Category: Spirituality

Ice Cream Truth

Jon5 Comments

Millions of voices of the world clamor for belief. You are asked to believe that 123 is a better cable channel than 234, that Sandscrape is a better toilet paper than Scratchroll, that M.T. Promisiz is a better leader than I. B. Lyin.

Then you’re asked to believe “in” pure abstractions, for instance that the area called Rolling Hillarity is a different “country” than the area called Dulland Flatlandia. And whether you are Rolling Hilarious or Dulland Flat, you need to believe that your country is the best one!

But the belief-net isn’t finished entangling you. To be “really” complete, you must have a “belief system,” too. In other words, you need to cram an elaborate mental superstructure into your head comprised of numerous associated concretized thoughts—that is “beliefs” about things you can neither see or touch. And you need to believe that it’s right, and preferably believe that all others are wrong. If that sounds like hard work, it is.

But fortunately, some have tried to make it easier for you. The most popular belief systems have come in ready-to-use packages, and luckily for you, a mere a half-dozen or so brands have satisfied fully 90% of the people of the world. Some have strong incentives if you buy this brand, you will enjoy bliss forever, and if you don’t, you’ll be in agony forever. (If that’s not incentive, what is?)

Occasionally, though, people come to the point of wondering what is true, what is real. Is it the belief system, or is it something else, maybe something the belief system is trying to describe, no matter how awkwardly. I propose a simple test:

Does it help you enjoy your ice cream more?

It’s amazing how irrelevant beliefs are when eating ice cream (or calamari, for that matter). An evangelist whose name I forget, despaired of trying to get ministers of different denominations to associate together through “ecumenical events.” He found that it worked quite well though when the occasion was getting ice cream. Belief systems don’t eat ice cream, but people do!

And for God’s sake, don’t believe a word of my beliefs here. Just see what makes your ice cream taste best. That just might be real. Taste and see (Psalm 34:8). If it does, it’s probably more real than a belief.

PW II

Jon6 Comments

I’m so sorry that I haven’t had much time for blogging and reading blogs this week. We’ve had a major project going on at work . . . I’ve been putting in 11-hour days for a week, and it’s not over yet. However, this weekend I did get the chance to relax a little. No time for loneliness this week.

I saw Peaceful Warrior for the third time. Iit’s been years since I loved a movie so much that I paid full admission to see it three times! And I actually began writing my long-promised review of it, but a power-surge knocked off my computer and destroy my unsaved work. (I know, I should know better.)

Part of me wondered why this superb film seems relegated to occasional arthouse screenings. Then I realized that PW‘s higher level of meaning is inaccessible to people who aren’t ready it yet. Hence, most critics and non-seekers see Peaceful Warrior as a familiar sports movie of the well-worn “dramatic comeback” type, sprinkled liberally with vague New-Agey platitudes.

The mind acts as a kind of a filter, almost as a safety valve in some ways, that keeps itself from grasping any truth before it is ready. In a teacher-disciple relationship, it kinds of goes like this:

Teacher: You are not the body. The world is an illusion. God is all there is.
Student: Yeah, cool.

Teacher: You are not the body. The world is an illusion. God is all there is.
Student: Whatever.

Teacher: You are not the body. The world is an illusion. God is all there is.
Student: Got it.

Teacher: You are not the body. The world is an illusion. God is all there is.
Student: Holy Sh*t! GOD IS ALL THERE IS!

Peaceful Warrior portrays the learning process beautifully.

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A Lesson from Loneliness

Jon8 Comments

I live alone, and I’ve generally been comforatable with that. I had roommates in my college and grad school years, and for a couple of years after I dropped out, as well. But for more than a decade, I’ve lived alone.

Suddenly, this year, I’m lonely. And it was this year that I got a glimpse behind the curtain, and saw that there’s no one else here. Before, I had largely thought of God as my invisible Companion, with me whereever I go. How could I be lonely? Since that experience, I’ve known that there is nothing to seek, nothing and no one is “with” me… I am part of This and This is noThing. That peek at non-duality changed my comfort with being alone.

But I’m here, and there is a world. The Bible and the Upanishads both teach that God created mankind for fellowship. (Heaven must be boring, eh?) So after one wish for a universe, voilá! There’s a universe. (In Sunday School, I never thought to ask what God made it of when there’s nothing but God.) So now, one part of it is feeling alone. The cure is obvious. Relate more to the world where God is hidden in every form.

The catch is to do it as a giver, not as a taker. To be God’s light shining love. To see myself in everyone. My teacher called this the zazen of being in public.


