The Fight is the Suffering

I think people often turn to spiritual paths as a means to end suffering, with the expectation that circumstances which can breed suffering will cease to exist. The spiritual path can help point us to a more conscious, empowered means to move through the suffering where we have better tools in our pack to meet it. But it will not magically make suffering disappear. Life will still happen. You will still be human. Circumstances will arise.

Our tendency is to fight against suffering, pushing it away, when we are confronted with the experience. Rather than meeting the initial occurrence, we fight and this fight compounds the suffering. This fight often leads are minds to create more hypothetical situations around the instance, making us go even more crazy. A great deal of our suffering lies in this fight.

If we are to meet a troublesome experience squarely, look at it with as much equanimity as we can muster at the time, we can forgo a lot of the unnecessary unease. This will also lead  to us dealing with the actual situation more soundly and effectively. I know that it can be hard have equanimity when presented with trying situations, but this is a practice. Practice mindfulness and presence in the easy times, and it will be easier to have them when you need them most. 

/by

Seeing with the Light of Love

Our minds are fickle things. They fly from one thing to another. Who knows from where the thoughts come or go. We oscillate from one role to the next. One moment we are an employee, the next we might be a mom, we don all these different masks and our minds go with us. Our identity bounces constantly, as do our thoughts. 

Rarely are we truly, actually present in the moment. We are where we are physically. But our minds are not. Our minds are thinking about the next thing we have to do. The next place we need to go. The next thing we have to get done. And we tend to think that this next thing is going to make us happy. We forgo happiness consistently and push it off to the future, never meeting it here, as we are never really here. 

This brings with us a sense of separation from the world and from others. We get sucked into this unconscious idea that, somehow, “I” am the only “I” that matters. My needs and my wants should take priority and the others, those whom we are separate from, must find their own way. Of course, this is a lie. In truth, we are all intrinsically interconnected, but when we act from our unconscious trances, we behave otherwise. 

Mysticism of every tradition strives to alleviate this sense of separation and the peripatetic wonderings of the mind. It seeks to remind us of the which is sacred and that which truly matters. One of the tools that Buddhism uses for this is called the Brahmaviharas, which are also known as the Divine Abodes or the Four Immeasurables. These are:

1. Loving Kindness: We desire to see all beings in the light of loving kindness We wish for all of them, without exception, to have happiness. Because, isn’t this what we all want on our deepest levels?

2. Compassion: We see others in the light of compassion and hope that their suffering diminishes. 

3. Empathetic Joy: We take joy in the accomplishments of ourselves and others. 

4. Equanimity: This is our learning to accept loss, gain, praise and blame, success, and failure for ourselves and others. 

What these tools are doing is bridging that unconscious tendency of separation. They are attempting to show us that we, ourselves, are not the only ones that matter and that all of those around us are human too. They help us to see that we all want happiness and that we are all, deep down, the same. 

We all have our suffering, our joys, and our hardships. When we are able to pull ourselves out of our unconscious, myopic view of self-centeredness through practices such as the Brahmaviharas, we can see our fellow beings with love, consciousness, and compassion. In turn, this feels our lives with more joy and bliss. 

/by

Technological Silence

Today we are enmeshed with technology. In a very real sense, we have become cyborgs. Our computers, tablets, and cell phones are extensions of our minds. They store information for us, allow us to communicate instantly anywhere in the world with anyone in our lives. If we don’t know something, Google does. Never in history has information been so accessible and easily shared. It is really quite amazing! It’s also becoming a legitimate and dehumanizing crutch.

I’m the type of person who is constantly wanting to learn some new skill or random factoid and the internet is one of my best friends. I am always taking some class or other online and on any whim I can pull up Google to satisfy my insatiable curiosity. It’s absolutely magical how much and how quickly information is now available to us! I, and many of my friends, prefer to keep in contact via text, email, Facebook, or in person rather than via telephone. I write on my laptop or tablet; I read novels on kindle. Obviously I use technology a great deal. I don’t think it is inherently either a good thing or a bad thing. Like most tools, it depends on how we use it.

