“And thoughts of mortality touch the mind.”
Virgil
The other day I was talking with a friend, I haven’t asked, but I’m guessing someone in her mid or late thirties. I referenced Jimmy Durante. She had no idea who I was speaking of.
Now be clear my friend is literate and in touch with culture. But time. Not only was Jimmy Durante a fixture of my childhood he was a cultural icon. So, a bit of a reminder of how everything passes.
In my childhood I occasionally projected my imagination forward to the turn into the twenty-first century. I even wondered if I might be too gaga to appreciate it, should I even be alive. After all I’d turn fifty-two that year.
And now I’m some weeks into being seventy.
I rummaged around the interwebs trying to find an interesting pull quote for this decade. All I could find was something by Brendan Gill, long-time critic at the New Yorker
“To die quickly in one’s eighth decade at the very top of one’s powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.”
I found it interesting that he considered one at the height of their powers at this time of life, a testimony I assume to the literary or intellectual life – so long as one has retained at least a small majority of one’s proverbial marbles.
Nor did I miss that it wrapped one’s mortality into the reflection. I’ve realized that it is interesting in regard to death. Should I drop dead later today no one is likely to say “Ah, James. He died too young.” And, at the same time its too early for anyone to say, or likely to say, “At least he had a good long life.” So, I’m not sure if this should be considered a sweet spot or not.
By the eighth decade one moves beyond the powers of all but the greatest self-deceivers to notice the ravages of time. Age spots appear in interesting places, one’s skin begins to go crepey, cataracts appear and surgeries minor and large follow. I’m increasingly aware of how moving is critical and even missing short periods of regular walks has near instant consequences. Similarly, while its always been true that it is very hard to lose weight while it is astonishingly easy to gain a pound or two, that perennial struggle is more pressing and with, again, ever more immediate consequences.
Still, there is a bit of Janus about this time, two faces. One is looking out at the experiences of a lifetime, sweet, and sad, all that stuff. The other turned toward the future and while that direction is caught in swirls of cloud or smoke, it isn’t hard to notice it will not stretch out near as far as the other direction.
And then there’s the person with the faces.
Reminds me of a koan. Yunmen asked his assembly, “I don’t ask you about before the 15th of the month. Tell me something about after the 15th.” No one spoke, so he responded himself, “Every day is a good day.”
This isn’t a complete non sequitur. The 15th is the time of the full moon, and is a common metaphor in East Asia for the moment of awakening. Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to note that Yunmen lived in harsh, politically unstable times, where armies were on the march and famine and hunger and danger the common currency of the day, So it would be very hard to find the phrase “every day is a good day” meaning “don’t worry, be happy.” No smiley faces in this assertion.
Anyone who thinks the call of presence within the spiritual project means only this moment without reference to past or future hasn’t thought it through. That kind of presence is a kind of death. The real presence of insight, of wisdom, of possibility is rich with the past and future.
It is within presence we find our awakening, our waking up from the slumber of a life that has been distracted from the most important matters. We slumber with our apparently endless desires. We slumber with our anger and hatred. We slumber as we figure something out as true and defend, fiercely that idea of true, sometimes even to the death. Sometimes our own, too often someone else’s.
Waking up is waking up from all this grasping at wanting and resenting and hating, and knowing for sure, into something else. And, and this is most important: this waking up is also our common human experience.
What matters here, in this moment, as we live between the dying of an old and the birthing of some as yet uncertain new, is to share some good news. It starts as something deeply personal. Awakening, enlightenment disrupts our dreams of certainty and with that seeing through our desires and aversions.
The Zen teacher and psychiatrist Barry Magid summarizes much of what I understand to be the basic truth of the matter.“Awakening is the progressive – or sudden – loss of one fantasy after another of “awakening” – until one is left with one’s ordinary mind, just as it is, with no self-centered project of becoming more or other than who one is in the moment.”
The way I prefer to phrase it, is that awakening is not a thing, nor is it a thought, nor is it even an experience – rather it is noticing what is: the first time perhaps dramatically, but then over, and over, and over, and deeper and deeper and deeper, in each undramatic moment of our lives.
The rhetoric attached to Zen’s awakening is that it is once and forever. I have a sense of that. There is some truth in it. But. It isn’t actually a steady state. Everything is in motion. No exceptions. No magical other place where our poop doesn’t stink. And no state or experience that isn’t fully a part of the given moment and the circumstances that create that moment. Awakening isn’t an escape from our place in karma, the great play of cause and effect.
Although, this insight into our intimate reality brings with it a moral compass, a reminder that we are not here alone. Never have been. And, with that knowing comes some responsibilities. I talk about that elsewhere. It’s deeply important. But, here, I just want to hold it up, while continuing to walk with the most intimate, with what a life on this way might be.
What awakening is, is an existential stance of radical openness. It does not mean there are no blind spots. It does not mean one is free of the play of those endlessly arising constellations of grasping, aversion, and death-grasping certainties that are the very stuff of our humanity. But, it does mean some part of the person who has had this experience of opening sees or knows deep freedom as well as being fully within the play of life and death. So, yes, once and forever. And, no, not free from karma or even stupid or possibly evil actions.
And here we are. Age spots appear in interesting places, one’s skin begins to go crepey, cataracts appear and surgeries minor and large follow.
What this all reveals is a life of mystery and engagement. And, one more thing. While this is all about awakening in Zen with a strong dose of Western rationalism flavoring the matter, we need not, nor should we be bound by either of these approaches. Here we discover the many gifts of Universalism, of the insight that every religion carries wisdom. And with that I think of the Medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.
He said two things in particular that appear relevant to understanding what awakening actually is. One was “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” And with that, “we are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”
This very moment.
As T. S. Eliot sings to us.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
So, what is awakening? What is enlightenment? Well.
This very moment.
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