Dharma Monkey

So much about the spiritual journey is about finding things:  words like “discovery,” “exploration” and “searching” seem to underscore the notion that the “path” (another one of those expedition words) is either a quest to uncover a hidden wisdom or a difficult odyssey to a recondite destination. Certainly most of the New Ageism that surrounds us in popular culture is about unlocking this or unearthing that.

I am reminded tonight, however, that my own journey should be about creation, and specifically about creating peace. In his column in this month’s Shambhala Sun, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche writes about our individual obligation to develop a meditative discipline in order to become a peacemaker.

As human beings, we are influenced by our environment. If we create an environment of aggression and disharmony, stress will become the norm. Conversely, if we create an environment of kindness, love, discipline, and generosity, we will all begin to feel a sense of peace.

One characteristic of this dark age is that we doubt our innate goodness. We look outside ourselves for fulfillment, and this creates individualism, in which we believe only in our own interests. We solidify our mind and consciousness—which are naturally fluid and harmonious—into material entities. We become hard individuals who communicate through anger and arrogance. We believe that what will satisfy us is material, and with this view we create a hard, angry, and materialistic world.

At present, the world seems to be running on self-centeredness, speed, and aggression. As this pattern exacerbates, the possibility of peace, both personally and socially, will diminish. Materialism will never make us happy because it is of a different nature than consciousness. Even though material things are important, they are not fundamentally at the core of human beings. The antidote for this materialistic outlook is peace, the opposite of stress.

Rinpoche goes on to say that mindfulness — “the ability to appreciate our own life, moment to moment, because we are able to access our own consciousness” — is the key to creating internal peace.  It is a way to create a distinction between an overwhelmingly material world and the inner buffer that allows us to actually notice how we feel, as we feel it.

At first it’s just a matter of trying to be present, so we connect with our breath.  The we have to remember to follow the breath, come back to the breath, and let the thoughts go.  As our sense faculties — sight, sound, smell, taste, touch — begin to relax, we start noticing how we feel.  Our consciousness has not become more subtle and soft.  What we are feeling is the mindfulness of being alive.

Using mindfulness to cultivate internal peace reduces our own aggressiveness (and our less-than-ideal responses to what happens around us) and plugs us into the fundamental interconnectedness that underpins life as we know it.

It is the key to letting one’s inner light shine.  And yet, next to actually finding the time to meditate, it’s the most difficult task I face in life.  I don’t need to “find” the answer because it’s already there.  I need to create the space within to bring that answer to the surface.

January 27th, 2010 | Category: Buddhism, Mindfulness, Spirituality | Leave a comment

The images and stories coming out of Haiti are heart-crushing. Our world is so small, so interconnected. The feeling of helplessness that so many people feel right now is only amplified by the fact that we can watch live as bodies pile up on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

I am struggling with the overwhelming sense of grief. Watching the evening news brings tears to my eyes and makes my chest ache. A video taken the morning after the earthquake tells the real story: muffled cries of misery, pain and anguish combine to fill the air with a dull roar of unimaginable sorrow.

I can’t let myself look away when the shattered body of young child is on the screen because it reminds me that we are fragile beings, and that this human birth is the most precious of gifts. Seeing this devastation, and the human suffering that has resulted, causes deep feelings of compassion and loving-kindness, and pain, to well up within my soul. I realize I am connected to Haiti, and to Haitians, and to the men and women who are working to bring relief in the midst of this devastation.

Om mani padme hung.

A body in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, covered with dust from a collapsed building. The search was still on for survivors two days after a devastating earthquake. Photo credit: Damon Winter|The New York Times

January 15th, 2010 | Category: World News | Leave a comment

An excerpt from Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God, is included in this month’s Ode magazine. In it, she makes the argument that New Atheism, a school of thought that has gained popularity through the writings of people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, doesn’t have the grounding in science that some would like to think.

Dawkins, she says, has argued that mankind’s propensity toward religion is “an evolutionary mistake.” I’ve read some of Dawkins’ works where he has described our shared religious impulse as an accidental by-product of evolution and, as Armstrong quotes him, a “misfiring of something useful.”

From The Case for God:

Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism. For Dawkins, like the other “new atheists,” religion is the cause of all the problems of our world; it’s the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” These individuals see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.

But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould [believed] everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but he insisted science wasn’t competent to decide whether God did or didn’t exist, because it could work only with natural explanations. Gould had no religious ax to grind; he described himself as “atheistically inclined agnostic,” but pointed out that Darwin himself denied he was an atheist. Atheism didn’t, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations proper to science.

