just be it Just Be It is a practice of presence that recognizes the limits of language. When aware of silence there is a state of inner still alertness. You are wholeheartedly present.

This may be one of life’s most difficult questions. I’ve found it practically helpful to try to stay out of the way from others. This becomes more difficult when under attack. When I was a child I was taught to surrender to the authority of my parents, the church and the state. This changed when what they were asking didn’t align with something that was deeper. The more curious I got the more I found the need for flexibility. Conditions were forever changing and what I ‘thought’ was truth at one time was totally flipped on its head another time. I’ve seen how those who struggle to stop change eventually break. I’ve seen how those pioneers who push to make change are seldom rewarded in history, at least in their lifetime. And I’ve seen how wisdom has grown in those who hold a bigger view, allowing for uncertainty and the gift of divine providence.

I’ve studied language and thought intensively for the past forty years. It’s utterly fascinating to see how we fight over various ‘beliefs’ which are basically ‘thoughts we’ve attached to’. As we attach to these fixed beliefs in a constantly moving environment we increase our chances to break. We become rigid and brittle. Yet, nature advises us to surrender in faith, to be limber, flexible, curious, kind and in harmony. It seems as if we’re doing everything but fostering harmony these days as we fight amongst one another. We proudly attach to our ‘thoughts’ of being right. We call these our convictions. And just as convicts are imprisoned behind their limiting walls, we close ourselves to growth through our fixed thoughts.

Thoughts are by definition linguistically driven. You can’t have a thought outside of language. Language can point to the universal, to the experience of the divine. Yet, the experience of All (God) comes before the birth of a thought. Once thought (language) comes into the picture we’re necessarily ‘divided’. Uchiyama Roshi describes it as:

“Ordinarily we divide up the world into this and that on the basis of thought.  But to give up thought, to be free from thought, is to be prior to thought and hence to be before the separation of things into this and that.  We can say then that when we are practicing zazen there is not yet any separation between now and eternity, or between self and the world.  This way of speaking may sound like mere theory;  but for the man of zazen* this is no logical deduction as such but a direct personal experience given in zazen.”  p. 115 Approach to Zen. *the practice of sitting meditation

Today we face potential wars of great proportion based on our attachment to having the correct ‘thought’. We all have our myth and through pride, arrogance, and a sense of conviction, we’re willing to kill/harm one another. Yet, when we go to the complete demand to surrender, the Declaration of Independence recognized that it has to be bigger than surrender to nationalism, to church, to military commander, etc. Their statement of faith was a commitment to surrender to full reliance upon divine Providence. I propose that this is God before labels and language. This is that universal experience of support that is free from thought and language. It’s the universal direct experience of peace and support that’s felt before thoughts separate us from each other. It’s the sense of the divine that says we are each other, beyond thoughts’ temptation to label one another as enemy.

We all know this, yet any sense of meeting one another in this space seems to be withering away. From fear and anxiety, we scream ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’. It seems we’ve lost our faith and replaced it with fear/materialism. I recently heard a call from a local minister that said, “As we worship God we let go our fears that keep us from loving, we put down our masks that hide our true selves. We turn to God seeking wholeness and forgiveness in our own life and the courage to offer forgiveness to each other.” Letting go our fear and seeking wholeness (non-duality) is big work, big faith and big courage. Faith has contempt for fear. Can we find the divine before thought, judgment and separation (fear) enter? Where does our sense of belonging stop? Who is no longer our neighbor? If we deeply look at this we’ll likely find where our violence begins, where our peace feels threatened.

This courage to surrender to that which is bigger than our ‘thought’ knowing is what real communication is about. It’s been called dialogue. Rumi captured it when he wrote:

Somewhere out there is a field beyond right knowing and wrong knowing.
Let us meet there.

There’s a moral dimension that lives beyond our judgment of good or bad. There’s a deep respect for the limits of language and the fact that meaning is in the person, not the word. This capacity to cultivate deeper faith in stillness, prior to being captured by language and thought, opens us to a bigger knowing and limitless respect for the mystery of life. This is where we cultivate integrity through faith. This is where we find the courage to dialog. In an article titled “Toward a Meaning-Centered Philosophy of Communication” found in Bridges Not Walls, Dean Barnlund writes:

“Integrative instruction in communication encourages the student to work out better meanings concerning his own communication with himself and his fellowmen. By “better” I refer to meanings that permit more consistency in his personality between what he assumes, what he sees, and what he does. By “better” I refer to meanings that will increase his openness, curiosity and flexibility. By “better” I refer to meanings that will make him more independent, and more confident of his own judgment.”

Tonight is the eve of our first presidential debate. This is a competitive warring format that’s far from cultivating any sense of real communication. We’re electing the most powerful position in the country where ‘confidence of judgment’ through integrity is of utmost importance. Yet, for days they’ve been coached on answers that are anything but authentic. We will not see an openness to one another, a curiosity to understand one another and a flexibility to see things in new ways, all the characteristics we really need for a peaceful world. It will be a battle of who is right and who is wrong, who stands up best to the supposed ‘fact’ checkers, and who cons us best into believing they’ll get more jobs. It’s a test of everything we don’t want in a leader. When the battle cry could be, “Communicate, communicate, communicate”, we’re stuck with the mantra of materialists dedicated to more conflict in the never ending fight to be ‘right’.

