing that to fully overcome self-cherishing may be out of reach–at least in this lifetime. For now, we simply do the best we can.

A supremely spacious clarity is a prerequisite for accessing the source of happiness. From that source, happiness becomes a view as vast as space, an uninterrupted flow of sensation and feeling without attachment, an expanding, unimpeded, infinitely inclusive condition of holding all that is. Everything is included: all events (including the assemblage of events that is Donald Trump), all sensation and all emotion. No need to deny anything. On the contrary, everything can be used to energize our view in every moment. If that condition of possibility can be formed, arising unimpeded according to one’s capacity, then anything can arise in that space.

Does such a condition exist outside of ego-consciousness? What is “happiness” not arising as an object of intention? Do we call it happiness at all? If happiness can exist as something other than an object of “my” intention, then who is the “I” that is forming the wish?

Contemplating the supreme spacious quality found at the root of happiness, I do not create or wish happiness for myself. I don’t wish for the happiness of a single separate identity, “me,” to become just another passing object of attention. I seek happiness with no object, which is to say a wish of happiness for all others. Resting in the root of that happiness itself, arising spontaneously without intention from a dynamic spacious nature, being “uncreated,” as it were, it becomes entirely natural to extend it to all others.

I project a wish that others will also connect to that root. Inherent to such a wish is the knowledge that we are all connected by and as the root of happiness. We are not simply connected separately to some ineffable source of happiness. Our connection to each other is that source. The nature of happiness is identical to the true nature of everything; we can’t separate the source of happiness from the source of compassion, from the source of loving kindness or joy. They are all inseparable from each other.

Our work is more than the formation of wishes. It is the active removal of all obstacles to a connection to the source of happiness. Believing we are ever separated from the root of happiness or, for that matter, from any of the Four Immeasurables is the obstacle to overcome. In the non-dual view, since there is no such thing as happiness (or suffering), connecting to the root of happiness, already pure, goes to the heart of the Mahayana view. True happiness and compassion arise in natural abundance from the same timeless and ineffable source: the realization of emptiness.

The nature of happiness becomes known as appearance imbued with the truth of emptiness in which the very idea of happiness itself has no true existence. In every time, even as Trumpism mutates into post-Presidential threats yet unknown, that is precisely why it holds unlimited potential.

One Full Breath

Maybe I could see it if I had eyes on the side of my head instead of looking straight, as if I’m a fish, perpetually suspicious about the possibility of water—as if I once knew of it but have forgotten. That is, if I, a fish, believed in existence.

Dawn is breaking. Lurking in my awareness for a long time–at least intermittently—is a perpetual presence lying just outside my field of vision. Try as I might, I cannot bring it wholly into view. Perhaps it’s an illusion, but regardless, it’s elusive, yet it also feels like something central to all understanding. Maybe I could see it if I had eyes on the side of my head instead of looking straight forward, as if I’m a fish, perpetually suspicious about the possibility of water—as if I once knew of it but have forgotten—still sensing its centrality to my existence. That is, if I, a fish, believed in existence.

My adventures in Buddhist philosophy and subsequent experiences, not merely the intellectual exercise nor any cognitive machinations, but by direct experience, have taken me all the way to the realization of water. Yet in the routine experience of relativity, I revert to a suspicion, which is accompanied by an annoying sense of inadequacy, that such clarity—enlightened clarity—is never as accessible as I might wish. This is surely a common phenomenon.

Today I noticed an essential truth housed in a familiar book passage. I recalled its past impact, this time it had no impact. It was as if my mind had closed and was no longer open to being impacted, or of having my current spell broken, not even for a moment, to permit what was once a possibility that my energy would change, that I could enter a spacious and unadorned frame of reference, that I could be lifted out of the all-too-familiar quagmire of routine discursive thought for even a moment.

It seemed that what were once anchors of a self-regulated, light-hearted, even somewhat innocent demeanor had been rendered inert, remote and inaccessible, almost completely foreign. And in their place is a frustrated, anxious, edgy, too easily angered, limited and defended, even fragile presence, helplessly attempting to regain some agency in a universe whose laws quickly undermine every presumption of agency.

I might have called this the bardo of everyday life, this forgetting, but my temptation to also name it the bardo of death is because I suspect the sensations are nearly identical, of being lost, drifting in a sea of semi-cognition, dreams with no sensations, no handholds, no anchors, no primary orientation whatsoever, being no-body, as if I will forever drift, uncertain if I wish to or am even capable of either surrendering to the dream or waking from it. Except now, the dreamscape abides whichever way I go.

I wonder if I’m merely experiencing aging, slipping across some threshold into a permanently shrunken space where the inventory of available brain cells has diminished. I don’t seem to be able to transcend, to free myself from these limitations. Until this:

I settled and began gazing, a deliberate and progressive meditative process, eyes wide open, into the heart of Being, expanding, loosening the anchors of the physical body, a condition in which the boundaries between self and object, seer and seen, flicker and dissolve like a mirage, like a dying flame. For a moment, I am free of my story. I breathe and rise to my full stature.

Gazing into the moment…as the moment gazes into you…the comforting stability of it, its fleeting nature and unlimited potential, the opportunity for wisdom to arrive, for benefit to arise for all beings, that is the nature, the whole (he)art of the gaze. It is not a condition of a single being gazing from or at or even with anything. Gazing is (potentially) a non-dual state, the formless form of Being, the perpetual condition of Being seeing through its own eyes. Gazing is more than looking or sensing or feeling. It is more than hearing or touching or interacting in any finite way with any thing. Gazing is taking a full breath of now. It is all things now, being now, creating now, living and dying now, absent any desire or agenda whatsoever.

Outside of meditation itself, in post-meditation, the presence of gazing may also partake of the ferment of ideas in the teeming bazaar of this time, the fertile turbulence of the evolutionary marketplace at the crossroads of this moment. Aren’t we all desperately gazing into this moment to comprehend, to extract the meaning and succulence of these increasingly desperate times? Take one full breath of this! Rise to your full stature and realize the world is gazing back at you.

Being is gazing back at your being, with no expectations, no demands, no promises, no guarantees, with no past and no future to destroy or create. We are all making the world in this moment, gazing into the future, becoming messengers to the future, rising to fullness as vital nodes in the web of life, sensing the energetics of the whole, a promise we make to ourselves as we fully breathe into the present.

This is what the future is asking of us now, to take a full breath of this moment. Each of us, in our personal conflicts, lifelong journeys, unresolved questions, resolutions, accomplishments large or small, is called to be a messenger, an ancestor, a gift to the future. Regardless of our karma, whatever our success or failings, we are guides, changing the course of history, bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice. That’s all we have. That’s all we’ve ever had and all we will ever have.

Accepting the fullness of one’s own karma may not be such an easy thing, because to do so you have to tell yourself the truth. But if ever there was a moment to breath fully into life, into this long-awaited transition, this re-opening of possibility, this moment to reflect and dedicate ourselves to the task ahead, this is it. Gaze into it; and may the Being of Samanthabadra, the consciousness of all Buddhas; of Manjushri, the wisdom of all Buddhas; of Chenrezig, the compassion of all Buddhas, the nature of Being itself, hiding in plain sight, be the guidance you wish for and deserve. Take a full breath and give everything to it.

Gratitude to Rudolph Bauer for sparking this content. See his article, “Gazing as Dzogchen.”

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