Excess to Simple

On Friday at Half Price Books I came across Wisdom from the Monastery, edited by Peter Sewald. I bought this book a year ago and lost it.

Yesterday, after meditation, I gave a dharma talk on the five training precepts in Buddhist practice. Giving a talk about some aspect of Buddhism I review for myself again what initially inspired me about practice. I add to what I used to know what I have since known, updating outdated memories with newer ones.

That moment on April 17, 1986 waiting in line to query Ruth about some trivial aspect of the guided meditation she just gave us remains iconic to my search and discovery in spiritual life. Those nine days there in Barre themselves have become a template on which I depend all these years since then. Even as the memory has become vestigial and dim, periodically I feel the light again that touched not my eyes' retina but something deeper inside me, something that came out like a newborn baby that minute, that week, in Barre.

Towards the end of that retreat in 1986 I approached the retreat manager about ordaining. I ended up backing away and returning to civilian (meaning, civilized, ordinary life). I think that was the right decision then. I needed more experience in the "real" world and needed to work in that world to prepare the resources I would need that now I can access to live the life I dreamt then of living but couldn't do back then.

After Barre and working with Jean Alice at Carmel I spent more and more time at St. Meinrad in southern Indiana. For years I entertained the fantasy of joining the Catholic order although I didn't subscribe anymore to the key beliefs of Christianity. What attracted me was the lifestyle and the atmosphere of the monastery community. Half an hour away, even as I approached what looked from a distance like a medieval European town on a hill, my spirit and mood changed. Away from work, away from home, away from the familiar things and people of my familiar life, staying at St. Meinrad gave me more of that taste I first had at Barre.

Now I long for those days again. I've gained weight in the last five years. I couldn't do my favorite yoga asanas that I used to do. They require a slimmer waist. I have not checked my cholesterol and sugar but suspect the former at least must be close to risky. (For years I thought I preferred to die a sudden death from cardiac arrest rather than a lingering one from cancer.) Physical health was always a major factor in my excursion into spiritual life. Now more than ever it is a major instigator.

Life at Barre was stripped-down simple. I had a cold, drafty room at the end of the hallway at the former Christian Brothers' school dormitory (Caskills, IMS called it). The bed was lumpy, the sheets thin and old. The food was all vegetarian which back then had scared me with the restriction in choice. Lunch was the main meal. For supper we had miso soup or tea. I had no access to the Internet, to TV or to movies although I did smuggle in a book on Hindu myths. Snow covered the empty fields around the center but walking at midday after lunch on that white landscape to a pond where one day I espied a snake sunning himself on a rock was my chief form of entertainment.

Not having the options I had in civilian life was a deprivation that I believe contributed hugely to the happiness I discovered there at IMS. It was the first time I knew happiness like that, soft, gentle, pervasive without being invasive.

Later that year I started working at CMHS and by the following year the stress caused me to develop ulcers. I took high doses of Cimetidine and bit by bit gave up a healthy diet, immersing myself with richer and richer, starchier and fatter foods. Two years ago Kevin helped me get off the antacid. Now I can fast again but don't.

Sewald's book is about fasting in the North German Christian monasteries as part of going into retreat. The "desert" experience has always attracted me. Back in Manila before I was able to find my way to the States, Lent was a powerful experience with the tropical heat accompanied by fasting. Back then I felt God truly died on Good Friday. That belief made the days leading up to Good Friday rock-hard and crystalline. The clarity was deeply affecting.

The conditions are right again for entering that desert. In the preface to Sewald's book, Bernhard Müller quoted the friend who first suggested he try a retreat at a monastery: "Fasting gives you renewed strength and confidence. Everything looks different. What was blurred and insoluble becomes transparent and clear. You feel optimistic again. Often it feels as if you only have to wish something for it to come to pass. You are filled with a feeling of happiness. You feel so light, so free. And this lightness is not just a product of your imagination. After you fast, you are truly lighter, both physically and mentally."

His four-year old asked him one day, "How can angels fly?" The child answered himself. "I know, it is because they are so light."

Astonish Me!

I am still amazed at the ups-and-downs of life. I am talking about the experience that rolls out in our heads. Life itself is too abstract. How I feel shapes my experience. When in the grip of the feeling it is all there is. I am lost. Remembering to think outside the box gives me back some control but most of the time feeling dominates and the experience is life.