As an extension of our minds, our technological devices can and do fill our minds with a lot of chatter. Emails, texts, and fear of missing out. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to see two friends hanging out and, instead of interacting with one another, they are glued to their phones, texting someone else.

It is okay to step away from the technology from time to time. Take a break from the computer and the phone. This might trigger that good ole fear of missing out! Accept it! Invite it in! Ask what it has to show you. Chances are, you aren’t going to miss out on anything and will experience the world right here in front of you more richly.

Turn the phone on silent from time to time.

Unsubscribe. Get rid of all those email subscriptions! They’re everywhere! Keep the ones that you find helpful and get rid of the ones you don’t read or need.

Go into nature. While you’re here, invite one of those friends you’d be texting to come with you! Or, just go alone and experience the stillness with you.

It’s a scary idea, but it’ll be okay. I promise.

/by

Violence is the Mind

The violence that is common throughout our world is very evident, not just in our time, but throughout all of history. We are confronted with it constantly. Not a week goes by before there is more tragic news of a terrorist bombing or school shooting. In response, we collectively lash out in anger toward the individual or group who is responsible. We, in turn, fill our minds with violence, with thoughts of how we wish to harm those who perpetrated the attack or shooting.

This is not how we will end violence. This is how we perpetuate violence. Violence starts in the mind. All actions and structures in the outer world started in the mind! Our minds must be trained, one by one, from person to person, culture to culture for the pervasive violence to end. This is a very high and lofty goal, but it is not unattainable.

In Buddhism and other Eastern traditions, there is the practice of ahimsa, or nonviolence, the act of not causing harm. This practice encourages us not to live with a closed, fearful heart, not to react unconsciously with violence. Instead, ahimsa invites us to live from a more empowered, centered place of courage, wisdom, forgiveness, and of course compassion.

The cultivation of consciousness and awareness is the only way that we can confront and avert the cycle of violence within our minds, and in turn, throughout the world. It is impossible to do it with any other means. This calls us to open our hearts on our daily, moment to moment path in life. It is a call to live with mindfulness, in the present, now. In order to do this we must breathe with awareness, with consciousness. Allow the breath and the consciousness of it open us up to the present and to the body. Here we can now look into the dark places of the mind, open ourselves up to the awareness of our internal poisons of doubt, fear, narcissism, anger, greed, prejudice, and selfishness. In seeing them, with consciousness and clarity, we can see their uselessness and replace them such things as with awareness, compassion, centeredness, inclusiveness, and courage. 

/by

The Shroud of Ignorance

There are aspects of our thinking that can be problematic. No one causes us as much harm than we cause ourselves with our constant mental noise, derision, and judgement. In order for us to go beyond suffering, we must confront and meet these aspects, otherwise we will get stuck in an unconscious trance, a loop where we meet these patterns again and again instead of confronting our suffering. I want to talk about one of these, namely ignorance.

We believe all of the phenomena we see to be real and everlasting. We identify with our fleeting stories and thoughts of ourselves and believe them to be our actual, eternal Selves. We often don’t investigate our thoughts or ask ourselves what it is that we don’t know. Much of how we respond to the world ends up being products of our conditioning, what we have been taught by our parents, school, work, and society. There are thoughts and beliefs in our minds that we believe to be true, but if we actually meet and investigate them, unwrap them with the light of consciousness, we find that these are merely unfounded beliefs that we have been taught and left uninvestigated.

The Buddhist path invites us to analyze our world closely. We are asked to sit and watch what the mind does, where it goes, what it believes. We are asked to deal with our unconscious patterns and aspects of ourselves.

Through investigation, we can find that things do not exist as we assumed they did. We find that ourselves and our egos are fleeting and ephemeral. We can then choose to steer our minds in the directions which we desire such as resting in equanimity. This does not mean that we must complacently acquiesce to whatever is going on in the outer world, but we can meet it fully, with presence, and with an open heart and thereby powerfully move through It.