It’s my big hope that we’ll once again find our faith, a bigger faith that goes before thought and words. It’s a faith that has contempt for fear and separation, for greed and ignorance to kindness. It’s a humble confidence that’s willing to cultivate a practice of sitting/surrendering to the silence found before thought/words. As this local minister said, it’s a surrender that cultivates the experience of wholeness and unity, knowing “God has loved you, loves you now, and will love you always”, that God is All beyond notions of division. This is real wholeness, real unity, and what gives us the courage to surrender to divine Providence, this knowing that we’ve never been alone, aren’t alone now, and will never be alone. It’s waking from the illusion that we’re separate, and this happens before thought.

A friend recently forwarded me this Ted Talk that exquisitely communicates the human experience of non-duality and duality from a physiological perspective.

jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder: schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother’s brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion?

So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, “What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?”

So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body.

If you’ve ever seen a human brain, it’s obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. So this is a real human brain.

This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it’s obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities.

Excuse me. Thank you. It’s been a joy. Assistant: It has been.

Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about “right here, right now.” Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere — our left hemisphere — is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it’s all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we’ve ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It’s that little voice that says to me, “Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning.”

It’s that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it’s that little voice that says to me, “I am. I am.” And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me “I am,” I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain — caustic pain — that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me — and then it released me. And then it just gripped me — and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, “OK, I’ll just start my normal routine.”

So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. And I’m jamming away on this thing, and I’m realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, “That’s very peculiar.” And I looked down at my body and I thought, “Whoa, I’m a weird-looking thing.” And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I’m the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I’m witnessing myself having this experience.

And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I’m walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There’s no fluidity to my pace, and there’s this constriction in my area of perceptions, so I’m just focused on internal systems. And I’m standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, “OK. You muscles, you gotta contract. You muscles, you relax.”

And then I lost my balance, and I’m propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy — energy.

And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me? What is going on?” And in that moment, my brain chatter — my left hemisphere brain chatter — went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online, and it says to me, “Hey! We got a problem! We got a problem! We gotta get some help.” And I’m going, “Ahh! I got a problem. I got a problem.” So it’s like, “OK. OK. I got a problem.”

But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness — and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.

So here I am in this space, and my job — and any stress related to my job — it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those — they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! (Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria — euphoria. It was beautiful.

And then, again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, “Hey! You’ve got to pay attention. We’ve got to get help.” And I’m thinking, “I got to get help. I gotta focus.” So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I’m walking around my apartment, and I’m thinking, “I gotta get to work. I gotta get to work. Can I drive? Can I drive?”

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!”

And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool.” (Laughter) “This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?” (Laughter)

And then it crosses my mind, “But I’m a very busy woman!” (Laughter) “I don’t have time for a stroke!”

So I’m like, “OK, I can’t stop the stroke from happening, so I’ll do this for a week or two, and then I’ll get back to my routine. OK. So I gotta call help. I gotta call work.” I couldn’t remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I’m looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind’s eye what my business card looked like, I couldn’t tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn’t tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that’s not the card … that’s not the card … that’s not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it’s the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I’m matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I’d already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I’d be able to tell, “Yes, I’ve already dialed that number.”

Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I’m listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, “Woo woo woo woo.” (Laughter) And I think to myself, “Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!”

And so I say to him — clear in my mind, I say to him: “This is Jill! I need help!” And what comes out of my voice is, “Woo woo woo woo woo.” I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever.” So I couldn’t know — I didn’t know that I couldn’t speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help.

And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just — I felt my spirit surrender.

And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition.

When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But then I realized, “But I’m still alive! I’m still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana.” And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the “we” inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.

And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

“Faith has a contempt for fear and is therefore risk-taking.  In monologue risk taking involves deep trust of the self, but little risk with others.  As alienation from others decreases we pass through the stages from technical to resistant to confronting communication.  When we risk involvement with another we enter into dialogue with him.” from Monologue to Dialogue by Brown and Keller, p. 206.

Faith requires a genuine acceptance of self embedded into the divine.  We thrash about in our craziness, continually reeling in and out of our sense of ‘enough-ness’.  Keller and Brown emphasize how, depending upon language as we must, we construct a life out of ‘abstract values by which we direct ourselves’.  I recently had a local congressman tell me how ‘divine Providence’ to him means listening and voting according to ‘his values’.  I didn’t confront him on how his values were vastly different than mine.  Yet, this is where the real work is:

“We rest our lives on our values, the vaporous wings of a prayer.  These values must be confirmed by others or they die and we die.  Research has demonstrated time and again that each of us is unique in our perceptions, there being no more alikeness among friends than among strangers or enemies.  Friends are united and confirmed in their common ideals.  Society exists in common aspirations.  Therefore dialogue between people both develops and depends upon trustful openness among people in search of common ideals and hopes.”  p. 206

So what happens when the closed mind of authority refuses to listen to those of difference?  We have seen that a fire can burn when great despair is mixed with faint hope.  When we refuse to listen to one another, locked in our notions of ‘right values’, we rob opportunity from others’ participation and create conditions for conflict and revolution.  In an article entitled “The Rhetoric of Confrontation”, Scott and Smith describe the underlying feelings as:

1. We are dead.
2. We can be reborn.
3. We have the stomach for the fight, you don’t.
4. We are united in a vision of the future.