But the new atheists will have none of this. They adhere to a hard-line form of scientific naturalism that mirrors the fundamentalism on which they base their critique: Atheism is always a rejection of and parasitically dependent on a particular form of theism. Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner.

That last sentence underscores what I believe is the real problem.  Isn’t is so easy to think that what you believe — or even what you see — is the truth?  We’re all guilty, in one way or another.

Thousands of years ago, we looked to the heavens and within our own minds and wondered the eternal questions: How?  Why? What’s Next?  We used what we had to try and understand that which eluded us, and in doing so, we found what we thought were our own personal truths.  Many of us still ask these same questions today.

Some could argue that, if this ability to place our faith in the unseen — be it within or in some omnipotent power — were so detrimental to humanity, evolution should have weeded it out by now.  And for all I know, as wars rage around the globe while we amass stockpiles of weapons capable of annihilating our species and fundamentalists use terror to twist the teachings of wise men, maybe that’s where we are headed.

But the only thing I think I can be certain of is that no one knows the absolute truth.

Perhaps the underlying source of our problems is that evolution has given us the ability to rationalize our individual truths as The Truth.  Do people go to hell after they die for not accepting Jesus as their personal savior, or for worshiping another god?  Does the man who drives a car laden with explosives into a packed market spend eternity in the company of virgins?  Is there some part of me that moves on after this body ceases to function?

I don’t know the answer to these and other questions, and yet, so much of my day-to-day life is based on the assumption that I do.  Amplify this assumption by 6.8 billion people, and suddenly, things get very complicated.

The point where science and faith intersect is murky at best, but assumptions of truth should probably be left to scientists, who have established a method for separating that which is real from that which is unknown. As science and faith continue to work together, as is the case with organizations like the Mind and Life Institute, maybe we’ll find some answers.  Until then, humanity is best served by leaving the absolutes in the laboratory.

October 25th, 2009 | Category: Spirituality | Leave a comment

With world headlines fixed on the return to Libya of convicted terrorist Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, I have watched these last couple of weeks as deep sorrow over the loss of 270 innocent people has turned to anger, rage and hate.  A court action, allegedly on the grounds of compassion, has generated profound animosity that is, perhaps, as deep as the sadness from which it sprung.  Gouging the wounds of the surviving families is television footage of Al-Megrahi’s jubilant return to Tripoli.

I consider myself fortunate to have never experienced the depth of loss and helplessness that comes from the senseless death of a loved one.  So it is easy for me to sit back and remind myself that we should feel compassion and loving-kindness for everyone involved in the tragedy of Pan Am Flight 103 — including the perpetrators.  This is, I guess, an area of my spiritual practice where I am relatively untested, though I have been able to find room in my heart for forgiveness of those, especially in my own family, who have committed hurtful acts against me and the people I have loved.

I also have the example of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with his sincere, public forgiveness of the same Chinese Communists who very nearly destroyed Tibet and forced its government into exile, all while torturing and murdering millions of Tibetans since the 1959 uprising.  This, to me, is the ultimate act of compassion.

Survivors of the Mumbai attacks stand with Kia, center. From left are Patty and Phil Duncan, Ben Radtke and Master Charles Cannon

Another illustration of compassion in action comes from journalist April Witt’s well-crafted narrative of events during the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.  Her story, in tomorrow’s Washington Post Magazine, follows a group of spiritual pilgrims from Virginia who were in the Oberoi as terrorists put the hotel under siege,  murdering 32 innocent people, including a father and daughter on the pilgrimage.  Despite losing her husband and a radiant 13-year-old daughter named Naomi, Kia Scherr does not harbor the anger seen in light of Al-Megrahi’s release.

“We must send [the terrorists] our love, forgiveness and compassion,” she said at a news conference after the pilgrims from the Synchronicity Foundation returned home from India.  ”As Jesus Christ said long ago, ‘They know not what they do.’  They are in ignorance.  And they are completely shrouded and clouded by fear.  And we must show that love is possible and love overpowers fear.  So that’s my choice.”

The story featured photos of the pilgrims who survived the attack, including Kia.  After reading the story and seeing the power of compassion in action, I guess it isn’t surprising that it appears as if light is literally emanating from the group.  They are an example for all of us, a testament to the power of forgiveness in aiding the so-called human condition.

Photo credit: Matt Eich/Aurora Select, via washingtonpost.com

August 22nd, 2009 | Category: Spirituality, World News | Leave a comment