They say that over seventy per cent of America’s economy is based upon consumption.  Our days are filled with thousands of advertising messages trying to persuade us we’ll be happier if we choose a particular product.  Somewhere within the past few decades the skill of creating a desire moved to a more destructive message:  ‘You can’t be happy until you have this product.’  Today our restlessness has grown to such extreme levels that we can barely focus for more than a few seconds at a time.  The Rolling Stones’ lyric ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ has grown to new levels of meaning.  Markets fluctuate up and down based on our consumption rates as news commentators seem to urge us to buy in support of our country’s welfare.

With this awareness as backdrop, I was struck by a recent sermon I heard from a local Lutheran minister.  His topic centered on the biblical line in Psalms 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”  He noted that this Psalm is the most requested for memorial services he’s conducted.  It carries the great wisdom that our peace and joy rest in the practice of faith, of cultivating gratitude for what we have.  Interestingly, this is the same truth the Buddha came to.  His great enlightenment said we must accept that life is filled with restlessness.  Our attachment to desires, grasping and wanting produces our suffering.  We can alleviate suffering by accepting what ‘is’, cultivating a practice of awareness to the moment and our release of ‘wanting’.  Our ability to do this requires great discipline and skill in the face of a culture that’s economically based on pushing ‘restlessness’.

We’re continually fighting to ‘be back there’ or ‘hoping to someday be over there’.  The anxiety we grow from not wanting to ‘be here now’ grows our stress.  One definition of stress is that it’s the gap between where you are and where you want to be.  Again, ‘wanting’ something different than what is produces our suffering.  Our remedy is found in deep, abiding faith.  It’s  the Ground of Being that holds our stability in the face of impermanence.  It’s a bigger hope that sustains when all our little hopes fall away.  It’s what remains when our beliefs are shattered.  It’s our greatest journey requiring the utmost in courage.  It’s that place where we make space, through prayer and meditation, to find the gift in what’s given.  This is not easy work and it doesn’t come naturally.

The poisons of greed and fear are unavoidable.  Deep faith that’s cultivated from the heart eventually comes to the experience of our interdependence.  ‘Not wanting’ lands us in joy for ‘this moment’.  We move past ‘craving’ a future heaven or a different life experience found in our yearning for ‘the good old days’.  We start questioning the harmful effects of hoarding massive amounts of wealth driven from unbridled greed.  We start a more mindful practice of consumption and competition, always first asking, “Who gets hurt?”.  Cultivation of ‘not wanting’ leads us to a richer quality of life that commands our awareness to ‘now’ as we steward a healthier future for those following us.

It takes deep fortitude to cultivate a practice of ‘not wanting’ in the face of rapid change.  Yet, ironically, it’s within our practice of gratitude for what ‘is’ that space opens to awareness of opportunity.

The practice of ‘not wanting’ is a practice.  It requires a commitment to ‘making space’ for regular prayer/meditation.  As we grow our awareness to the life and death found within each moment, we grow our courage to live more fully.  As we grasp for conditions ‘different’, filled with ‘wanting’, we grow our pain.  Our joy can be found in living the experience of the future within ‘this moment’.  This has been called the Isaiah Effect, this ‘feeling’ of prayer.  In contrast to petitioning prayer, filled with a ‘want’, our most joyful prayer is found in a deeper faith that ‘feels’ the prayer’s completion within the present moment.  This ‘feeling’ is so great that we have no choice but to give thanks to the Source, to the Divine, for the very gift of the experience, outside the abstract notions of time and space.  This is Big Hope.  This is Big Faith.  This is the truth in cultivating a practice of ‘not wanting’, of accepting the Buddha’s Noble Truths that life is suffering and restlessness and our peace and joy can be found in cultivating a practice of ‘not wanting’.

So how does this relate to the American Dream?  First, we come to recognize that we’re not entitled to anything.  All is gift.  If we’ve lived long enough and cultivated a practice of gratitude and ‘not wanting’, we eventually find the gift in the given, no matter what.  Somewhere in time the American Dream got turned upside down.  Our founders saw this land as a place for opportunity.  In the face of greed, oppression from massive accumulation of wealth and power from a few, and a deeper desire for freedom, pilgrims set off with deep courage to discover the gift of a new land.  The pilgrim spirit is one filled with awe and wonder found in the surprise of the moment.  There was a flexibility to meet new, rapidly changing conditions, with an open heart.  This was a deeply spiritual experience that moved from the heart in Big Faith.  It was an experience that understood the suffering of life and the need for courage cultivatied through a practice of ‘not wanting’.  It led to a spiritual groundwork that recognized the Divine in all.  It embraced indigenous cultures that also understood our sacred covenant to ‘be kind’ to one another.  It recognized the need for moderation and the power found in prayerful awareness to the ‘gift in the given’.