These feelings are what feed revolution.  As humans, we desperately seek to be heard.  Yet, caught in our notions of greed, ego, fear, and a sense of separateness, we consciously and unconsciously ignore those who appear to have different values from us.  Yet, the human story says our real peace is found in our courage to listen to one another in ‘trustful openness among people in search of common ideals and hopes.’  This mission of faith would certainly change the climate in the realms of politics/economics and religion/spirituality.

In faith, surrendered from fear through divine Providence, we can let down our obstacles to dialogue.  We can explore ‘common ideals and hopes’ with flexibility and open minds.  We could move from the ‘win/lose’ mentality of monologue and debate to collaboration.  We could move to meaningful dialogue when we find real intent beyond our notions of ‘thinking’ we’re right.  Brown and Keller speak to the language of confidence, noting how dialogue may sound weak on the surface in order to insure accommodation from the other party.  Yet, language that is firm and inflexible, on the surface sounds like it comes from strength, allowing only one interpretation.

“…it is the flexible man, seeing the possibility for several or many interpretations, who is strong, strong enough to accommodate, perhaps, his less flexible conversant.

When we are too sure of our words we are not listening to them or the words of others.  We are listening to the fears which are demanding firm and legal definitions.  Legal language is abstract, logical, and technically correct.  But the language of dialogue is spontaneous, free, noncritical, tentative, reflective, searching—based on faith and tolerance.  When people meet in dialogue, their language is not an analysis of the rights and privileges of each other, but a mutual participation of the lives involved.”  p. 204

How does this relate to immediate events?  A couple days ago a worker was released from a local printing company.  He proceeded to shoot and kill his boss and several co-workers, eventually taking his own life.  I would suspect this man reached a point of ‘not mattering’ that broke his spirit.  It would be interesting to examine his last weeks of life and the communications he had at the work place that led to such disaster.  I suspect there was what Paul Newman coined in a famous movie, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”  I’m sure that today there are several employers taking greater care in dealing with their downsizing, doing what they can to listen to employees they may have to let go.

The big international news showed the leader of Israel calling for forced action against Iran for it’s failure to stop development of a nuclear weapon.  The rhetoric of conflict was at it’s peak when he literally drew an explosive red line, calling for military action.  Common sense would ask why they should stop if Israel is not willing to give up their nuclear weapons.  An open commitment to dialogue would result in a wisdom circle in search of ‘common ideals and hopes’.  The first question would be, “Who here wants to end the world through nuclear war?”  Or perhaps, in faith, we could find common ground  for the respect of life and the reduction of suffering?  These dialogue, wisdom circles could be carried on international media so we could really see the intent of those in power.  We all know that when it comes to nuclear weapons, no one wins, yet we carry our rhetoric on the assumption that someone will.  This is perhaps the most extreme notion of monologue lunacy.

In a couple days we’ll have another presidential debate.  Both candidates will set out with the intent to defeat the other.  The set up is designed to create monologue and a refusal to listen.  Yet, the highest office in the land necessarily depends upon the skills and capacity to listen with flexibility and openness.  We’ll hear the media spend days in meaningless speculation about who won, in effect pronouncing who’s better at fighting with words.  Any notions of trust or faith are removed from the table as the polarization of the country increases.

Perhaps our most immediate need for dialogue is found in recent religious turmoil brought about by a film denigrating the Muslim faith.  This is a time where our leaders must show greater courage in stepping forward with flexibility and skill in speaking to those of multiple faith.  The notion that one particular group has the ‘right’ faith/myth has been the cause for the most violence throughout the ages.  Politicians steeped and trained as attorneys who focus on monologue and win/lose paradigms desperately need the help of spiritual leaders who can effectively speak to interfaith issues without inflaming any particular group for their values.  Our real security will come from a larger faith, one that has contempt for fear and the courage to dig deeper in respect and willingness to offer mutual participation for the lives involved.

The greatest antidote to unhappiness and anxiety is gratitude.  When asked, “Gratitude for what?”, Brother David Steindl Rast replied, “For the opportunity to participate.”  The key to harmony is to allow participation.  The fuel for violence is to take it away.  Monologue, words of certainty and claims of ‘right’ oppress the process.  Dialogue, in faith and contempt for fear, steward us to a better life for all with least harm.

Faith is a ‘feeling’ of being supported, and with prayer and meditation, it grows deeper.  Our beliefs are thoughts that we attach to. Faith finds the courage to surrender these thoughts to the deepening process.  We can deepen our felt faith through opening the mind, allowing our beliefs/thoughts to soften, as we get bigger than our temptation to lock into being ‘right’.  Our forefathers seemed to understand this well when they directed us to place full reliance upon divine providence in the Declaration of Independence.  They recognized the value in surrendering our intellectual answers to the mystery in faith that something better can come up.

This past week I attended an American Public Media event hosted by the famous interviewer, Krista Tippett.  She’s been captured by the current frustration with our polarized monologues, our failed dialog and the lack of civility in our communications with one another.  This has led her to create a project called The Civil Conversations Project.  This week’s program was titled “Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Pro-Dialogue”.  My curiosity led my attention, particularly in noticing the use of a word seldom seen these days, dialogue. The program featured her interview with pro-choice representative, Frances Kissling and pro-life representative, David Gushee.  Ms. Kissling  seemed to best describe our current best-effort communications as “common grappling”:

“The only way I can be credible is to give up the hard political side.  It’s not to change others, but to change myself.  I want to be changed all the time.  I try to be transparent about my values so as to not veil where I come from.  I’m not talking about common ground, but common grappling.”

