• Waiting

    March 26, 2019

    Knowingly or not, we spend much of our time waiting for things to happen, or not happen, dates to arrive or pass. Can you see this? Can you sense how it narrows your attention and prevents you from being where and when you are?

    Real waiting is a powerful mode of being. I do not wish to denigrate it. Consciously waiting for something valued, without agitation or impatience, provides an accommodation for arrival and a thankful response. Real waiting is shot through with faith and love. Voluntary attention brings such waiting into the present. But not so with my unconscious waiting.

    Most of us have some sort of dream-like expectation of the future which is half-acknowledged and never fully embraced in the present. See if you can find it. Are you preparing every day for its realization? As you wait, are you preparing to be worthy of the gift? Or are you afraid to really commit to waiting, watching and preparing because you fear it may not happen? Does a vague hope of some good thing occupy your mind subconsciously without your diligent participation?

    The things we wait for shape our lives in a hundred ways. Can you engage with this? First Corinthians tells us that the three great virtues are faith, hope and love (charity). Do not think of these as separate. Hope alone will not sustain you. All three virtues are needed for real waiting.

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  • His Endlessness (2)

    July 1, 2018

    I have said for many years that it does not matter what name or concept you use for God. What matters is what you feel about Him.

    People want to talk about God with the same frame of mind and setting of the nervous system that they would use to do the grocery shopping or figure out the Times crossword puzzle. This is nothing short of stupid.

    I speak to a beloved friend with a special feeling, a different tone of voice, a different countenance. In this way, the basis of our friendship is renewed. If I do not make this effort, the relationship is closed to me; in reality, it does not exist, it is something else, something unrecognizable.

    So it is with God. Thought of in one way, He does not exist to me. I am an atheist. But when I am in the right state to be engaged with Him, He becomes accessible. He becomes real.

    I have often said, ‘do not allow yourself to think about God when you are in the wrong mood.’ Use the mood you are in to do the things appropriate to it, or change your mood, do not try to talk to your beloved friend when all you can think about is your taxes.

    This is the problem with so-called logical proofs of God. The sort of thinking that examines things logically is not up to the task of proving His existence. All my capacities need to be awakened for me to be satisfied that He exists and then my speech will have many more dimensions than logic alone. It is not possible to house an elephant in a closet, and in the dark, the various parts of an elephant will be easily mistaken, as the story goes. To ponder His Endlessness, I need my best efforts at spaciousness and subtlety and even then I will be far short of the task.

    Bring together feeling, sensing and thinking. Look with great care. Search your heart. Stay with the search. You will find Him, however you have conceived and named Him. Faith is not belief and it is not blind, as the saying goes, it is the most perceptive of faculties.

    Rumi tells us of being in a caravan crossing the desert. At night, while encamped by the fire, he hears a man plaintively calling for his camel by name. ‘Have you lost a camel?’ Rumi asks of him. . ‘I feel I am missing a camel,’ the man responds, ‘and the more I call him, the more certain I am that I have lost my camel’. Rumi begins to think that he, too, has lost a camel. That is how it is for those who find that they are missing something dear to them. They begin to look for Him and call His name.

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  • Hope

    October 23, 2016

    I remember that you said at one point that in this work you must abandon hope because it is contrary to making work efforts. Could you explain what you meant?

    My favourite vajrayana teacher convinced me of this many years ago but it has a specific meaning. Like all real insights, it cannot be reduced to a rule.

    What most of us mean by hope is a strange mix of wishful thinking and anxiety. We hope that things get better, we hope nothing bad happens and we hope that we, or those close to us, get what is wanted. These hopes are largely driven by fear and disagreement. We reject what we have, we do not like the current situation, so we pin our hopes on the imaginary appearance of something more pleasant in the future. The key is that these hopes are imaginary and future-oriented.

    Noticing this process in ourselves is a very important work exercise. The fact is that we often do not deal with the present, and we do not do the work we can do now, because we imagine that things will magically get better in the future. This is a major source of procrastination. In the future, we will have what we need to work, the situation will be more favourable than it is now, we will be less busy and stressed. The future becomes the enemy of the present.

    In business, the expression is: “Hope is not a strategy.” Conditions usually do not just get better. Problems and opportunities must be dealt with as they arise.

    Is this the only kind of hope there is?

    I don’t think so. What I have described is hope as a sensation-state. In my experience, there is also an objective feeling of hope. This quality has a strong degree of presentness; it is not only a projection into the future. It has threads running through it of trust and faith. This hope is not for tangible things or accomplishments. It is based on an experience of being and the confident expectation that being will continue to unfold.

    Hebrews 11:1 says: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen… Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. (New King James Version)

    I hope for a deeper relationship with ‘things not seen’. This hope, this expectation, is rooted in a relationship that exists now, that I wish to make more perfect. This expectation asks that I work towards it in the present, as often as I am able to remember. This kind of hope does not offer an escape but rather a promise of discovery.

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  • Confidence

    October 17, 2016

    The ordinary meaning of this word is to feel good about yourself, to think that you are up to the task, whatever that task is. This use of the word correctly exposes the orientation of our time, as words do; an orientation to oneself.