/by

Discipline of Compassion

Spiritual teachings of various traditions speak of compassion and its cultivation being a necessary component of a fulfilled and happy life. 

How is it that you can establish a way of living that will be conducive to being a mindful and compassionate human being in your ordinary, every day life?

Firstly, you must have motivation and discipline.

You must ask yourself why is it you want to be compassionate? What can you get out of being selfishly altruistic?

Study after study has shown that compassionate people live a more fulfilled life. You will be happier. You will experience life from a more inclusive perspective.

Daily existence will be imbued with a greater sense of ease, comfort, equanimity, and overall joy. And wouldn’t these things make everyone’s life a better place to be?

You also need discipline.

Discipline in living within a compassionate mindset will be a guideline in establishing compassion as a priority, keeping you on track with this view in your mind and will then give birth to compassionate actions.

The intention of being compassionate and having the discipline to act in accord with it will then give rise to a different relationship with yourself and others. A deeper, freer, easier relationship that is more harmonious.

Have the discipline to practice when things are going well because there will, at some point in the future, be a point when things are not unfolding as you would like, when things are full of pain. Here, having had practice practicing in easier times, you will then have the strength and fortitude to practice compassion during more trying times, when you really need it. 

The practice of regularly practicing meditation is also a key here as it will unfold to your mind the nature of reality and liberate you from the tyranny of the unenlightened mind. 

Be yourself and experience your intrinsic wholeness here, now. Ask yourself, “What would it be content with what is here right now? What would it feel like to stop waiting for another day, postponing our happiness for some future event?”

This contentment with the present is learned through meditation. You must relinquish all your illusory struggles at some point. Why not now?

It’s a moment to moment choice that you can only have if you are aware and mindful. 

/by

Our Misplaced Happiness

People in our society are generally more materially abundant and have more comforts than we have ever had in history. We ferociously consume with the thought that more things will bring more fulfillment. Yet so many of us find we are unfulfilled and unhappy. This is because we are tying our happiness to external conditions, to material things, to consumption of goods and that is our mistake. That is misplaced happiness.

Of course, we need to have our basic needs of food, water, shelter, etc. met, but I know I don’t have to explain how those of us in the West go above and beyond that, voraciously using and buying more than we need in the hopes that the next thing will bring us true fulfillment. Often, this isn’t even a conscious thought. We see something we like and unconsciously believe that possessing it will make us happy so we buy it. We place part of our identity around it and everything else we own, tying our self worth and selfhood to our material objects and conditions. The problem here is that this kind of fulfillment is short lived. Further, outer conditions are beyond our control and physical things are impermanent, destined to dissolve into nothingness, taking our misplaced happiness with them. 

The invitation exists for you instead to seek the cultivation of a truer happiness. A happiness that can be found anywhere regardless of the price tag on your clothes. Be happy now, just choose it. Be it. See the beauty in others. Practice altruism. Practice compassion. Instead of seeing those around you as separate and unreal, truly connect with them. See your interconnectedness by seeing the commonalities you have with them. Smile. Breath consciously. Take time in nature and feel your oneness with that. Once you realize that you can actually have happiness despite outer conditions and once you make the conscious choice to actually have that happiness here and now, it will be yours. 

/by

Stop the Glorification of Busy

We live in a world that wears “busy” as a badge of honor. 

Often when we ask friends how they are doing, their response is “Oh, work, work, work.” And that work is usually doing something they hate. 

I am not trying to say that doing things is wrong and that we should just be sitting around all day doing nothing. But we have allowed our busyness to become a distraction from life. We are missing everything. In times where we are not going from one distraction to another, we are thinking about another distraction, thinking about what we think we should be doing, or being worried that we are forgetting something that we should be doing. 