9-11 Five years later

Jon3 Comments

This will be a day of reflectionand remembrance for many. Five years ago, I was in Shelbourne, MA, in a meditation center during a 10-day long intensive. I remember when our silence was temporarily broken so we could gather in the dining hall and were informed that planes had crashed into the both towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and another plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.

After a few questions and answers (and no, no one really knew anything more than that), silence resumed, with the injunction: This is why we practice.

I was deeply affected by the tragedy, as everyone else was. Yet, I found when I came back, that I was not “caught up” in the whirlpools of fear, rage, war fever, and apocalyptic concern that seemed to be engulfing so many around me in Hampton Roads. Somehow, even though I was in the storm, I wasn’t being blown about by it.

I soon also gained an insight into karma and the cycle of violence. I believe the fuel of violence is resentment. As long as resentment isn’t dealt with, conflict remains, and the conclusion of one war lays the conditions for the next one. If I needed any further confirmation that peacemaking first depends on making peace within, that was it.

I need to keep on with my practice.

Fingernails and Fast Food

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I bit my fingernails from as early as I can remember, until early September 2001. I usually wasn’t conscious of it… only when I looked at my ragged nails, or spat out a “trimming,” was I aware of it at all. I tried many, many times to stop, and never could.

In 2001, just after the Labor Day weekend, I went to a Vipassana Meditation Center for a ten-day-long “intensive” (Intensive is the word for it. It was ten hours of meditation a day, for ten days, and all but part of the last day in silence.) I didn’t really enjoy the experience that much, but midway through, perhaps it was five years ago this very day, I looked at my hands, and realized that I hadn’t bit my nails since the intensive began. I also realized that I was now free forever from my nail-biting habit.

Two nights ago, while I was sitting at my computer, reading some blogs, I suddenly felt a strong rush of energy to my head, and it came with a distinct message, that I should sit zazen immediately. I obeyed, and after a period of sitting, felt I had been given a gift: specifically, that I was now free from my addiction to bad foods.

Some of you know me well enough to know what my diet is like. I’ve struggled with eating decent, healthy food (versus fried food and sweets) for more than two decades. Occasionally, I had some success that soon proved to be all too fleeting. But when I woke up yesterday, the certainty of the gift held: I was free. And my meals showed it. So did my meals today. I find I simply don’t want things that are bad for me anymore.

My teacher told me there actually is a Sanskrit word for this phenomenon (I don’t remember what it is) but it refers to the liberation of a person from negative attachments. It comes not from self-effort, though; it’s an effect of the spirit becoming more aligned with the One.

You can soon expect a leaner Frimster!

The Magic of Permission

Jon3 Comments

I am who I am, and have the life I have, because I was given permission to.

This fact has been high in my awareness for the last couple of weeks. We are bundles of permissions and restraints, mostly received from others. I’ve written that I sometimes burst into song. I’m able to do that unself-consciously, because I was given permission to. But most people have had that freedom taken away from them. Where there could be a song, there’s silence, instead. Not too long ago, having music at all depended on families, friends, or individuals singing or playing instruments. (Now 99% of our musical intake is recorded and commerical… and with iPods, increasingly isolated.)

I was given permission in my youth to think for myself and research information. Many people have been given restraints in those areas instead, and were given permission only to think the same thoughts, about the same things, that their parents did.

Of course, my youth wasn’t entirely rosy (far from it). Instead of normal permission, I was given tight restraints in the area of doing, such that the doing side of my life is still under-developed. I need to consciously give myself permission to do and experience more.

Sometimes I had to fight for permission. I can see much of how I became a spiritual questor came from fighting in my youth for the right to worship outside of the permitted channel of my parents’ denomination. (It was a long and grueling fight, BTW.)

Gaining permission is not something that ends with childhood, and neither is the grace that it blesses the soul with. And just as restraints and inhibitions are often unconscious, the giving and receiving of permission is often unconscious, too. Also, understand that I’m not writing about permission in its negative view as something bestowed by a “superior” to an “inferior.” I’m talking about blessing, encouragement, affirmation, or just letting another be as they are. The psychological effect is the same: OK-ness. Permission. The lowering of a psychological barrier.

I recently thanked a close friend of mine for the gentle permission he gave me a few years ago to proceed with the next step on my spiritual journey. He was very surprised. He had no idea that much of my spiritual growth over the last several years had its root in a single kind sentence he said to me.

He’s not alone. There are many others. And those are only the ones I’m aware of. When I posted my concerns about blogging a few weeks back, several of you gave me permission to take it farther. Thank you.

To some degree, all of our words are all either contributing to this extending of blessing, or its opposite. C.S. Lewis said that in everything we say or do is helping other become like demons or angels. Another Anglican, John Donne, simply said, no man is an island.