    The original meaning is to be or to act con fidele (with faithfulness). Implied in this understanding is that confidence does not come from oneself, one’s abilities, but rather from a relationship which is faithful, one to the other. This orientation suggests that humans need a relationship to enable them to be confident. To be confident, I need to be faithful to someone or something which will hold me in place, keep me from wavering.

    A relationship that inspires confidence cannot be constructed by the mind. Faith is not blind, or rather, it is blind to the ordinary human world because it relies on seeing into another world, a world of honour, truth and love that transcends the temporary alliances and values of the world around me.

    Do you know the immense relief that comes from this relationship? I do not care what name you have for it. In our work, this relationship is said to be remembering. It is returning to the connectedness that has always been there when I cease forgetting.

    I forget. I become identified with my roles, personalities, aims and desires which isolate me in myself. All confidence is lost. I am left to bluff my way, whistling in the dark, plucking up my courage, alone.

    I remember. I am present. I feel connected. I am not alone. This is beyond reason. It is fact. It is what the heart knows as an organ of perception.

    Can I remember? I notice that I cannot remember when I am in a state of contraction, when my heart feels constricted. I notice the things that bring this contraction. I learn to avoid these things where possible. I learn to release the sensation of contraction. I learn the gestures that can expand my heart.

    Am I willing to do battle for the state of connectedness? In this battle, when I remember, I am helped, I am remembered. I learn that the wish to remember is met and seen and I am held. This is confidence.

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  • Faith

    August 17, 2015

    I notice how encumbered I am by my beliefs. I believe certain things and I don’t believe others and both seem to be permanently fixed. I cannot believe in an unseen world. Can this rigidity be shifted so I can believe?

    What you are describing is the sickness of our time. What you are describing is a lack of faith which is not the same as belief.

    To inquire into this matter we must be careful to make distinctions. I wish first to explore the differences between knowing and believing.

    I know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is based on personal experience, the experience of many others, and verification over thousands of years. It is explained by a theory of celestial mechanics which is also based on verifiable observation…we understand why the sun will appear to rise tomorrow.

    The resurrection of the dead is in another category. I can believe in this but I cannot know it.  I have no experience of it, neither do others, there is no historical record of it and there is no verifiable theory to support it. My belief is likely based on religious authority or some sort of intuition.

    Inquiring into belief, I find that it is a marriage of thought and emotional preference. My belief consists of thinking what I want to think about something or someone.  It is supported by an emotional need.

    Not believing something requires an equal amount of careful consideration. Is my non-belief a refusal to believe something because there is no evidence, or because I want to reject it?

    The issue here is emotion in its dual forms of clinging and averting.  If I do not know that something is true, I can test it to see if there is evidence for it. Or I can decide to believe it or disbelieve it.  My motive for doing so is observable in myself.  Most likely, I believe because I cling to something I like and I disbelieve because I reject something I do not like. These emotions are facts which can be determined by observation. They are not immutable because they are based in emotion.

    One of the primary functions of believing or disbelieving is to reduce uncertainty, which is unsettling and anxiety-producing.

    Observing these mechanisms is fundamentally important because I continually adopt beliefs and disbeliefs that then block my capacity to know. We commonly use the expression that ‘seeing is believing’ but the converse is far more true…believing is seeing. I precondition perception by what I want to see and then delight in confirmation, which provides a false sense of certainty. To open my experience to the unknown, I must first unwind the beliefs that block perception.  “The undesirable must be relinquished before the desirable can be attained.”

    One of the strongest beliefs is what constitutes evidence. Thinking based on sensation is believed and has become completely dominant despite its home in the transitory world. Feeling is not considered evidence. Aesthetic experience, the perception of beauty, the feeling of truth…these are not taken as evidence of perception. They are thought to be subjective and ephemeral and therefore they are disbelieved. But in the world of feeling, there can be just as much certainty based on evidence as there is in the physical world where I know the sun will rise tomorrow. The evidence is the feeling.

    Humans have three capacities for the play of perception—thinking, sensing and feeling—but we habitually rely on only the first two. Feeling is the perceptive capacity that opens the second dimension of time, the dimension that is all-certainty, unchanging by its very nature.

    If you rely on belief, you cannot have faith. Faith is perception of the heart, perception by feeling. It has no emotional needs, no subjective preferences motivated by clinging or averting, no history, no development, only uncovering.

    Faith is not blind. Faith is knowing, but not the knowing of the mind. It cannot be overturned by reason because it is not rooted in the mind. Faith comprehends the shape and texture of truth before it reaches the mind. What does faith apprehend? It knows relatedness, it knows with certainty that all things communicate and cohere. It knows that life has meaning. Faith is the feeling of being held and sustained. It is the cognition of being embedded in something immeasurably large and compassionate.

    Faith serves the unseen world, the world of the Absolute. He who is lost is found by way of faith.

    Rumi writes that each of us must dig out the foundations of the self and discover underneath two veins, one of ruby and one of gold. Faith is one of these veins. All beings have faith but it must be freed from the beliefs that cover it. We do not need to produce faith from our own efforts, rather we need to expose its counterfeit, the beliefs which stand in its place.

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