Awakened

The sleepwalker passes through life with eyes fixed firmly on his past and, walking backwards through his present into his future, he allows his path to be directed by the life situations which he bumps into. The awakened looks ahead to the future with a firm footing in the moment, each moment, a slippery stone in the stream of ever changing life.

Humility

This is not an age of humility. It is an age of celebrity and self-promotion. Youtube has enabled the ad man in everyone with a digital camera or mobile phone. "Look at me." is the underlying mantra of videos of cute cat tricks and gurgling babies. There are, of course, exceptions, but Google Ads belie a certain egocentric materialism generally.

As a humanist and atheist who admits ignorance of what I cannot see or understand in The Universe, I do experience a natural humility every day. My tenuous grip on life and consciousness allows me to appreciate the vastness of The Universe. I do not live comparatively in relation to other human beings. I understand that we are all smaller than bacteria in the great Universe around us. The famous will sicken and die no more elegantly than the man sleeping under a bridge.

Admission of the smallness of my life in the great sea of life and non-life around me is liberating. My greatest possession, perhaps my only possession, is this moment. Though it is precious to me, it is fleeting and so easy to miss. I choose to share my moments with you because I feel our greatest quality as human beings is our ability to share our internal experiences of The Universe with each other. Bringing our shared awareness to life's successive moments breeds compassion and mindfulness. Each tiny light of shared consciousness, like my own, joined with millions like itself, may eventually illuminate a world darkened by selfishness, poverty and violence. This is my idea of a great vision of a better world.

Love

It is tempting to equate love with sentiment. Who doesn't enjoy infatuation and sexual titillation, once these drugs are discovered during adolescent hormonal rushes? But, I have grown to see love as behavior, as a process, as a growing entity with its own life.

I believe sustaining love is planted and tended like a tree by those who love. The seed of love can be sex, sentiment, blood relationship. The sapling of love is the early discovery that comes with time and shared experience. The tree of love is the pruned and shaped understanding and dialogue which can withstand drought and storm. The fruit of love is the sense of belonging with another who knows and accepts your deepest truth.

Love is supported by commitment. It can be accelerated by sex. It is fed by communication. It is strengthened by ongoing affection. Learning to love one person deeply and completely opens the heart and mind to loving the world. Never experiencing deep love leads to mental illness and alienation from the world.

The greatest challenge of love for some is letting it into their lives. Money, role, material success and possessions are common barriers against loving and being loved. Loving requires vulnerability and sacrifice of some boundaries and barriers. It also requires the personal confidence and self-understanding to remain a whole individual while loving another completely.

Like a healthy forest, a full life contains loves of many varieties and levels of maturity. Love can be contained within a simple interaction on the street, a sprouted seed which does not grow but has life and value. Certain relationships may remain contained by business or other boundaries. The love in these relationships can grow like an elegant dwarfed bonsai, shaped by more formal manners and behaviors. Love in other relationships takes root and grows wildly from sexual passion into an ever-changing canopy of shared experience and understanding. These tall trees of long relationships lend shade and protection to new loves, planted in our lives.

The art of loving is practiced with the mind as well as with emotion. Loving is intentional behavior. Communication os essential to developing mindful love between human beings. The communication of words and the communication of physical affection have equal power. I believe any practice for human growth entails practicing the art of loving.

Attitude

Attitude, the outward demeanor with which we face the world, shapes our world. In Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, a Medieval Japanese Buddhism based on the teachings of the Lotus Sutra, two precepts apply. First, the law of cause and effect. Second, man and his environment are one.

The way I approach the world is the cause. The effect is the result of that approach. In Biblical terms, I reap what I sow. My approach to the world creates a personal environment of peace, antipathy, harmony, etc.. Therefore, a person lives in an environment which he is part of and shapes with his attitude. Likewise, a person and his attitude are shaped by the environment which he creates. This is a basic concept of behavioral science.

In American gay culture, "attitude" is a commonly used word. It sometimes implies an edge, a defensiveness on the verge of reactive hostility. It can also describe the dignified pride of a gay person who has affirmed and accepted his sexuality without shame or diffidence. Different attitudes, different human experiences.

