Suffering

Suffering is not composed of the difficulties and tragedies of life. Suffering is in the perception of life by the individual mind. This is the reason for practice. By practicing meditation and other forms of strengthening the mind and body, it is possible to endure life's inevitable challenges without suffering. This is true liberation.

Elements

I sometimes like to look at my own life's development in terms of the elements. When I was growing in the womb, I was like the amniotic fluid in which I resided. I was unconscious, flexible, fluid, malleable. After being born, my body gradually hardened and stiffened. From rubbery newborn, I became a dynamic and aggressive toddler.

Growing from baby to child to adolescent is a hardening process, a process of individuation and forming of more rigid boundaries. More like stone plow than water, as a young adult, I learned to fend off rejections and other assaults on my self image. I plowed a path into a work life. I honed the blade of my plow against the rocks of prejudice, materialism, class and ignorance.

It was familiar and easy to continue to harden as I approached middle age. A certain amount of financial stability made me less dependent on social supports and networks. I had a fixed idea of where my life would go as a plow in the secure, walled field of my life.

The AIDS epidemic represented a boulder far stronger than my plow. It shattered that hardened me. The resulting congregate person, pieced together initially from the old hardened me, fumbled along for a short while. No straight furrows through the intense, changing morass of the epidemic could be plowed. So, I dissolved into it, became part of the soil of the epidemic itself.

By working within the devouring beast, which was decimating my community and my own life, I gradually learned that being more like water than stone worked better for me. Working my way back to the fluidity of my pre-conscious, amniotic self has been a form of liberation. Rebirthing, perhaps.

My practice is leading me gradually to that end point at which I will concretely become like water, like air...simply water vapor, dust and dissipated electromagnetic energy. I believe that approaching that end point, awake and alive, without struggling with the elemental realities of being is perhaps the height of what is means to be human. I also believe that any person who does this will inevitably become a mindful and compassionate creature.

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.

Packing

There is an art to moving. If there were a degree for moving, I'd have a doctorate. In the past forty years I have moved about thirty times, usually by myself, since I have lived alone for most of that time.

My house is now packed neatly into one large room here on the first floor. Fifteen medium boxes of moderate weight/density. Twelve plastic crates, smaller with more compact weight of wrapped dishes, glassware or books. Boxes are stacked for easy access, since they usually go into the truck first. Larger furniture is next. Small items are last. They are tucked securely into holes left by larger items.

More often than not, I hire movers. I have great admiration and empathy for the men and women who lug the weight of the materialism of others for relatively low pay. They represent a vanishing segment of the population of developed countries: Those who labor against gravity and friction for their living. They provide a truly valuable service.

I have known people who enjoy brutalizing paid laborers. These selfish bullies feel that they are entitled to insult the dignity of a person who has to work hard for their money. What could be more cowardly? There may come a day when those who labor at basic services, like moving, will be considered worthy of more respect. I hope that day comes soon.

All in all, while I struggle with my muscles and joints, exerting myself against the weight of my own possessions, I find moving tremendously invigorating. My heart races at the prospect of new habits, new walks, new acquaintances. Many people seek this exhilaration in travel. I learned many years ago that travel does not satisfy my need for shaking out the cobwebs as well as moving to a new neighborhood, where I will live for a year or more.

In The Dhammapada, the translated sayings of Gautama, there are repeated references to moving or movement as a method to diminish attachment and to spread the word of liberation. I must concur. My moving is motivated as much by economics as by philosophy, but the net effect is the same. Weeding out, packing up and lifting your life, box by box, requires having your feet firmly planted on the ground. Breathing deeply with the mind wide open helps a lot.

Inauguration

My heart swells for joy at the realization of Martin Luther King's dream. My eyes bear the tears of one whose full humanity has yet to be recognized by his nation.

One-ness

The great fear of life, its greatest challenge, is its inherent, physically determined, mental isolation. We are born alone and we die alone. Each of us, encapsulated in one body, must make the internal journey of his/her life in solitude.

Individuals and cultures deal with this differently. Religion is a common vehicle for people to assuage their fears of one-ness as it pertains to life and death. In fact, the less educated the person and his/her culture in modern science and philosophy, the more he/she tends to rely on religion, concepts of immortality, concepts of an afterlife. In these inventions, people can imagine that they are never really alone. In fact, when they die, they can believe, they will be reunited body-less with their loved ones and never suffer the separation of death again.

No such magical thinking is available to the awakened mind. The awakened mind uses practice and learning to forge constructive ways to live with one-ness, while remaining compassionately engaged with other human beings. This is one of the core principles of practice.

Those who embrace awakened, mindful practice as a way of daily living are truly liberated from fear about living and dying alone. Frankly, these fortunate human beings are too busy for these insecurities. They are also too engaged in positive change to be drawn into culture wars or religious wars. They are painfully aware of these horrors of attachment and ignorance all around them. However, their road, their path, is forward, nonviolent, ultimately peaceful.

Layers

You may find that your life experiences will add layers of understanding and feeling to your consciousness without your doing a thing. Aging and sickness are life's great teachers. Unfortunately, most human beings do not reap the wisdom of aging and sickness until they have very little time to apply their increased awareness, empathy and compassion.

The point of practice is to learn as much about the full arc of life and death while having the time and energy to apply this learning to life. When this happens, the level of learning goes deeper and deeper. Then, when additional layers of life experience come along, more and more can be learned from those new experiences.

Enlightenment and liberation start with learning. Book learning and experiential learning. When one looks to the history of Siddhartha, it is tempting to assume that meditation alone led to his enlightenment and liberation. However, Siddhartha had the best education of his time as a young royal prince. He traveled extensively. He communicated with the most revered thinkers of his place and time. He was a worldly man before his enlightenment and liberation.

The deepening layers of bodily and conscious experience will come inevitably. We all age, sicken and die. How we prepare to experience these deepening phenomena depends on the preparation we consciously put into our daily lives through practice.

Set aside a time every day to meditate. Set aside a time every day to exercise. Set aside a time every day to learn through reading and communication with those you meet who have much to teach you. This is all part of daily practice.

Freedom

Freedom is not a product, a sales pitch, a slogan or an excuse for invasion and mass murder. Freedom comes only to the individual heart through liberation from attachment and aversion. The Middle Way, or Middle Path, is the path to true freedom. The Middle Path is found one step at a time. These steps constitute practice.

Work

I recently heard a weeping defendant of illegal immigration here in the US on a radio talk show. She said, "We all work so hard. Americans wouldn't want us to leave if they saw how hard we worked."

Well, I think this says a lot about the current attitudes toward work and law here in the US. Work for wages is considered moral. Respect for the law is considered dismissible. This is the Reaganite message: Money is good; how you get it is irrelevant. Ronald Reagan's own administration operated this way in international and domestic politics. The end, as long as it supported corporate power expansion, ruled the means.

The Reaganite myth is about to be toppled, like a statue of Lenin or Saddam. As the corporate promise of prosperity for all as an outfall of greed of the few becomes revealed as a big lie, as the world economies crumble from within due to the drunken greed of the rich, the uselessness of sacrificing one's life to the dollar will become quite obvious to the most gullible.

The most valuable work in life is the work of liberation. Liberation comes from detaching oneself from obsession and aversion. This is the Middle Way. Letting go of material obsession, anger obsession, family obsession, sexual obsession. Letting go of aversion to labor, aversion to difference, aversion to responsibility, aversion to risk, aversion to selflessness.

This is the work of mining the heart, the mind, the spirit. This is the work of study, social engagement, curiosity and generosity.

Practice is work. Its basis is daily commitment to doing the work of liberation.