“We have to learn how to not be advocates, but to ask more questions, and I like people to ask me questions to help me go deeper.  Intelligent conversation isn’t rewarded politically in our society.”

This sense of “common grappling” seems to be what the program was about.  It didn’t really challenge the participants to suspend their belief system in aim to fully hear the person of different opinion.  Krista referenced a five year program where people agreed to “common grapple” , only to find they were firmer in their belief systems than when they started.  Dialogue necessarily commands a larger process.  It’s not about trying to win, to persuade,  or to change.  As Ms. Kissling said, “It’s finding courage to be vulnerable in the face of those you’re so in disagreement with.”  This is what faith is.  It’s what surrender to divine Providence is about.  When we can suspend our thoughts/beliefs, touch the human experience, and see what comes up, we’re more often than not, blessed with a better course of action.  In an article on the elements of dialogue, H.M. Lynd writes:

“The creation of symbols in language is a characteristically human ability that can bring unconscious creative forces into relation with conscious effort, subject into relation with object, can give form to hitherto unknown things and hence make possible the apprehension of new truth.”   On Shame and the Search for Identity, pp. 249-250

When we sit together with open minds, in faith to bigger things coming up, we allow the divine to respond.

In his book The Presence of the Kingdom, Jacques Ellul fully recognizes the problems we get into when we lock into fixed beliefs and closed minds:

“In the intellectual sphere, in connection with political and social spheres, we need a complete revision of all our positions, a new beginning, and this reconstruction cannot be the work of one man alone, it cannot be exclusively the work of man.

This work is necessary, not only for the intellectual, but for all men, for if Christians do not do this work, they cannot have any hope for all that concerns their attitude in the social or political world, all that they will be able to do there will be puerile, useless, and out-of-date at present day.  It is disastrous to see Christians embarking in all the social and political boats of this world, entirely unaware of all the preliminary questions which they alone could examine.

Christian intellectuals must go forward to this great process of questioning, for the world, which is wandering about in a labyrinth made by its own hands;  and for the Church, which should now at least break through all its ready-made intellectual categories, and for the other members of the Church who ought to receive genuine teaching in the life of faith.

The work of Christian intellectuals is not done in the abstract, it is effective participation in the preservation of the world, and in the building up of the Church.  This is why we cannot act here simply in a free way; this is not an intellectual gymnastic to which we are called; it is, above all, in prayer and meditation that intellectuals will rediscover the sources of an intelligent life rooted in the concrete.”  pp. 135-136

When we have faith in the full support of the universe, of the divine in all things, we find strength and stability to open and face the ever changing conditions of the apparent concrete.  We find a sense of stewardship that’s bigger than our small self interest.  We surrender notions of winning and losing to just being our best.  We speak less and listen more deeply.  We suspend judgment, thought,  and fixed beliefs to allow something bigger to come in.  Brown and Keller, in From Monologue to Dialogue, stress the importance of faith, a faith based on one’s heart and entrusted to the other person in the exchange of communication.  It’s a deep concern for the other person, described as the maintenance of an “I-thou” relationship.  There’s an agreement to not use the other for one’s own personal gain, an agreement to not control or take advantage.  They describe the courage to “walk at the edge of our knowledge and our security” in openness and willingness to listen.

“In dialogue we make our life complete, give ourselves our sense of meaning.  A common consequence of real dialogue is the response, “I didn’t know you were like this.  I never really knew how you felt.”  Then perhaps to the self,  “He is changing, and so am I.”  p.  203

They stress that dialogue strengthens faith and faith is the source of dialogue, and to me, this is what Jefferson was getting at by gluing the Declaration of Independence with a faith command to surrender fully to divine Providence.

I’ve been asking some of our politicians just what this means.  Yesterday I had the good fortune to explore this with my U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachman and my Minnesota Rep. Bob Dettmer.  While I have little agreement in their policy platforms, I appreciated their willingness to “common grapple”.  They seemed unwilling to enter an arena where beliefs were suspended, but respectfully listened to my take on it and gave meaningful responses to their understanding of the directive to rely on divine Providence.  We stepped from needing to win to hearing one another in a civil conversation which I suspect changed us both, just a little.

I will not vote for greed and capitalism without moral conscience.

I will not vote from fear and anger.

I will not vote from the illusion that we are separate from one another.

I will not vote for the closed mind that ‘thinks’ it has all the answers.

I will not vote for those who think their religion is the only right one.

I will vote for shared pain and gain.  I prefer to call it kindness and opportunity rather than the currently accepted label of ‘entitlement’.  I will vote for health care and educational opportunities for all and for the preservation of human rights from those who would oppress those freedoms.

I will vote from a sense of stewardship and faith that we’re safely held by the whole universe, whatever label we may use for this.

I will vote from reliance upon divine providence, from what God would do in the best interest of the planet, the international community, the nation, the state, the community and the family.

I will vote for bigger understanding to the challenges of today’s changing world, for open minds and for dialogue over monologue.

I will vote for the candidate skilled at speaking to today’s challenging and fast changing religious climate, for the candidate who heals our global community rather than the one who inflames anger through arrogant notions of having the ‘right’ answer.