There is no being “here”. There is no presence. There is rarely a time when in this busyness we are actually experiencing that which we are doing. We’re thinking about the past or the future. 

All of this doing creates so much turbulence in our outer, physical world as well as our mental world. There is no space. No stillness. No time to experience our expansiveness, no time for awe. We’re throwing our lives away into the future for experiences we never experience because we are never here. 

I don’t think that any other creature in nature does this. You don’t see cats, dogs, or deer rushing around blindly, creating distraction after distraction to get to somewhere they don’t want to go. You’ll see them do something when they need to, they get up when they are hungry, scratch when they have an itch, but they’re “here”. They’re present. They’re living life now. 

I’ve made a list of six ways in which we can cut down on this societal psychosis:

  1. Meditate: experience silence and stillness and introduce a sense of expansiveness into your inner world. There are hundreds of techniques. Try one that resonates with you. 
  2. Journal: journaling can be a very powerful spiritual tool that allows us to become more self aware. Find out what is really important to you in life and live for that. 
  3. Say “no”: it’s okay to say “NO” to people, appointments, and things. Honor you. Don’t say yes to everything that comes your way.
  4. Limit time on social media: this can be a big distractor. Social media itself is neither positive or negative. But too often we become engrossed in it. 
  5. Opt-out: opt out of all that inbox clutter! If you’re getting emails from organizations and companies that you are not interested in and don’t read, unsubscribe from their email list and keep the ones you find truly beneficial. 
  6. Spend time in nature: experience the awe of nature. Allow yourself to just “be” in it. It is grounding and soothing and can put you in touch with what really matters while disconnecting your from pointless distraction and noise. 
/by

The Darkness that Births the Light

For all of my adult life I have been afflicted with clinical depression. Typically we are conditioned to view our “negative” states of consciousness such as anger, fear, or depression as being bad and undesirable. However, I disagree with this assertion in many senses. These negative states are that catalysts for our evolution. Our depression and sadness allow our hearts to break open ever more deeply so that we have room for a deeper, more encompassing love and sense of appreciation for the world of light. Phenomenal reality exists because of polarities and it is necessary for us to have inner darkness so that our inner light may shine with resplendent glory. This blog post is a journal entry I wrote after battling the most severe and difficult bout I had with the disease when I was 25 years old. It was the most painful and arduous experience of my life, but it was also one the most rewarding and illuminating things I have undergone, which eventually gave birth to my spiritual awakening. Here we go!

It [the depression] was at once the most painful, horrific, cathartic, and healing experiences of my life. I literally felt myself going crazy. The essence of my reality had not only been torn, but was being completely decimated. Truth, love, power, and beauty were being obliterated before my eyes. As I observed the world in my state of anxiety and abject sadness, everything had lost its color and shine. Fear was gnawing away at my mind. Sadness and sorrow were overcoming me. All I could do was watch this happen, trapped in my mind, as everything I believed I knew was being taken away by some unseen, unknown, and malicious force for some unknown reason.

I stood on a street in Southern California, tearing at the hair on my arms, listening to the laughing and mocking disembodied voices in my consciousness giving birth within me a sense of hatred and rage. My mind was swirling with a sense of disbelief and I began to cry because I truly believed that there was nothing, absolutely nothing left for me. There was no place existentially, physically, emotionally, or spiritually left in the world to where I could turn. I was convinced that the one option that remained, the only action that would bring a cessation to this most intense suffering, was to make it end by seeking solace in the welcoming arms of death. I had to do this before my world, my vision, all that I loved and perceived dissolved. I must dissolve my self first, in a hope that perhaps the little remains of my reality I had thought were left would be preserved.