Today we’ve become very confused about the true spirit of America as we logically try to honor separation of church and state.  It’s left us with a culture lacking in moral conscience.  We find ourselves fighting the empty dogma of secular believers with fundamentalists filled with notions of their ‘rightness’.  Our attempts to impose belief from our ‘thoughts’ of ‘rightness’ fill our airwaves and politics with tremendous distraction from cultivating a practice of ‘not wanting’.  The pilgrim moves from the heart and Big Faith, with a deeper courage and curiosity to the mystery of life (and death).  The pilgrim spirit is not one of persuasion, driven from a desire to change another.  It’s driven from a deep spiritual place of reverence and respect for one another, recognizing the Divine in all things and all beings.  It recognizes our biggest command, “Be kind to one another, and at the least, try not to cause harm.”  Our health is found in cultivating joy through gratitude in the ‘gift of the given’, noting the antidote to greed, fear and ignoring as ‘awareness’, deepened through prayer and meditation.  I’m filled with expectant joy and gratitude for an America of opportunity, flexibility, curiosity, Big Faith, harmony and rhythm, gratitude, and kindness.  We’re a nation founded on kindness, moderation, and mindful consumption.  For me, this is what Occupy Wall Street is about,  a return to the pilgrim spirit of kindness and opportunity and a moral conscience that always first asks, “Where’s the harm (potential or present) in the thoughts, speech, and action we’re about to pursue?”  Our moral conscience can once again be found in the ancient Hawaiian mandate, “Best for all with harm to none.”

“The Lord is my shepherd.  I shall not want.”

4:6-7

King James Version (KJV)

4 Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. 5 Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. 6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. 7And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

Good News Translation (GNT)

6 Don’t worry about anything, but in all your prayers ask God for what you need, always asking him with a thankful heart.7 And God’s peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus.

Life is difficult.  Our difficulties come from wanting conditions different from what they are in the face of change.  Our relief is found through prayer/meditation, embracing the moment’s gift outside our restless mind.

The greatest truth is deeply coming to see the nature of time.  We struggle with our restlessness, grasping for conditions to be what they were or what we hope them to be.  Yet, the Law of Impermanence continues to work, moment by moment, constantly in change.  We struggle to ‘fix things’ but change is movement, nothing fixed.  Pema Chodrin writes:

“As human beings we are as impermanent as everything else.  Every cell in the body is continuously changing.  Thoughts and emotions rise and fall away unceasingly.  When we’re thinking that we’re competent or that we’re hopeless—what are we basing it on?  On this fleeting moment?  On yesterday’s success or failure?  We cling to a fixed idea of who we are and it cripples us.  Nothing and no one is fixed.” p. 31 from The Pocket Pema Chodrin

So we’re repeatedly brought back to cultivating a greater appreciation for the gift of time (change).  This gift is opportunity.  Human beings are unique because of consciousness.  We have the capacity to reflect and this inevitably causes suffering/restlessness.  This reflection creates our illusion of separateness.  This separateness is fed by our greed (craving for more), fear (stagnation to move), and our ignoring the interdependent nature of life (ignorance).  We want to be at peace, free from greed and fear, yet consciousness is not capable of fully grasping the interdependent Source of Being.  So we suffer, since we can’t get rid of consciousness.  Yet, life works us and deeper reflection creates deeper suffering and pain that “gives you many chances to investigate the root of life and deepen your life in dharma.  That’s why the Buddha said that suffering is truth.”  (p. 48,  Each Moment is the Universe by Dainin Katagiri).

This suffering is our greatest teacher as we learn to be one with this truth itself.  Katagiri describes it as touching the truth that’s always present at the depth of your life and then ‘bouncing’.  He refers to this momentary realization of truth (suffering/nonduality) as deepening wisdom, that experience of no ego and emptiness.  It’s a wondrous feeling of profound knowing that’s impossible to stay with.  Poof!  Back to consciousness and the dualistic realm.  Yet, the wisdom from these fleeting moments, once touched, is what sustains Big Hope (faith).

