Tag: Awareness

Different ways of getting to heaven

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Sometimes ideas can give us insight. Some other times, it can be simple little encounters, when for a brief second, the mind is stilled and we see into the heart of things. Their newness, or their beauty, shock us briefly, giving us relief from the preoccupations in our mind, or the routine of daily activity,  and we are nourished within. We try to create some space for such moments today.

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.

Mary Oliver, Yellow

Sunday Quote: Already there

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We have what we seek, it is there all the time,

and if we give it time,

it will make itself known to us.

Thomas Merton

Getting caught up in the content of our lives

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For all of us, the experience of our entanglement differs from day-to-day. I know from personal experience how strong the habitual mind is. The discursive mind, the busy, worried, caught-up, spaced-out mind, is powerful. That’s all the more reason to do the most important thing — to realize what a strong opportunity every day is, and how easy it is to waste it. If you don’t allow your mind to open and to connect with where you are, with the immediacy of your experience, you could easily become completely submerged. You could be completely caught up and distracted by the details of your life, from the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night.

You get so caught up in the content of your life, the minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness, and the vastness escape you. You never emerge from your cocoon, except for when there’s a noise that’s so loud you can’t help but notice it, or something shocks you, or captures your eye. Then for a moment you stick your head out and realize, Wow! Look at that sky! Look at that squirrel! Look at that person!

Pema Chodron.

Seeing the secret

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Another writer, Eugene O?Neill, describing a moment – when he looked up at the stars in the night sky – when he saw something as if for the first time. Although difficult, we try to bring some of this quality to each encounter and each moment, not meeting them through the filters of our conditioning, fears or preconceived notions:

For a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the…high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life..  – to Life itself!   To God, if you want to put it that way…. For a second you see the secret – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!

Eugene O’Neill, Long Days Journey into Night

Just being aware

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This quote, from a essay by Anne Dilliard, is as good a description of the simple  – but difficult – act of paying attention, that moment before we add words to what we are experiencing. It is something which we keep working at, slowing down the continual commentary which accompanies everything in our mind, working on our capacity to just let thing be:

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I’ve lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip’s stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat. I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator – our very self-consciousness – is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

Annie Dilliard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Tired eyes

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I was recently away on retreat in Massachusetts and noticed that, as it has before, travelling stimulated the senses and moved the mind to notice new things – or things with fresh eyes. I was reflecting on this as I passed through different airports, when I always find that impressions are more intense. Or it could be that I am more open. Because it seems to me that being in airports and travelling is an exercise in “who I am” and identity, an experience in which the normal containers in which I act, and am perceived by others,  gets moved around and suspended for a while, until I land and get back into reasonably familiar places, like hotels, and into roles and routines that I can determine myself. In the airport I find myself in a space where I am not – and nobody else really is – “at home”:  everything is fluid, my identity reduced to that of a person-in-movement, defined only by passport and boarding card. The normal familiar people, places and roles that hold my life together are not around. And mostly I find it a very open, stimulating experience.

So I emerged from a flight, through the scrutiny of passport control and various checks, to stand with the others to wait for that other comforting element of my identity to slot back into place, the suitcase. Opposite me were two small twin brothers, travelling with their parents. They were lively and excited, and for the first moment my mind labelled the delighted sounds they were making as “too much noise”. However, soon their excitement focused on the conveyor belt and each tumbling-down piece of luggage brought cheers of surprise and delight. Not just the first one, but the tenth and the twentieth brought gasps of amazement and amusement as they waited for their one to arrive. It was very funny to see their faces and their wonder at the technology, seeing it probably for the first time.

And it struck me how much wonder we lose at the things which happen everyday,  simply out of force of habit or being in a hurry. Now, I am not saying that we should get back to a condition where routine things, like the operation of a conveyor belt, fills us with surprise and awe each time we see them. It is simply not possible to get back into that fresh state.  But it did impress on me that we miss so much, either out of familiarity,  or due to  the wariness with which we approach strange situations,  or maybe because of the fact that life has betrayed and hurt us and we have learned not to open our hearts. Thus, sadly, the innocence, openness and wonder of children is not normally our everyday mode of relating to things.

Thankfully from time to time something new, or something of beauty, comes along and cuts through the habitual mind and the defensive heart. Like this American Robin which I saw foraging for food every morning as I sat on a bench after breakfast in rural Massachusetts. I have been an amateur birdwatcher since my childhood, so seeing a new species is always interesting.  And the movement of this bird – although called a robin in homage to its redbreast – reminded me of the European thrush with which I am more familiar. It appeared each morning, always timid, searching for worms with some success.  So this hesitant bird,  which for some reason has evolved to be wary and cautious, became my companion for the days of retreat, and its tender vulnerability  helped me to see with new eyes and a more open heart.

Maybe this is the key. Moments of beauty  and changes from fixed patterns open the heart, making it gentle and vulnerable. But not only the beautiful or the surprising. It struck me that I should be also be open to the arrival of unexpected difficulties or to upsets in life,  as moments which challenge the habitual, and force new ways of thinking. They too come to visit me, maybe to stir me up and  allow me see where I am stuck. Where I have gotten too much into a routine. In some ways,  life will never cease to provide me with occasions for growth if I can just be awake to what is presented. I do not have to go out of my way to seek them. I just have to have fresh eyes that can see.