Practicing an awareness of human suffering and a commitment to alleviate human suffering when it is encountered in human interactions leads to an attitude adjustment. Acceptance of human commonality in suffering and death leads to an open attitude in social situations. Aggression gives way to humility. Selfishness gives way to generosity. Attitude reveals humanist mindfulness where it exists.

Breathing

I have had to learn how to breathe. Breathing deeply and slowly has become a conscious practice for me. I spent the greater part of my life unconsciously focusing tension in my chest, gut and neck muscles. Tightened chest, tightened gut, poor posture, poor breathing. Poor breathing, poor oxygenation to brain and muscle, which leads to more tension and even worse breathing. The result is disease and dysfunction.

Learning to sense tension in your body is a very good health-promoting skill. Taking an inventory occasionally through the day is the key. While sitting in a task chair or walking to work or sitting on the subway, consider your own body's posture and attitude. Straighten the spine with chin up and shoulders back. Inhale deeply. Exhale deeply. Repeat. Feel the change in your body. It will relax. You may even feel a burst of alertness and increased energy, as your brain is oxygenated.

Whenever you can, follow this procedure throughout the day. Stretch your arms and legs. Remember to keep your chin elevated as you look at monitor screens, listen to lectures or carry on conversations. This helps to keep the posture erect with shoulders back.

This activity is a form of meditation. It brings you back within your consciousness of your own life, your own body, which is ultimately all you truly and temporarily possess in life. Mindfulness of your own state of well being or dysfunction is the first step to greater mindfulness. By staying well, you will have energy to practice compassion and generosity to others.

Brains

Developing mindfulness and compassion requires playing with your brain.

Conscious, intentional lives are the constant interplay of consciousness with brain (thought) and behavior (action). We all awake in adulthood to find we are working with a brain which is used to and preconditioned by our genetics and experience. In every moment, we are faced with the situations of life on a planet, crowded with humankind and complicated by the products of other brains. Our brains are more like racing speed boats without navigation systems than hi-tech ocean liners. The trick is to stay behind the wheel and keep on course.

Many people go through life impulsively, compulsively and reactively. Like players of a video game, they frantically push buttons in their brains to react to situations and people. Most are disappointed in the end by the choices they make. Few face their deaths with a sigh of satisfaction and completion. I know. I have been at hundreds of death beds.

Mastery of your own brain's triggers and patterns is a lifelong process, a practice.

Sobriety, honesty and reflection are necessary tools. Controlling and changing behavior is the first step to mastering the brain. This is the path to proactive living. Indulging impulses and compulsions is the road to disaster. Mindfulness and compassion emerge with understanding and acceptance of one's own mortal humanity.

Death

Death is our great commonality. The more a society flees from death and dying, the less it invests in the common good. The wealthy indulge themselves in delusions of immortality, aided by plastic surgeons and medical gurus. The poor slave away their lives for the rich under the delusion that they will live forever in their children, whose lives might be better.

We are born alone. We die alone. There is no reason to believe in any personal, conscious immortality.

Accepting mortality as the human condition can lead to an awakening. The awakened focuses on the quality of human experience in the moment and the means to improving that quality. The compassionate person, once awakened, strives to bring that quality of his/her experience to others by trying to awaken them.

Stunning surprises, terrible accidents or life-threatening diseases bring this awareness to most. The elderly often awaken a short time before they die. How sad it is to waste a life asleep only to awaken just before death. The wise person accepts his/her mortality and incorporates that acceptance in his/her relationship to the world.

Vision

Maintaining a personal practice of truth, compassion and mindfulness is aided by a vision of life as it could be without suffering, greed and violence. Formulating this vision is helped by focusing on alleviating your own suffering, monitoring your own greed and purging violence from your own thoughts and actions.

My own life is my best laboratory. By showing myself that I can effect change in my own actions and perceptions in the moment, I can instill hope into my life for the eventual liberation of all life from suffering. This requires an ongoing commitment in moment after moment.