Alexey Brodovitch, the visionary art director at Harper's Bazaar in the 1930s to the 1950s, egged young Richard Avedon: "Astonish me!" Photographs can't be just good or even perfect. They have to astonish the viewer. No matter how sophisticated the viewer is, the photographer must find that angle, that perception, that once-in-a-lifetime composite of light, shapes and emotion, that boggles the mind. To astonish is not so complex but harder to accomplish than we can imagine. 

Astonishment is to my mind that quality of experience when every object in our mind's eye shimmers with unadulterated delight. What adulterates it? Every other feeling. The image possesses its own emotion, the capacity to cause feelings to arise in the viewer but to create the image demands sincerity beyond the ordinary. We must lose ourselves in the imagination. We can't stay in our little world and expect to find God there. To be astonished is to experience God as others have known him so many other times before.

In Buddhist terms, to experience God is to experience the elemental. Asian philosophers write about the five elements—earth, air, fire, water and space. Of these is everything we experience composed. Practicing meditation one examines what appears to be whole but is really just a composite of past experiences that keeps us from seeing dynamic nowness. Now is eternally moving. It is nowhere because when we grasp at the moment it is gone. 

"Do you know the word 'temporary'?

It means 'only for a little while.'"

John Buccino's little collection of songs, Grateful, is one of my favorites. In the song, Temporary, he hits upon the same theme I am writing about today.

"Everything is temporary...

If you learn this though

You won't feel so sad:

A playmate, a tearstain

A Christmas, a dad

The best times

The worst pain

All temporary."

In meditation we learn to watch each temporary moment come and go. We learn what earth is, what air, what water, what fire, what space: everything is temporary. A product of the practice is we rediscover astonishment. Accepting and letting go we find each new image suddenly and eternally bathed in the vividness of what I think of as life beyond experience. Each whiff of fragrance, each nub under our fingertip, each curlicue of line, all partakes of a brilliance that photographs only aspire to possess.

The heart of experience seems to me best described only in paradoxes. No wonder teachers of old spoke in riddles or parables. Between the polarities of yes and now there lies only appearance. To get to the underlying reality we must forego the easy path of holding on to what is temporary. In the endlessness of space where no feelings find a home we find the adoring face we search for all our lives. It is our own face but not really. We see beyond the appearance to what the finger points to that gives rise to the incessant hunger that drives us relentlessly, ever unsatisfied, foolishly most days.

"I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage..."

Thus Antonio explains his sadness to his friend, the merchant in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. 

When we find amazement our lives spontaneously take on an evangelical thrust. Its shimmer pervades not only our experience but seeps outside it to affect other experiences. If we seek meaning, amazement more than fits the bill. Let go and astonish!

In the Beginning

My background is Christian. My mother and her family were staunch supporters of the indigenous church, the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, that split from the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Filipinos' struggle for political independence from Spain in the 1860s.

As a child participating in what was often referred to as the Aglipay church (Monsignor Aglipay was the first presiding bishop of the fledgling church) was central to my experience. It felt like the one real thing in my life. The teen years changed all that. Education can corrupt our naiveté and cause a disruption in our seamlessly whole worlds. As I learned about other peoples and cultures I began to question the notion of a personal God especially one whose image is that of an old man with long white hair and flowing beard who commanded plagues and catastrophes to visit his people whenever they went against his fickle will.

It wasn't until I came to America in my late 20s that I slowly came to terms with a dreaded label, atheist. Christians in the Pagan world of the Roman Empire before Constantine established Christianity as the state religion were known as atheists, non-believers. They didn't believe in the gods and goddesses of the Roman pantheon, refused to offer them the sacrifices required to maintain civic health and power. The cycle has come full circle.

I don't think of myself as an atheist, a term Christians assign to those who don't believe as they do. Belief, I've come to realize, is at the heart of much of the world's conflicts. As we move inexorably into closer contact with other peoples and individuals on our shrinking planet we have to contend with differing beliefs on a practical level. No man is an island anymore but a decided part of the main.

I created Spirit Writes on my iWeb as my depository of contemplative writing on Spirit—the values, motivations and stated and mostly unstated goals that while not accessible through the physical senses nonetheless shape and give meaning to our daily struggles, what Buddhist call dukkha.  I intend to continue this exploration at blogger.