Lifeletters

The spiritual training and teaching I have been engaged in for most of my life comes from the ‘non-dual’ teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. I notice that most people’s eyes go a bit glassy when I mention the word ‘non-dual.’ It’s a difficult concept to grasp with the mind, because the mind functions in the field of polarity, of opposites.  I’ve found the simplest way to approach the non-dual understanding is to invite people to let go of their ‘either/or’ thinking.  Non-dual is more like both/and.  Either/or thinking is black and white thinking. AA calls it ‘stinkin’ thinkin’, because it leads to pain, suffering and confusion. Why? Because it divides our world and our experience up into opposites that oppose one another. And this opposition exists only in our conditioned mind. When we confine ourselves to a world that exists only in our minds, we run into trouble.

I began to contemplate this many years ago in India, after having a conversation with my teacher one day. We were standing on a mountain road, looking down at the great river Vyas, roaring through our valley. I was asking him to help me deal with a situation in my life. “I can’t help you in that way,” he told me, “that’s not the way human beings are. What you are now calling your greatest strength, will one day be your greatest weakness. And what you call your greatest weakness, you will recognize as your greatest strength.” I was stunned by that, and spent many years exploring the depth of it. But it wasn’t until I left India that it really came home to me. Then I started to hear it everywhere: “ Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.”
- Moshe Feldenkrais

It was like waking up from a dream, realizing that I had been living in a black and white world. At first it was confusing and frightening to leave that world behind. Then I began to appreciate the depth, complexity and richness of life when I was not putting everything into those boxes of human/divine, good/bad, strong/weak, matter/spirit. In the non-dual understanding, your true nature is something that embraces everything as it is. As long as we live in a world of polarities, we cling to one side and try and push the other side away. Life becomes an endless struggle.

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‘If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try spending the night with a mosquito.’

In the spiritual traditions, there has always been talk of transmission, the recognition that the freedom, love and wisdom of the teachings can be transmitted through a living human being. Most of the time this person is understood to be the teacher; but the truth is actually much bigger than that. We are all transmitters. Whatever our state of consciousness is, we are transmitting it all the time. And we are all receivers. In the indigenous traditions, they recognize nature as a great, unending transmitter. So there is wolf medicine, hummingbird medicine, the medicine of the elements and of the plants. Anyone who has ever heard the cry of an eagle, or seen one soaring through the sky, knows intuitively what this medicine is. You don’t have to be a shaman to receive this kind of transmission.

When my mother was dying, she would listen to a video of the great Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, over and over. He was talking about the enormous power we have to influence each other, in every minute of the day. ‘Please,’ he would say, ‘remember this-even ten minutes in a taxi can be a moment of transmission for that driver, if you are connected to your basic goodness and sanity.’

The reason I’ve been contemplating this lately is because of the immense helplessness and despair that so many people are feeling right now. I read an article recently about a top secret meeting that was held in the U.S. about a month ago. Scientists, engineers, environmentalists and political leaders all gathered together to discuss the fact that the polar ice caps are melting at a rate none of the scientists ever anticipated. Unless something changes, within the next decade many of our coastal cities will be under water. Somehow that shook me, even more than Al Gore’s movie about global warming, because the American policies in relation to our environment seem to be based on a profound level of denial. When I read that article I realized that they do know what is going on- we all know. As Joanna Macy says, “The body knows, because it is intimately connected with the larger body of the earth.”

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At one of my writing workshops over the weekend, we were writing in response to a picture. In my picture a beautiful dark-eyed woman was celebrating at some kind of party- blowing a streamer, with colored lights glittering behind her. I could hear the loud music, and the voices; I could feel the presence of the crowd. It brought home to me the Christmas and New Year’s season awaiting us all-the food and the parties, the drinks and the drugs; and the deep sadness and isolation many people experience in the midst of it all.  Every year I have clients who speak to me about their challenges at this time of year. My daughter often says about birthdays, Christmas and New Years, “It’s a set-up, a perfect way to make yourself miserable. Any other day of the year, you’d be happy just to have an ordinary day. But on these days, you’re supposed to be having an incredible time, and often, it doesn’t measure up to what you had hoped for.” I have a few friends who have been bold and brave enough to declare, “no presents this year” and stick to it. I know people who have even tried ignoring Christmas and birthdays altogether. But I sense there’s something here the human heart longs for.  I think these times are really about community and celebration.