The mind slides to its animal or habitual nature all too easily. Being fully awake entails guiding the mnd along a path to wellness against the resistance of habit and history in each moment of awareness. This takes practice. This is practice.

Nonsense

So much of what keeps us from being in the moment and being happy is simply nonsense. From childhood, we are conditioned to adopt our cultural and familial norms. Layer upon layer of nonsense from the past of our families and the past of our environment gets wrapped around our brains. And, our brains operate through the filter of those layers of nonsense, unless we liberate ourselves.

Liberation, or awakening, doesn't just happen. Facing the nonsense in your mind requires work.

The work for some entails therapy. Others find liberation through sports or yoga. Some find it through meditation and study. The path to liberation is not a dead end. There is no Eden waiting for the liberated, no cozy cul-de-sac. Liberation, or awakening, is the beginning of a new open life. Liberation itself becomes a never ending process of self-challenge and renewal.

Like growing older, liberation isn't for the weak-hearted. To be in the moment requires strength and courage. To embrace the impermanence of all things requires the acknowledgment of one's own impermanence. I believe this can become part of a daily consciousness, which promotes ongoing liberation and personal evolution. Simply put, this consciousness entails challenging everything that comes to the mind against a standard of justice, truth and compassion.

Christians

"What would Jesus do?" That was the central mantra of the Christianity in which I was raised. In fact, the utter failure of the representatives and officials of that Christianity to live by that standard drove me from that Christianity and the other mainstream Christian sects.

Similarly, I say to Buddhist practitioners, "What would Gotama do?" I tire of those who identify themselves as Buddhists or Buddhist-friendlies and live as materialistic hedonists with little or no regard for those in need around them. I bristle at those who turn Buddhism into a lucrative career path by selling it to the wealthy as a balm for their already lapsed social consciences.

Practicing mindfulness and compassion in the moment every day is not easy. The world is immersed in suffering all around us. The awakened sees the suffering and is compelled to action, right action , to ease it in whatever incremental way possible in each life situation. Jesus and Gotama, as best as I can tell, were awakened human beings. They did not set out to be demigods, used by scoundrels for political and materialistic purposes. They tried to promote a daily practice of peace and justice for all human beings.

Courage

if you're always strong

you can do no wrong

if you're always rich

you can feel no hunger

if you're always safe

you can see no threat

life wrongs the many
life starves the poor

life frightens the unsafe

the powerful can defer

the wealthy can provide

the secure can protect

if you're always mindful

you can see true need

if you're always willing

you can find compassion

if you're willing to suffer

you can find true courage

Fear

How much of your life is governed by fear? Fear of animals? Fear of disease? Fear of pain? Fear of violence? Fear of theft? Fear of poverty? Fear of loneliness? Fear of loss? Fear of fire? Fear of commitment? Fear of abandonment? Fear of the unknown? Fear of social ostracism? Fear of forgetfulness? Fear of mockery? Fear of passion?

My experience with fear, which is extensive, has taught me that the first step of freeing myself from its effects is to acknowledge and clearly examine it, despite my anxiety in that process. "Face your fear." It's a common approach, and it works, with practice and conscious effort.

The most dangerous fear is the fear that goes unrecognized. It eats like invisible termites at the foundation of personal integrity. Eventually, integrity gives way to fear and collapses under strain. The erosion of the German popular psyche in the Nazi era is an all-too-grotesque example.

My humanist practice has developed in part as my success at confronting my own fears has grown. I see these growth processes as intertwined. This is no surprise to anyone who has studied psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Fear triggers fight-or-flight mechanisms in the brain and body. It is difficult to be a nurse, when fear is constantly encouraging you to flee, I assure you. But, my battle with fear began earlier than that. It began with my fear of loss and abandonment as a child. As I struggled out of a pre-adolescent, suicidal depression, precipitated by the sudden deaths of seven key people in my life, I recognized that I had to force myself to see beyond my fear responses. It was very difficult, but I did it with the routine determination and perserverance of a gymnast. And, I still do.