Ancient Hawaiian spirituality calls it “best for All with harm to none”.  It’s a high standard to aim for, but one that’s been directed from the core of all spiritual traditions.  I will vote for this candidate when he/she shows up.  And finally, I will allow you to vote for what and who you feel you must vote for without attempts to change you.  Please allow me the same.

Yesterday I went to an air show and was amazed at the stunts the acrobatic pilots were able to pull off.  I was most impressed when they built speed in a dive only to throw the plane into a vertical climb, maxing out in a held static position until the plane stalled and free fell like a leaf.  These pilots took the plane from complete control to a full surrender.  The plane would tumble several hundred feet and then it would capture enough airspeed where they could throttle up and fly out of the plane’s overwhelmed condition.  These pilots had faith in the realm of uncertainty and apparent overwhelming conditions.  I’ve interviewed many top athletes known for pushing new maneuvers and have always been curious about that ‘moment’ when they left familiarity, entering a new zone of performance outside their previous experience.  It’s almost unanimous that they systematically work up to the moment of surrender with days, months, and sometimes years of practice.  Yet, there’s a moment where they step beyond our typical notions of time and space, almost in a foreknowledge, completing the surrendered procedure before initiating it.  Katagiri Roshi describes it beautifully in Each Moment is the Universe:

“…time becomes supreme time, beyond any concept of past, present, or future; place becomes supreme place, beyond any dualistic concept; and person becomes supreme person, who is melted into the universe.

That situation is unknowable with our consciousness.  It’s impossible for me to express it in words.  But maybe you can feel that this is true, that this activity is something that could appear in you life in the future.  If so, that feeling becomes a kind of prediction, foreknowledge, or hope.  That is big hope.”  p. 145

He talks about how hope just comes up, we do something with complete devotion and focus, from the whole heart, we forget our self (separation), and we change the structure of time and space.  Even though people may not see this, they ‘feel’ it.  There’s a felt sense of the bottomless nature to life’s mystery that brings us to our knees in wonder and awe.  It’s what gives us the courage to free fall ourselves when moments of uncertainty inevitably arise.

At the same air show, I by chance, met up with one of my favorite sailing friends.  He’s an ER doctor working one of the Duluth hospitals and was giving his time to cover medical emergencies at the event.  We spoke about those life situations where we’re brought to our knees from ‘not knowing’.  I had told him how this was our topic of conversation at a recent meeting I’d attended for a group at Rush City Prison.  I told him how some inmates described the free fall from ‘no hope’ and others described it from faith.  We briefly discussed the life experience of overwhelm vs. the courage to surrender in faith to life’s next surprise.  He then went on to describe his experience in treating attempted suicide patients in his ER.  I recall him saying how most surviving suicide patients radically change their spiritual journey once they’ve lived through their attempt to end this physical life. He had seen a major transformation that he said was hard to explain.  My sense was that they felt ‘caught’ from the free fall.  This seems to be our journey.  So often we can slip into overwhelm with feelings and thoughts of ‘not enough’, guilt, shame, and conditions not turning out as desired or expected.  Yet, when we surrender to divine Providence, when we can ‘let go’ our attachment to what we ‘think’ should be, faith grows through the experience of knowing we can never be alone.  We break the illusion that we’re separate and we find the strength and courage to enter what I call ‘I don’t know land’.  As Katagiri wrote, ‘we’re melted into the universe’.  He also describes it as knowing that wherever you ma be, your life is sustained and supported by the whole universe.

The night before this air show I had the great fortune of watching some friends creating music at a local club.  A couple who’s been deeply in the depths of ‘I don’t know land’ from a serious health condition intensely stepped up to meet the moment, hitting the presence of each arriving note.  Their sense of ‘aliveness’ brought a vitality to their music that touched us all.  We could ‘feel’ big hope in the moment, in supreme time and supreme space. They communicated the feeling of being supported by the whole universe.

The conversation changes when we can step out of our small ‘knowing’ minds to embrace the wonder, awe, and surprise found in our ‘unknowing’.  This week the great story teller, Garrison Keillor from A Prairie Home Companion, eloquently told a story about the suffering we cause from our small judgmental minds, especially during political election years.  While our media feeds on trying to grow conflict from polarization (Fox News vs. MSNBC), Garrison told a heart touching story that’s possibly familiar to us all.  He described a relative who carried a wonderful humility when returning to his Minnesota home even though he was famous in Texas.  He knew this gentleman held radical right wing political views in opposition to Garrison’s views.  He described our typical behavior of holding silence on these topics when we believe they’ll only lead to anger and further conflict.  He then went on to describe how this man he was tempted to objectify thrust a butcher blade through his heart from despair when he discovered his wife was having an affair.  He captured our need for compassion, even to those who may think different political or religious thoughts.  He challenged us to the vast mystery of life and humbled us to never be so arrogant to ‘think’ we’re right and others are wrong.  Life is too big.  The Divine is too mysterious.  It’s why we’re repeatedly instructed to love one another, even those of different world views.