It is common for people to believe suicide to be the pinnacle of selfish acts. In my state of mind, I saw no veracity in this assertion. I felt that in my dying I would leave something of the world in tact, as though my reality was the supreme reality, as though that upon my mind’s whim, I gave birth to the world and my thoughts were bringing about its destruction. This was quite megalomaniacal of me, but I did not have a sense of power at the time, but of perseverance. In death perhaps I would leave the world with its last remaining shreds of truth. I could not bear to see everything I knew, loved, and understand consumed by this thorough, rapid, indiscriminate dissipation. I was being dissolved. I was being eaten, slowly and tortuously murdered. The gods, all of them, if any had ever existed, had turned away from me. My thoughts and prayers could no longer appease or even begin to reach their heavenly pedestals. Ending my life would alleviate the dissolution and pain. It was the only thing that would not only heal me, but also heal the entire world.

There was a vortex in the deepest part of my being eating away at me, gnawing at my spirit, my mind, my sanity. I thought I could feel, see, hear, and taste all that I knew escaping my reality. I knew I was losing my mind and I hated it. There was only one shred of sanity left within me. It was a whisper and a shadow in darkness that told me that none of this was happening, that these thoughts were not really me and that another alternative to the situation existed. This shred of sanity led me to seek help for my mind. In that help I found more insanity, more uneasiness, and more pain. Ultimately, the end and the relief, the truth, was found in the recesses of my being. Through meditation, silence, and self inquiry, I found peace.

I was forced to see that what remains when all is gone — when there is nothing else, no stories, no searching, only stopping every search,  I saw the truth of being as it is.  I was forced to examine myself, to be reacquainted within the truth and power inside us all. From the greatest, most intense suffering I had ever experienced, I was introduced to the deepest, most welcomed peace, ease, comfort, and true happiness. For that I am thankful and blessed.

/by

Our Harmful and Insatiable Thirst for Power

Attributes and actions such as greed, jealously, the need to impress, the sacrifice of one’s autonomy and spiritual independence, anger, hatred, and fear are all characteristics of the thirst for power. These tools are put into operation by those with power who wish to hold on to or usurp “control” from those who are meeker and lower in the social system (politically, monetarily, aesthetically, etc.) who offer up or have taken away from them, their power, autonomy, and confidence, consciously or unconsciously, to those with the power. These roles of power wielder and power giver are not necessarily static; essentially, I doubt that any individual consistently falls into one of these categories. For example, in one situation one may be more aesthetically appealing than the other, the later then feels inferior to the former. Though perhaps the later does happen to be more intelligent, then in cases involving intelligence he would not lack power and usurps the power from he who holds it aesthetically. This perhaps shows that there are in fact several differing kinds of power and power exchanges, though this is something that I will not presently investigate further.

Given that these exchanges, as far as I have examined, deal primarily, and perhaps solely with power based on ego, on holding up the importance of the self, I will assert that this exchange, though apparent and real, is ultimately a façade, an unnecessary and harmful socially constructed paradigm of which we, as a conscious and global society, must dissolve. I see inferiority being the prime motivator in both those cases (having/giving power). He or she who has it wishes and fights to contain and control it as it gives them a sense of happiness, fulfillment, and importance. Without the power, they have lost these qualities. Ironically, these are the most fleeting, transitory ways of gaining happiness. Those that offer power up feel that they are undeserving of it, that they are inferior to those requesting it, therefore acquiescing to the power holder’s greedy wish.

The neurotic sense of this is that nearly everyone is in one sense or another blind to this occurrence, though, simultaneously, brazenly believe that he or she with the most power is the best and happiest human. My assertion is that this power is fleeting, it is based upon attributes that are quickly and ultimately taken away. The person who dies with the most power is not in fact the happiest, but the most dissatisfied. As in life, the symbols of true happiness are not fought for out of power, but through awareness and understanding. Mystics of every culture, chronological point, and background strongly declare that this life is here to gain consciousness, to be aware of beingness, to understand the beauty of being alive, to understand and feel what it means to be in the universe, that, in actuality, we are the universe. Power and its struggles, to put in Buddhist terms, are maya, implements of illusion used by the demon Mara to keep humanity drowning in their sea of sorrow and despair. We no longer need to succumb to this lie.

/by