In this age of PTSD awareness, more and more understanding of fear is uncovered by science. Fear is hard-wired. Living with fear and trauma-memory which re-triggers it, requires practice in order to be able to function as a caring and open person in the world. The individual must change to adapt to a slow-changing world of violence, insecurity, ignorance and poverty.

Breaking free of the crippling, inhibiting and/or diverting effects of fear through desensitization by experience is at the core of all forms of human liberation. Being truly, mindfully compassionate often requires acknowledging and calming one's own fear in the moment. Being balanced on the mindful path as a humanist is a constant quest to live in internal peace with all that is human within.

Extremes

One of the goals of my practice, learned from Buddhist and monastic Christian practice, is the narrowing of my moment-by-moment attention away from the extremes of my reactions and desires. It is the most difficult and most rewarding aspect of my practice.

In the US, we live in a country of extreme views and extreme differences in wealth and well-being. While the extremes, diluted by a bureaucratically grinding government, generate slow social progress, the temperament of America is fickle and often unfocused. Materialism is the common ethos of the country. Freedom, as touted and seen by most Americans, is a euphemism for selfish pursuit of monetary wealth and/or celebrity. This adds to the challenge of practice for me.

Tempering the extremes of reaction and desire, brings calmness to the mind. Calmness of the mind allows for self-confidence and an understanding of self. Self-confidence and self-understanding allay many personal cravings. Allaying personal cravings allows the perception of the needs and humanity of others. Generally perceiving the needs and humanity of others, without seeing them through selfish insecurity and/or desire, breeds compassion. Compassion brings love. Love extinguishes fear and violence.

This doesn't just happen. It's exhaustive labor much of the time. A simple subway ride in the city with this consciousness brings countless tests of my resolve to practice. Driving in the city makes this practice nearly impossible for me. But, the commitment to the effort has paid off.

Ethics

Peter Galbraith, son of a prominent American political family, has demonstrated the etiquette and importance of ethics in true democratic culture. He has been castigated for it by corrupted men in international seats of power.



The corrupt shrug at the practicality of corruption in others. This is the way of politics and the world of materialistic men without ethics and higher vision. Keeping their secrets overrides keeping their standards of ethical behavior. When exposed, the corrupt encircle each other defensively, like a pack of attacked wolves. The truthsayer is isolated, punished, expelled.

This behavior has infected all layers of civic culture and business culture in the U.S. and in the developed world. It is symptomatic of governmental and corporate reactions to overpopulation, stressed environments and stretched natural resources. Greed is a symptom of the awareness of the wealthy classes, usually well educated, to the impending environmental disasters on this planet.

Is this behavior conscious? I doubt it is as conscious as it is pervasive and infectious. Capitalism has no consciousness. Corporations have no definable consciousness. Accumulation of wealth drives capitalist corporations in the same way hunger drives a pack of wolves. However, the hunger of corporations is unmitigated. Corporations never have full bellies. They never sleep.

The practice of truthfulness in all things is a bad business model in a capitalist world. This is a crucial conflict for any person who wishes to practice mindfulness, truthfulness and compassion in his/her daily life. It is a moment-by-moment choice. Making the right choice and taking the right action in each moment over time builds practice. In my experience, living in this practice, while never easy or monetarily enriching, builds the strength and skills which also ensure living well within the realities of the world.

Practice?

What is practice? My answer to that question is this: Practice is moment-by-moment, mindful, intentional and purposeful thought and behavior, guided by an informed, personal, ethical standard, based in love, compassion and peace.

Practice is awakened living. Practice is attempting to live every moment as a whole, human, conscious, peaceful being. I could go on, but I think I have made myself clear on my ideal concept of practice.

Practice goes beyond thought or belief or intention. Believing in ethics, believing in peace, believing in truth and justice is not enough. Practice is behavior, joined with these ideals. Right action with right thought in every situation from awakening to going to sleep.