And this is what we often call celebration: herd us all together into one space, turn up the music, pass out the drinks and the drugs, and leave us to drift-lost, isolated, occasionally making brief contact before we sink even deeper into the collective coma.

When did we forget how to celebrate, really? What is it to celebrate? How do I celebrate you, us, our life together?

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Have you heard about the positive deviants? There is growing body of research on this particular group of people. I first heard of them from Bill Harris and Marshall Thurber, a student of Buckminster Fuller. The positive deviants are people from all races and cultures, who have somehow triumphed in situations where everyone else got stuck.

The research has shown that these people have three main characteristics.

First of all, they are very clear about what they want, and do not give up. They just seem to have an inner ability to endure, long after the people around them have thrown in the towel. Jack Canfield, author of the ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ books, is a great example. His books have now sold more than any book in history, including the Bible. He went through 142 publishers before he found one who liked the book. The others all told him it would never sell. Sometimes the best things meet huge resistance at the beginning.

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I remember one day in Grade 5, when I came home and told my mother what I had learned in science class. I was on fire with it.  This was in the 50’s, long before we all heard about quantum physics

‘Mum,” I said, “When you look at that chair and think it’s solid, that’s not really how it is!”

“What do you mean?” she asked me.

“It’s just how it looks,” I told her. “ But really, that chair, and everything else, is made of tiny little particles called molecules and atoms, that are zooming around all the time.”

My mother looked quite stunned. “Are you sure that’s what your teacher said?” she asked me. “And what are these little zooming things made of?”

“Well,” I said, saving the best for the last, “molecules and atoms are really nothing but space.” After that my mother was very quiet. She just walked around, touching things and shaking her head, for the rest of the day, in a state of wonder, curiosity and deep bewilderment.

I have always remembered the feeling of that afternoon. It was as if my mother and I reached a precipice, over which our minds could not carry us; and we stood there together, peering into the mystery of Being.

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Over the last twenty-five years I’ve spent teaching and coaching, I’ve become very interested in the nature of real change. It seems to be such a rare phenomenon; and yet there have been these moments, in myself and others, when something opened, and nothing was quite the same after that. I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to people about this mysterious process called transformation. How does it happen? What leads up to it? What’s it all about? Shakespeare had a phrase for it: ‘Ripeness is all.’ What brings about that ripeness in us? It seems an important question to ask at this time in our world. I think a lot of us are experiencing a kind of ‘evolutionary pressure’, not just as individuals, but collectively, as a species that needs to transform in some radical ways.

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We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so we can open to the life that’s waiting for us. (Joseph Campbell)

In Zen Buddhist practice, when you meditate you sit and face the wall. One thing this does is confront you with your aloneness. A fundamental aspect of being a human being is that you are very much alone. You crawled down the birth canal by yourself, and no-one will go with you when you die. No-one else can breathe for you, meditate for you, think for you, eat for you. Coming to grips with our aloneness is an essential part of our evolution. Then we no longer look to others to take care of us. We discover resources and capacities inside ourselves that are deeply fulfilling and enduring.

The other side, which is just as true, is that we are not separate. We live as beings who are intimately connected to everything in the universe. Our capacity for ignoring this connection is one of the reasons for global warming and the environmental crisis. It’s becoming more and more obvious that we can no longer afford to live our lives as though we are small, separate, isolated beings. The price is too high. There are things we need to do that we cannot do alone.

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“You are not a walking mistake
You are not a problem to be solved.” (Adya Shanti)

I remember one session of ‘The Gift of Presence’ where we were exploring intention, and how it really works. I asked the participants to spend some time contemplating what their deepest and strongest intentions were. One woman in the course called me during the week to ask me more about it; so I encouraged her to throw caution to the winds and really see what was going on with intention in her life. She returned the following week with the brightness people carry when they have discovered something for themselves. “It’s so simple,” she told us. You can talk all you like about your grand intentions, but if you want to see what they really are, just watch what you actually do from morning “till night. Everything else is just fantasy.”

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