It’s so easy to become distressed by the ‘con men’ trying to gain our confidence in ‘their’ thinking.  Noam Chomsky has said there is always underlying violence whenever we try to persuade others from our notion of being right.  It’s why our actions are so much more important than our attempts to debate or change others.  I’ll never forget the Dali Lama leaning over to a fellow Buddhist who was enthusiastic about explaining one of the teachings.  He said, “You’re not trying to push Buddhism, are you?”  Or the ministers who were trying to push their notions/beliefs on traumatized Virginia Tech students who were in free fall from a mass shooting.  We just need to cultivate our faith through the courage to face the surprise of the next moment with kindness.  We don’t need to agree in our heads.  We’re just hear to touch each other’s heart, just as my musical friends did, just as my ER doctor friend has done, just as the acrobatic pilots did.  When we can do our best in meeting the next arising moment, giving our full devotion to our activity, others can ‘feel’ it.  Big hope says this is what we’re here for.  It’s what we do for each other, feeding big hope and faith to those who may experience overwhelm…to those who’ve lost the feeling of being caught.

In the free fall, we need the courage to receive grace, to make space to find the gift in what’s given, and to break through the illusion that we’re alone.  Every act of kindness grows this feeling.  Every act of silence in the the face of attack grows this feeling.  Every act of love given to those in overwhelm free fall heals us all.  Today’s campaign screams ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’.  No doubt, difficult economic times challenge us now as they have in the past and will in the future.  Yet, we know that no amount of material accumulation will bring us lasting peace.  Actually, most spiritual traditions describe how our growth comes from meeting suffering and loss with faith, a knowing that we’re supported by the whole universe.

For me, I’m waiting for the messenger who addresses this ‘free fall’, not trying to sell confidence in them, but in something much bigger than them.  It goes well beyond the strategy and mechanics of the campaign talking heads.  We all want confidence and it can only come from the spiritual journey.  Change happens constantly.  Everything wears out.  Suffering comes from our attachments to what was or what we have.  Our freedom, growth and evolution will come from our kindness to one another.  Our careful stewardship of the planet, nation, state, community and family will forever come from the mandate to do what’s best for all with harm to none.  Our courage to meet each other in our differences, with open compassionate minds/hearts, surrendering to what divine Providence has to offer up, is where we’ll find our healing.

This isn’t about the ‘right’ nation, the ‘right’ race, the ‘right sex, the ‘right’ religion, the ‘right’ political party or the ‘right’ economic strategy.  It’s bigger than that.  We all know we’re in free fall.  Our vitality is fed through our open mind and heart and our willingness to embrace uncertainty through complete reliance upon divine Providence.  Our forefathers got it, including it as the glue to our Declaration of Independence.  We print it on our money, “In God We Trust” (if the word God is a semantic trigger, use the word that best points to the ‘feeling’ of being caught).   If you’ve been awake enough to notice all the times grace has touched you, it’s a dis-on-grace each time we fail to communicate how we’ve been caught.  We’re all caught.  We can’t not be caught.  To rely on others is to be uneasy.  To rely on divine Providence, on everyone being caught, is to open to surprise and our blooming.  Our closed minds evidence lack of faith.  Our open minds, willing to refrain from judgment on others, feeding kindness, is where we’ll find our healing.

This morning I read a post from my son about our grandson’s evening insight.  He said, “Nobody knows anything except God and Santa”.  This openness to bigger mysteries is so evident in the five year old mind.  It’s a release from our arrogance of ‘thinking’ we know.  It’s a deepening in our spiritual journey to forever discover the surprise that God, Santa, Universe, or whatever language you use to point to this feeling, has in store for this next arising moment.  When we crack open our closed minds we can let in the light and wisdom provided from that that’s much bigger than our small mind thoughts and belief systems.

Life is so much more complicated than our small minds could ever understand.  It’s why we’re continually directed by all spiritual traditions to humble ourselves in the vast mystery.  Once we find our stillness we can only rest in gratitude for the gift of the given.  Once we kneel to the Divine we can see our journey is to surrender in confident humility to divine Providence.  Today’s gift is a rapid acceleration of interdependence.  Globalization is happening at a rate that overwhelms the reasoning mind.  Yet, we have political and financial interests doing whatever can be done to try to control this.  Whether it’s racial, religious, sexual, economic or age diversity, it’s happening at a rate never before seen.  All the while, as the train of change speeds up, we seem more and more lost in the quagmire of technological thirst.  It now seems normal to claim spectator sports as ‘our religion’.  There seems to be no outrage with political influence given to the highest bidder/contributer.  A social politics of oppression, the very thing our forefathers came here to get away from, seems to be accepted.  It seems that policies to oppress voter rights, to oppress marriage to limited social standards, and to dictate personal body choices in matters of life and death, are gaining momentum.  These attempts to limit our freedoms have been made before, and ultimately, divine Providence has us as a nation, ending in justice.  Eventually, women and blacks were allowed to vote.  Eventually, kindness and understanding made it legal for mixed race marriages.  Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that women have rights over their bodies.  Eventually, we were brought to our knees, humbly asking how we can best support one another without causing harm.

Our fear, greed and ignorance to this rapid change/interdependence has us in a dangerous position.  Caught in our ego’s notion of ‘being right’, we tend to close our minds to change.  We refuse to sit in a collaborative circle to see what divine Providence would offer up.  Yet, it’s this open, humble attitude that opens us to solutions that are bigger than our small minds and special interests.  It’s the small mind that’s insensitive to others’ spiritual journey.  It’s the small mind that tries to ‘push’ it’s notion of ‘rightness’ on others.  And it’s certainly the small mind that would inflame religious followers with derogatory attacks on a particular religion.  Today we have a presidential candidate who criticizes those who would apologize for the harm caused from an inflammatory movie created in our country.  This is arrogance.  This is harmful pride that refuses to open to the challenges of globalization.