I strongly believe that Christian practice, Buddhist practice, Jewish practice and Muslim practice, if motivated by compassion and peace, supersede their religious ideologies. In other words, practice supersedes dogma as a form of human growth and the promotion of general human well-being.

Secular humanist, or ethical humanist, practice is entirely harmonious with religious practice, when motivated by compassion and peace. Dogma is often the enemy, for dogma seeks to control human behavior and thought through ritualized and codified prescriptions.

The practitioner of peace and compassion needs no dogma. There are no magical ceremonies which can truly enhance the practice of mindfulness, truthfulness, compassion and nonviolence. Dogma divides. Compassion and nonviolence bring together. Practice is that simple, but it is also that difficult.

Nonviolence

I have learned a great deal from Asian philosophy and culture. I have not practiced martial arts, but I have studied their basic philosophy. Unfortunately, the Western interpretation and mutation of martial arts often blurs the lines between self defense to immobilize or fend off an aggressor and intentional or lethal harm to an aggressor.

There is power in living nonviolently, in my opinion. To firmly root oneself in nonviolent thought and nonviolent action takes practice. More practice for some than for others. Playing violent video games is not consistent with nonviolent practice. Supporting blood sports is not nonviolent practice. Joining the military is not nonviolent practice. Engaging in threatening speech or action is not nonviolent practice.

The key to nonviolent practice is the bridling of instinctive anger and conditioned anger. First, one must acknowledge the presence of anger in the moment. Then one must develop ways to deal with the anger immediately and consciously in the moment. Suppressing or repressing anger is not nonviolent practice. Acknowledging and channeling anger consciously and consistently is nonviolent practice. Exposing one's anger for what it is, accepting it and understanding its stimulus are essential conscious actions.

Many of us go through life experiencing habitual anger with roots in bad relationships in our pasts. This anger, if unexposed and left unattended to, will be an obstacle to many relationships. It will also inhibit personal growth.

Practice encompasses making conscious all the senses and all the emotions in our bodies. Then, moment by moment, mindful experience and channeling of our emotions builds a practice for personal growth. This is the central healing relationship we must build within ourselves before we can truthfully benefit the world around us in our practice as mindful, compassionate human beings in society.

Alcohol

I recently heard a broadcast on NPR about the rising incidence of alcoholism in young American female population. There is also a statistical rise in alcohol abuse in both sexes.

It is my opinion that one cannot effectively practice a life of mindfulness, truthfulness and compassion while also using alcohol on a daily basis. I have come to this opinion after many years of studying the issue and working with people in my nursing practice.

Alcohol alters hormonal and brain chemistry when used regularly in even moderate volumes. The human brain, while marvelous, is limited in its intoxicant-free state. The nature of a mindful, truthful and compassionate daily practice while living in the real world is arduous and unrelentlingy demanding, if one commits to practicing during all one's waking hours.

Many people function in the world while using alcohol in moderate and even large amounts of alcohol. But, practice is not about functioning. Practice is about being the best human being one can be at any given moment, no matter how stressful or demanding, with every ounce of one's potential. Any substance use or abuse, which leeches energy or capacity from the human body, is an antagonist to practice.

Struggle

Holy men are often depicted as masochists. I understand this. To stand for justice, truth, compassion, peace and fairness in life is somewhat masochistic in human societies which tend toward the hedonistic, selfish, greedy and bellicose.

The Middle Way offers a less masochistic alternative. Masochism Lite, perhaps.

Practice should always be embraced as simply that, practice. You will win some days and lose some days. But, practice is always a struggle against the animal roots of the human species, which can weigh down right action and right thinking in many situations. You see, humans, all humans, have animal brain elements (by 'animal' I mean 'non-human animal') and human brain elements. The frontal lobe brain elements can override the animal brain elements. In fact, as toilet-trained and clothed animals, we have started out with this type of override training fairly early in life. Education is the fuel of the human brain. But, the reptilian and basic mammalian brain elements are still in there and functioning without our conscious control much of the time.