Alan Watts wrote a book on The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. For what it’s worth, you’ve got my permission to break it.

Ineffable

Jon4 Comments

Speak of it, and you’re lying.
Think of it, and you’re deceived.
Write of it, and you set errors in stone.

Ignore it, and you bind yourself.
Look at it, and you are bewildered.
Realize it, and you are free.

Nonduality and Healing

Jon8 Comments

Steve Pavlina’s excellent blog brought this story, The World’s Most Unusual Therapist, to my attention. It’s about a Hawaiian psychologist, Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, who successfully treats criminally insane patients in the penitentiary, without seeing them. He uses a technique called ho’oponopono, which seems to be similar to reiki, but directed internally, not externally. Dr. Len says in the article “I was simply healing the part of me that created them.”

Even for folks who have had a glimpse of nonduality, this is a bit wild. Nonduality is wild. And for those who haven’t had a glimpse, its either foolishness or madness.

Yet I recognize a flicker of familiarity here. My friend Katherine, spoke of the “back door” way of praying for troubled or difficult people by visualizing them and extending love and peace to them. My teacher speaks elliptically about the effect of the enlightened mind upon the problems in the real world (elliptically to keep my non-enlightened awareness from thinking it’s got the answer when its beyond thought).

And earlier this weekend, I was pondering how to write more (even if I should write more) about the nondual perspective, where everything is not only “connected,” but is simply part of the great projection we call “Creation.” Well, it seems there’s no going back. I have to keep moving on, and it feels like I need to keep moving on in this blog, too.

Yet, I’ve always wanted my site to serve as an “entry-level” door into the interior way, for those just beginning to feel the Spirit’s call to go deeper. I wonder if my site can still fulfill that function if I go deeper? Will I leave others behind? All I know, is that I, too, have seen that there’s no “out” there. (And I used to wonder why spiritual director urged me to go within!)

What Tarot card am I?

Jon5 Comments

I Am (description) Which tarot card are you?

Okay, I’m not one to litter my very, very proper blog with a lot of silly personality quizzes, like “What Tropical Fish are You?” or “Which Spice Girl are You?” or “Are You Igneous, Sedimentary, or Metamorphic?,” or whatever is out there now.

Yet this one made me laugh out loud for being spot-on. There are “types” among spiritual seekers and mystics, just as anywhere else; some would be: the sage, the crone, the warrior, the priest, the holy fool, the oracle, the wounded healer, the blind prophet. I’m drawn to several of these, but none more than the holy fool, with his openness, innocence, and courage to leave everything behind and strike out on the path. I use the term “holy fool” a bit loosely, though. My picture of the fool is more like St. Francis rather than the Russian yurodivy.

Just ten days ago, a visitor to Kitabu’s satsang asked me “What are you?” and I answered, “I’m a holy fool.” It was cool to see this archetype pop up as the answer to the quiz.

Whew. Time for a break

Jon2 Comments

Five six posts in five in six days. I need to take a break. Not because I’m tired or am running out of things to say, but I need to do some serious housekeeping on the blog here. It’s a little technical, but WordPress users and interested geeks should keep reading.

I love WordPress. I can’t imagine switching to any other publishing engine, unless I build one myself sometime . (Yeah, right). But WP has a serious problem: Neither of its Textile plug-ins work.

Jim Rigg’s plugin hasn’t had any new development for a long time. It works decently for most of the stuff I want it to do, but lately, with the newest version of WP, is wrecking havoc with my paragraphs, line breaks, and blockquotes, and even editing in HTML doesn’t fix it as long as the plugin is enabled. Since it’s based on Brad Choate’s excellent version of Textile for Movable Type, which I used for well over a year, its features are what I think of when I think of Textile.

Then there’s Joel Bennett’s excellent TextileWrapper for WP. Although this was updated and released just a few days ago, It’s even less acceptable to me. Bennett says that this truly is Dean Allen’s Textile for WP, no core code or features changed at all. Perhaps it does work just like that for Textpattern, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, and if it is the case, it’s Choate-style Textile I need.

For instance, one of the things I found most convenient about Choate’s Textile, is how easy it was to add a class to virtually any element, without going into the HTML. I use a class for indicating which links are external and producing a little “offsite” symbol, for instance. Not only is that not working in this build of of WP and Bennett’s release, but it doesn’t insert classes for a tags, inline styles for anything that I can tell, and freaks out when Textile markup is nested within other markup.

I have but one solution: Get rid of all the Textile markup, since I don’t know how any future release of WP or ported-over versions of Textile will play with together. This will not be fun. I have over two hundred 230 posts now, probably 160 or so with Textile code. But I need to do this now before it gets worse.

See ya.