Today’s leaders, more than business sense, must have a deep respect and understanding of the world’s various religious traditions.  They must be eloquent in finding common ground and common sense solutions to an increasingly challenging world.  The notion that we can somehow separate religious views and values from the debate is naive.  Today’s world commands an open mind, flexibility to fast moving conditions, a solid grounding in basic spiritual truths, and a capacity to communicate with impeccability, reducing the risk of conflict.

The inflammatory rhetoric of Romney and the conservative right wing has us going down a path of escalating conflict.  While not the perfect surgeon of diplomatic language and action, Obama is light years ahead of Romney.

I want a candidate who understands the spiritual principles of gratitude, humility, moderation, kindness, empathy, and grace.  I want one who can document training in listening skills rather than business practices that disregard harm.  I want a candidate well versed in international experience.  How many countries have been visited, in what capacity, how long, and what languages have been learned?  What’s the candidate’s real understanding of the American experience?  Have them describe their experiences of ‘not having’, of ‘faith’, and what ‘divine Providence’ means to them.  Ask them about their views on capital punishment and how that washes with their spiritual tradition.  And most importantly, let’s see them in situations where they actually can demonstrate their capacity to listen and accurately restate what they heard.

Our future will be determined by how carefully we traverse the present.  This can only be accomplished through deep, mindful listening and collaboration.  The degree to which we push our agenda on the world without regard to harm will only accelerate the  train of conflict.  It’s time for wisdom, gratitude, and humility for grace given within this moment of opportunity.  May we have the strength to always ask forgiveness for unintended harm done, whether through drone missiles or insensitive media.  Our universal spiritual command is to love one another, to reach out to our neighbors, to wish good will and blessing on all peoples and things, and to surrender in deepest gratitude to the gift of divine Providence.  Just a little less pride and a lot more humility, please.

Opening Doors of the Mind, Entering the Heart

We have a choice.  We can fill ourselves with pride, feeding our ego with notions of being ‘right’ and of ‘knowing’.  We can humbly surrender to the vast mystery of the Divine, allowing the perfection and surprise of each moment’s gift.  We’re all creative artists of life, either nurturing this unfolding with deepening awareness to the pure heart or moving in fear, greed and ignorance from the pure heart.  The first requires an open mind that’s pliable under the influence of the Holy Spirit (Divine, Source, etc.).  The second is filled with notions of cleverness, intelligence or subtlety of mind, and other ego feeding notions of pride in separation from the Divine.  Rev. Jean-Pierre de Caussade says we must practice “a passive acceptance and yielding, like metal to the mould, canvas to the brush or stone to the chisel” p. 74 the sacrament of the present moment. He stresses that God is in and of all things and our work is to surrender to the gentle care of all, humbly listening to the heart for direction.

Yesterday I heard a Lutheran minister eloquently speak to this broader sense of belonging.  He suggested that whenever we separate we are sinning.  I like the origin of “sin”, which suggests it’s when we’re “missing the mark”.  Spiritually, can we say we’re missing the mark whenever we separate from others?  When we fill our minds in judgment and small belonging, whether through racial, economic, religious or ethnic discriminations, aren’t we missing the mark?  When we complain about the gift of ‘this’ moment, aren’t we missing the mark?  The heart doesn’t seem to know this separation.  Yet, the mind draws us to notions of pride, cleverness, greed, fear, and our ignorance to this interdependence we have to all beings and things.  Spiritual wisdom would say the Holy Spirit lives in all things, beyond any possibility of division.  It would say everything matters, so we must be very careful in our response to each moment.  When we are, we cause less harm, leaving a wake in life that’s more in harmony and rhythm to Divine action.

Today’s politics are filled with extreme, polarizing division.  A few extremely wealthy individuals and corporations spend billions of dollars attempting to influence an outcome that will place more benefit to them without regard to harm for others.  The Divine has challenged us with extremely difficult issues, asking us to explore with flexible minds, surrendered to Divine Providence, responses that come from a pure heart rather than a fearful, clever mind.  Whether dealing with complexities of how we handle birth/death policies, immigration, social safety nets, health care, or education, we’re being asked to let go our self interest in pursuit of a bigger solution.  When facing big problems, we have to get bigger than the problems.  We’re directed to sit with open minds, rooted in faith to the gift of Divine Providence, confident and humbled in knowing a better answer awaits when we still our dissonant minds from anger, fear, greed, and small belonging.

Each time I hear a politician trying to buy my confidence for a plan that’s trying to be sold or claiming credit for a policy that seemed to cause success, I lose confidence.  My life has been filled with every kind of con man you could conceive of.  And yes, they are me and I’m them.  My work is to not judge their journey, but only deepen my awareness to the tremendous carnage that’s left in the wake of selfish actions.  It’s Divine Providence that they came into my life so I could now write this.  It’s not chasing after our wants in desire but embracing the gift of each moment, in suffering and in celebration, in pain and in joy.  It’s about Big Hope, fully settled in the pure heart, mind stilled, filled with joy from the very grace of this arising breath.  This is harmony.  This is rhythm.  This is the music of the creative artist found in the hearts of all beings and all things.  This is why we must practice with an open mind, in faith, peace in every step, fully aware of the wake of our thoughts, emotions and actions.  This is ‘hitting the mark’, something we can all aim for.