So, every human's practice is a struggle on a very basic level. If we could all just talk about this struggle more and acknowledge it as our most basic commonality, perhaps that would be a great beginning of getting along, despite more superficial differences. This would entail being candid and frank about a whole range of instincts, compulsions, obsessions, bodily functions and desires.

Perhaps that is the place where many of us started our practices. By understanding and accepting the less human parts of ourselves, perhaps we can approach one another with greater humility and acceptance.

I struggle in my practice every day to deal with anger, reflexive reactions, libido, defensiveness, compulsions, anxieties and other physical impediments. This is the 'white noise' of my consciousness, through which I have been trying to hear the more human me, the compassionate me, the mindful me. Sometimes it's a out-and-out wrestling match, but, with time and daily commitment to trying, it has become a more gentle struggle, if I remember to stay in the moment.

Principles

I recently heard an author on the radio bemoaning her conscience and principles, instilled in her brain by parents, teachers and ministers. Her quest, apparently, is to become unprincipled. While I understood her resentment over certain sexist aspects of her conditioning, I think she is perhaps throwing the (well raised) baby out with the bath water.

While I no longer subscribe to my native Christianity, I do appreciate the one central commandment of the mythic Christ: Love thy neighbor as thyself, or, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the basic principle of all compassion and mindfulness. And, if followed, naturally leads to right thought and right action in its practitioner.

Perhaps this is the key to secular humanist morality and ethics. No harsh paternal figure required. No flames of hell as deterrent. No heavenly virgins as reward.

Being human in the most mindful and compassionate way in the moment when alone or with others as a practice is perhaps a higher standard of behavior than the standard of religions which offer ritual absolution for routine, mindless, hateful behaviors without a requirement of subsequent intellectual or behavioral changes.

My principles are my practice. If I proceed with intentional mindfulness and compassion through each day to the best of my ability, I feel it will be unnecessary to fret over the dictates of any religion, social trend or social pressure, which may be at odds with being a truthful, loving and open member of the human family.

Monks

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about becoming a monk. I thought it would be the solution to all my problems. I could retreat from a world I found harsh and inhospitable. I could dedicate my days to meditation, prayer for others, prayer for peace, perhaps a little farming too. How idyllic those fantasies were.

My otherwise devoutly Catholic parents would not sign my permission papers when I wanted to join the Jesuits at 16. It wasn't because they thought being a Jesuit was a bad thing. They preferred that I, their possession, become a medical doctor. In retrospect, they did me an unintentional favor.

How compassionate a person could I have been if I sealed myself off from the experiences of making a living, working in the capitalist system, paying rent, developing a career, working as an openly gay man in my jobs as a teacher, a nurse, an administrator? How would I have known what it means to be poor without a 'big daddy' organization to back me up? How would I have developed myself out of my narrow Catholicism to a broader humanism while being dependent on The Church for my bread and butter? Would I have been able to avoid being corrupted by the mainstream status that comes with a clerical collar?

Those who practice in organized and isolated intentional communities may reach enlightenment, I suppose. But, the historic Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed all lived in the world as individuals. They all pulled away from the conventions of their times to seek Truth. The monasteries and madrassas came later. In fact, one can see these intentional communities and schools as symptoms of de facto humanists' frustration with human society's persistent evils. In this light, I see them as symbols of a kind of surrender, a kind of failure.

While organized groups of devout moralists managed to transmit valuable cultural elements through the ages, they failed to instill practice in the populations they came from, with few exceptions. Practice in the real world with real worldly responsibilities and stresses is hard. But, the rewards of this practice are commensurately great. By practicing in the world, one can develop the strength to aid others in their practice. In this way, potentially, humanist practice can spread through a society over time.

Think of a world where every human being lives in mindfulness with compassion. Think of a world where speech is always based in truth. Think of a world where everyone prizes the act of giving over the act of seeking individual gratification. This would be a world of practice. This kind of world can only be achieved when all its people are just as concerned for the happiness and health of all as they are concerned for the happiness and health of themselves. My mind holds one prayer: it is a plea to future human generations to achieve such a world.