Cloudy Morning Vignettes

“The sun will have to struggle mighty hard to cut through these clouds this morning,” I think, sitting at my east window waiting expectantly for that great ball of light and life. But then I think, “the sun doesn’t struggle. It just does its thing, day after day. We say it’s ‘not sunny’ today, but it is sunny – everyday! Ha. There might be clouds in our way, but the sun is still up there, doing its thing, without struggle.”

So too with awareness, joy, and creativity. Let the ego-clouds pass from our minds and these all effortlessly manifest.

But boy how we cling to our clouds! In the great blue sky of awareness, they are what distinguish us from others, they are what make us unique, they give definition, relationship for other clouds… Without them —- who are we?

“I’m an ass, you’re an ass.” Anthony de Mello, a wonderfully sharp Jesuit priest writes,

“That’s the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you are an ass. It’s wonderful. When people tell me, “You’re wrong.” I say, “What can you expect from an ass?”
Disarmed, everybody has to be disarmed.” (Awareness p.40)

How true. Pristine, perfect unblemished awareness aside, we’re all conditioned beings, conditioned by our childhood, our wild – or not so wild – teen years, our wild, or not, college days and/or entry into the real world. We’re conditioned by every ass we meet along the way. If we’re lucky, we manage to get unconditioned a bit here and there, whatever that means. So –

Give yourself a break – give others a break too (we’re all struggling in this world).
Get unconditioned, get over yourself. Practice generosity for starters, find a way to simply give. After that maybe meditate some, or go on retreat – just get away from the madness of our society.

Choose Happiness

That’s a lot harder than it sounds – after all, we’re asses and so is everyone else. So try my old professor Albert Borgmann’s “happiness finder” – a simple (and very Buddhist in my opinion) tool for recognizing and being mindful of those happy moments in our life:

There is no place I would rather be right now,
There is nothing I would rather be doing right now,
There is nobody I would rather be with right now,
These three I shall not forget.

Charts and Graphs may be help too… This first one is borrowed from the Integral-Options Cafe blog and, I believe, reflects the philosophy of Ken Wilber. Where are you now? (I’m totally holistic, ha!)

And this old junker that I created last winter as I watched a friend and then myself disintegrate from lovely 6/7s (on the left-hand scale) to 3/5s. It was inspired by my understanding of Wilber’s work, along with my own studies in Buddhism and other philosophies. The basic idea is that, developmentally, we start out as a bit of a mess – literally all over the place. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is a place of great opportunity. We could go left or right or forward or backward in a hundred different ways. Yet, as we develop, we take on identities (here represented by the gender symbols); these identities bring focus and direction to our lives.
The shift from 4 to 5 is probably bigger than how it is represented below – it is a move from identities as ‘who we are’ to an understanding of them as mere useful constructs. We live in the harmony of encompassing dualities. The next step is also big, from 5 to 6. There, we transcend even the harmony of the previous stage; we realize that we are the bare awareness or observer behind (above, below, use whatever imagery you’d like) the dualities. Holding to this truth, the us shrinks, or becomes all (it doesn’t really matter), it just goes away. The ego dies.

And, as mentioned, it’s not a one-way process. I am reminded of a Buddhist creation myth (borrowed from Brahmanism) about the Great Being that once inhabited space and time, a Being of pure lightness and energy, living effortlessly on the mana of creation. At some point the Being became a bit greedy, taking too much mana, and growing heavy. Taking, taking, taking, the Great Being fell from His (/Her – genderless) flow of creation; the mana had begun to stick and create a physical body and he came crashing down to earth; his body breaking into pieces creating – us.

The Buddha does promise that once awakened, you are free from the cycle of flow and crash, but until then, enjoy the ride. (Wait, no! Don’t enjoy it, get off it, wake up!)