Brother David Steindl Rast says, “Hope is what’s left when all your hopes are fallen by the way.  Faith is what’s left when your beliefs have been shown to not hold up.”  He references a poem by T.S. Elliot:

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion…

Brother David suggests we forever realize the surprise within the surprise, that there’s always more to be discovered.  Hope is what keeps us open to a fresh future, in awareness to wholehearted action to the present moment.  We touch the moment’s arrival, motivated through our suffering, only to bounce back to consciousness and dualism with a deeper faith for having touched it.

Having touched this peace, can we move past greed, fear and ignorance?  Is there a place where all this suffering stops?  While many religious traditions portray a time moment where change stops, a lasting state of nirvana or heavenly paradise, the Law of Impermanence can’t conceive of ‘stopped time’.  The Law of Codependent Origination can’t conceive of ‘separateness’ or ‘aloneness’.  Stillness in prayer/meditation seems to deepen the truth of these laws, providing an abiding faith…a Big Hope.  Now, each moment is seen as birth/death constantly working.  Katagiri writes:

Just like everything that exists in the phenomenal world, your suffering is a being that arises from the original nature of existence, and every moment it returns to its source.  So when you see suffering, all you have to do is accept it and offer your body and mind to ultimate existence.  Then you and suffering return to emptiness and there is freedom from suffering.    p. 51, Each Moment is the Universe

This practice is what gives us the courage to embrace uncertainty, to smash past the notions of ‘fixed’ things and certainty, tasting the surprise in each arising moment.  It’s where we find our motivation to experience wonder and awe, to find the gift in the given.

The illusion is that others don’t suffer.  We somehow think accumulation of material goods or worldly achievements will stop suffering.  We polarize, separating ourselves in reflection that causes much unnecessary suffering and pain.  Yet, cultivating a deeper stability gives us courage to open, to move as water, in a deeper caring for one another.  This practice gives us greater awareness to the thoughts, emotions and actions that come up through our moment to moment living.  Either they serve to reduce suffering, hold stillness in no harm, or increase suffering.  Either they are kind or unkind.  Either they hold wisdom in the truth of the Law of Impermanence and Codependent Origination or they ignore them.  Up and down.  Rise and fall.  Poof!  Consciousness and emptiness, forever at play in a deepening practice.

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Cultivating a sustaining felt sense of joy is hard work.  No doubt, we all have our predispositions for holding a joyful attitude.  Yet, as we move through life, experiencing deeper suffering, the work becomes more challenging.  I’m extremely inspired by the person over ninety years old who still carries a joyful air with eternal possibility.  At ninety, you’ve seen most of your friends and family shed their bodies.  You’ve experienced a wide variety of injury and disease.  You’ve watched your body entropy over the years and you’ve felt the diminishing attitude our culture promotes toward the elderly.  And yet, somehow these people sustain a smile on their face that encourages me toward disciplined ‘joy practice’.

I’ve heard it said that if you’re body is still breathing, you’ve still got more than 50% working, no matter how bad off you are.  Now that’s something to be grateful for.  Gratitude is a major component to cultivating joy.  Our real work is to make space to find the gift in the given.  An attitude of joy is one of no complaint.  It’s putting attention to the fullness of life rather than what’s lacking.  It’s recognizing that we’re entitled to nothing and therefore, should take nothing for granted.  All is gift.  This is perhaps most difficult when dealing with perceived enemies, unexpected illness or injury, and ultimately, death.  And dealing with the inevitability of shedding our own bodies is perhaps the best way to cultivate the shear awe and wonder of the next arising moment while being served in these bodies.  I cultivate joy when I’m prepared to let this body go tomorrow, yet stewarding it to live beyond ninety.  This really brings me to life.  It’s what motivates me to wake to this next arising moment.  When we lose our long term vision we lose our awareness to death.  Finding hope in death, we find meaning in life.  This awareness of shedding the body should not really be about fear, but about the inspiration to appreciate life, aiming to meet death without regret. It wakes me to the truth of what life is about, this appreciation practice that yields sustaining joy, no matter what.

