Path

We are born as single, distinct individuals, despite any familial nurturing or support. All things pass away. With age, those of us who survive longest live the loneliest lives. This is nature. Eventually we die our separate deaths. Our bodies simply give out from one cause or another.

Our conscious lives are linear, despite any meditative or holistic practice we adopt along the way. This is an inevitable human condition. We can flee into denial, drug addiction or insanity in attempts to avoid it. But, the heart beats and the lungs bellow their inevitably finite number of mechanical times before they cease, like all engines in a material world.

Should we spend our time unnecessarily preoccupied with living longer and looking perpetually young? What is the use? How does that help the human condition or promote peace for all? When the door closes on each life, it closes as relentlessly as the door of a subway train. Death comes. There's no holding it back indefinitely.

So, given the limits of our human journey, what path should we follow? Should we wallow in hedonistic pleasure? Should we see life as an endless bag of potato chips to be devoured and craved indefinitely? Should we become self-centered and get everything we can for our own pleasure in the short time we have? She would focus on fleeting fame or popularity?

Perhaps we should shed every pleasure in favor of mind expansion and understanding of the human condition. The cloister, the cave, the mountaintop. Austerity in the name of inner peace and liberation.

I believe in the Middle Path. I live immersed in the world, yet not attached to it. I care for my body and mind, but I heed the needs of those around me and respond as best I can. I savor the basic pleasures of home, mobility and social intercourse, but I am prepared at any time to move from my place or my life in the inevitable loneliness of the human condition. I try to take what I need from life. I understand that wanting, when I am full, is a disease. I work to heal that disease in my own life. I try to help others to escape from needless wanting.

This Middle Path is often hard to see in the forest of modern urban life. Deep breathing and patience afford me the time to seek it when I am enveloped in the fog of my own anxiety or the demands of others. Time in meditation and times of being touched by love form the serene pool of happiness and reserve which sustains me when a crisis has passed. All falls into perspective. I know the journey ahead. It is uniquely mine, and I must travel it alone. This is what it is. I am at peace with it and with myself.

Awakening

Awakening entails letting go of the mind's path to discover your own.

Haiku

narrow middle way
footpath parting darkest wood
forest voice beckons

Choices

In every moment, the mindful and compassionate person must balance identity and humanity. This is practice.

Racism is a choice of identity over humanity. Sexism, including hatred of people for differing sexual orientations, is a choice of identity over humanity. Religious intolerance is a choice of identity over humanity. Ignoring the needs of the working poor, uninsured, mentally ill, addicted, homeless or any other peaceful human beings in need is a choice of identity over humanity.

Choosing peace is often a choice of humanity over identity. Choosing charity is often a choice of humanity over identity. Choosing humility is often a choice of humanity over identity.

Continuing to thoughtlessly choose identity over humanity in moment-by-moment living creates a bad personal environment, which will eventually alienate and marginalize. The evil of the world is built on countless individual choices of identity over humanity.

Walking the Middle Path by attending to a daily practice, committed to peace, mindfulness and compassion, entails balancing identity with humanity in every moment. Rather than seeking to change one's humanity, the seeker works relentlessly to change one's identity to harmonize with one's humanity.

Shade

Light and shade are ancient human concepts. The sun gives us the light and heat which sustain us. That same light and heat can cause us great pain and catastrophe. Man's appreciation of shade predates man himself. It is an animal instinct to get out of the midday sun. And, it is an animal instinct which draws us out into the sunlight.

Light is a metaphor for truth. Shade is a metaphor for dishonesty. Learning to live in full light and also shade our immediate passions and reactions is a way of looking at practice. Those who live entirely in the light with all their human and animal behaviors are the celebrities in the pop media. Those who live in the shade all the time, like former Vice-President Dick Cheney, become inhuman creatures with no sign of human dignity or human failing.

Those who learn the Middle Path know when to stay in the light and when to rest in the shade.

Masculinity

Gender is not a matter of choice in nature. We live in a time of gender alteration by surgery. We live in a time of metrosexuality. We live in a time of sexual take-out menus on Web sites. You name it; you can get it.

Masculinity is still valued in a society where men are becoming undervalued. Education statistics indicate that men are performing badly academically in relation to women. The media culture indicates that brutish, rude, criminal men sell clothes and music.

So, what is masculinity? Is it a mix of hormonal responses and affect? Is it the swagger, the crotch scratch? Is it the accomplishment of athletic skill? Is it the ability to coldly kill an enemy in a uniform? How do you define masculinity?

I abandoned my masculinity about 10 yrs ago when I first fell critically ill and nearly died. I realized that disability had made me something other than masculine or feminine. It had made me human in consciousness. Recovery only solidified this feeling about my genderness. I began the process of accepting myself to an extent I had never imagined when I was engaged in the 'normal' world.

I happen to believe that moving past obsession with gender is another step in personal evolution.

I also think that gender obsession to the point of self mutilation is a disease. The cure for that disease is the actual mutilation (sex reassignment) in the eyes of some. I would disagree, despite the current political trend to accept that solution. Yet, I would support and defend those who feel so compelled that they undertake that surgery, if I felt they have explored all possible options to deal with their gender obsession without self mutilation.

The photograph above is allegedly of Oscar de la Hoya, the famous boxing champ. It has become a notorious image. It challenges the masculine stereotype of millions of men and women. It does not challenge mine. Does it challenge yours? My practice includes being aware of my gender and what effects it has on my attempts at personal evolution. While I am not obsessed with my genderness, I am also not ignorant about it. This is another example of seeking the Middle Path.

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.

Change

How to embrace change and spontaneity, while mindfully attending to the routine responsibilities which create a basis of health from which One can evolve and share?

This is the challenge of the Middle Path. Shun attachment. Shun aversion. Shun ritual for ritual's sake. Shun mindless impulse. Balance through moderation is the goal and the remedy.

Lapses

I have come back today from a place far removed from writing and meditation. I was immersed for several days in what most people call day-to-day life. Funny how short the days seem in that frame of existence. They whiz by. Nights become dreamless blanks as the weary body repairs and reboots. I prefer the usual practiced pace of my life. It is very difficult to stay on the middle path without writing and meditation. I realize that the middle path is easily overlooked by those on the fast path of material life. It is part of my practice to try to point out the middle path to those who may have overlooked it.

Spring

The word "Spring" evokes a light and joyful feeling when I consider it through most of the solar year. The reality is that Spring comes very slowly in New England, especially along the coast. So Spring brings impatience as well as expectation of more comfortable temperatures. This isn't different from many things in life. In poverty, wealth seems magical and endlessly empowering. In youth, maturity seems liberating. In maturity, youth seems glorious and carefree. Walking the Middle Path entails being mindful of all these nuances in life as it is lived in the moment. In other words, from a perspective of a peaceful mind, both subjectively aware and objectively aware, the Universe can be experienced fully to the benefit of human evolution.