So how about the contrast between ‘joy’ and ‘enjoy’?  Joy is sustainable with regular practice.  Enjoyment is not.  When seeking enjoyment or pleasure, as soon as we have the experience we were grasping for, we’re filled immediately with a vacuum, a restless that produces guilt or desire for more.  Joy practice brings us to deeper and deeper conditions of well-being.  We can face conditions that don’t turn out as expected and find the gifted surprise.  We can stand tall in the face of those who aim to hurt us and hold love for them as our brother or sister.  An ever present awareness of our death is the greatest teacher in helping us to take care of life in the best way.  There’s a deeper realization that the only thing that’s permanent is change.  Consequently, in addition to gratitude, patience and awareness practice is central to our sustained joy.  With a strong joy practice, I’m less inclined to cave to my ego’s desire to react to another.  In the ’60’s I was livid with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara for decisions made with regard to the Vietnam War.  He later produced an academy award winning documentary called The Fog of War. His mind opened to see the incorrect assumptions that were made, assumptions that cost fifty-eight thousand young American lives.  Sen. Robert Bird was against the civil rights movement, only to later change as a key ambassador to equal rights and peace.  I would hope that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will some day open to the tremendous harm done from incorrect assumptions made in our military engagement in the Middle East.  None of us is immune from causing harm in our reactive judgments.  Yet, when we practice patience with a non-reactive mind, our decisions and actions will cause less harm.  I’m sure we can all think back to those moments where a little pause, a dedicated ‘joy practice’, would have produced a kinder response.  It really carries the qualities of prayer as described by Brother David Steindl-Rast:

“What is it that makes prayers prayer?  When we try to put into words what the secret might be, words like mindfulness, full alertness, and wholehearted attention suggest themselves.” from Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer.  p. 42

Sustained joy is the result of focused attention and wonderment.  Awareness and patience produce an open mindedness that receives sustained surprise.  Filled with wonderment and awe for the gift of the given, we meet the universe with eyes wide open.  Joy practice opens the closed mind as we cultivate our wholeness in the prayer response.  Brother David relates it to the eyes wind open of children.  He speaks of prayerfulness as that which keeps the child alive in us:

“And the child within us never loses the talent to look with the eyes of the heart, to combine concentration with wonderment, and so to pray without ceasing.”  p. 46

He goes on to say that this is very difficult work, cultivating the mindfulness, gratefulness and prayerfulness we have come to experience in those whole hearted moments.  Yet, it’s because of those whole-hearted, being moments that we know where to aim for deeper maintenance.  He speaks to the notion of this as practice:

“But for once we have managed to do it, we know at least that we can do it, and how it is done.  The rest is a matter of practice, of doing it over and over again, until it becomes second nature.”  p. 49

So the core elements of this practice are awareness, patience, stilling the thinking mind, and cultivating the whole heart response.  Brother David says we can’t be mindful without being grateful.  He also says that joy is a necessary consequence of gratitude.  He goes on to say that it’s a great ‘full’ response that comes from the heart, from the realm of being where we are one with all.

Some practices that facilitate the whole hearted prayerful response are listed below.

Breathing

Pausing in no thought

Going deeper through disciplined practice

Kindness to others (so they suffer less)

Gratitude, finding the surprise in the gift of the given

Patience, stilling the separating, judgmental mind

Cultivating the open, non-reactive mind

Touching our doing with wholehearted being

So, to cultivate joy through joy practice, practice full attention to the breath and go deeper in seeing how everything changes.  From this gratitude for the gift of the arising moment comes deeper mindfulness and further awareness to our interconnection with all things.

It’s also helpful to examine our regular breathing.  Is it peaceful, harmonic and rhythmical?  Does it come from the belly or the chest?  Can we develop greater awareness to the separating nature of our linguistic thoughts?  Through meditation, can we extend the ‘no thought’ moment, can we release our attachment to repeating thoughts, and can we experience a deeper stillness?  With mindfulness and gratitude comes a sense of wonder where kindness grows.  The natural desire to reduce others’ suffering is watered and judgments, competition and the separating mind diminishes.  The mind opens in wonder to accept how little we know, with frequent use of, “I just don’t know.”  The destructive nature of the closed mind and the phrase, “I know that” is revealed.  The grasping to be ‘right’ diminishes as the childlike curious heart opens to an expanding universe.

In the prayerful response, there’s a deep felt sense that all is supported, even when it may seem the floor has given way.  This sense of Big Belonging transcends the separating nature of race, sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, economic status, etc.  The mindful, nonjudgmental, open mind is the mind that can sustain joy.

Yes, we all meet despair everyday.  Feelings of not being enough, not having enough and not doing enough creep in repeatedly from our competitive, consumptive culture.  I can only hope that whoever reads this finds some relieve through the implementation of joy practice.  It takes practice, courage and discipline and is no less demanding than any spiritual pursuit.  May you break open this practice and find wonderment and awe as the closed mind yields to the open mind, once again letting the sun shine in.