“As long as a man ‘wakes up’ and lives as the Universal Self, he always works in the direction where the Universal is alive.  Everything we confront is our life.  Because of this, the aim is to make all things, the world, people, affairs, etc., live as the Universal life with the attitude that the Self is taking care of the life of the Self.  I live within your life and the Universal lives within my own life.  This is because you and I and the Universal are living out the life which pervades everything.”

“…the flower of my life blossoms when I work to make the flower of all the world, people and things which I now face blossom, and when the flower of my life blossoms, the flower of Universal life blossoms.  Likewise, the flower of your life blossoms when you work to make the flower of all the world, people, and things which you now face blossom, and this is when the flower of Universal life blossoms.

On the other hand, there is the attitude which stifles Universal life.  People see themselves as simply one individual in a world which is only a place to compete for existence.  They think that the law of survival of the fittest is the truth, compare and rate themselves against one another, and in their competition try to kick each other down the ladder.  There are winners and losers, but the winners degenerate in their own extravagance and the losers go from frustration to neurosis.  They end up without even being able to make their own flower blossom.  The flower of Universal life can never bloom here.”  from Approach to Zen by Uchiyama Roshi

As a Zen Christian, I tend to resonate more with the use of the words God or Divine.  If this is the case for you, can you read Uchiyama’s words with this insertion and see what it does for you?  When we ‘wake up’ to the Divine within All, we necessarily ‘work in the direction’ where the Divine is alive.  The Divine lives in all and pervades everything.  Consequently, we’re blessed to be here, now, doing what we can to water the seeds of joy for ‘all things, the world, people, affairs, etc.”.  Just as the Declaration of Independence grounds our country on “reliance to Divine Providence”, Uchiyama captures this ‘big hope’ experience of faith in directing us to ‘live as the Universal life with the attitude that the Self (Divine, God) is taking care of the life of the Self (Divine, God).  This surrender into the mystery that is so far beyond our words and reason is what real faith is about.  It’s a reliance upon the glory of this moment’s gift, no matter what.

Jean-Pierre De Caussade, a Jesuit who wrote in the early 1700’s, wrote in ‘the sacrament of the present moment’ the following:

“God is Everywhere.  A preoccupation with God tells us unconsciously that all will be well provided we leave him (Self) to do what he (Divine) will, and live by faith alone.

Everything proclaims him (Divine) to you.  He (Source) is by your side, over you, around and in you.  Here is his dwelling and yet you still seek him.  Ah!  You are searching for God, the idea of God in his essential being.  You seek perfection and it lies in everything that happens to you—your suffering, your actions, your impulses are the mysteries under which God reveals himself to you.  But he will never disclose himself in the shape of that exalted image to which you so vainly cling.”  p. 18

He speaks beautifully to moving past the limitations of our images and language, impositions which have cost us millions of lives, fighting our various religious wars.  Brother David Steindl Rast has spoken about ‘making space to find the gift in the given’ and de Caussade captures this in his continuation of the above thread:

“O Divine Love, conceal yourself, leap over our suffering, make us obedient!  Mystify us, arouse and confuse us.  Shatter all our illusions and plans so that we lose our way, and see neither path nor light until we have found you, where you are to be found and in your true form—in the peace of solitude, in prayer, in submission, in suffering, in help given to another, and in flight from idle talk and worldly affairs….finally the futility of all our efforts leads us at last to leave all to find you henceforth, you, yourself, everywhere and in all things without discrimination or reflection.  For, how foolish it is, O Divine Love, not to see you in all that is good and in all creatures.”   p. 19

When we cultivate the ‘feeling’ of the Divine in all things we’re able to develop the attitude of Self (God, Divine) taking care of the life of Self (God, Divine).  Our panic to act relaxes.  We move into resonance with God, harmonically aligned in faith to ‘just be’.  Another French Christian theologian, Jacques Ellul, has captured this in The Presence of the Kingdom when he writes:

“Our attitude towards the problem of the end and the means leads us to take up a position which is wholly revolutionary; it is actually a radical change in the perspective of human life.  For Christians the first ‘consequence’ of this new position is this:  that what actually matters, in practice is ‘to be’ and not ‘to act’.

Our world is entirely directed towards action.  Everything is interpreted in terms of action, nothing is more beautiful than action, and people are always looking for slogans, programs, ways of action; indeed, our world is so obsessed by activity, that it is in danger of losing its life.  We know that the great slogan of all dictatorships is this—action for action’s sake.

At the same time our world tends to eliminate, almost wholly, the life of the individual.  By the formation of masses, by the artificial creation of myths, by standardizing our living, and so on, there is a general movement towards uniformity, which leads man more and more to forget himself as he is caught up in this general tendency of our mechanical civilization.  A man who spends all his time in action, by that very fact ceases to live.  A man who spends his days rushing about in his car for hours at a time, at a speed of sixty miles an hour, has the sensation of living on speed, of intense activity and of ‘gaining time’, but actually a mental torpor creeps over him–he becomes less and less alive; more and more he is simply an automaton in a machine, he has reflexes and sensations it is true, but no judgement, and no awareness of anything beyond.  In the perfect working of his engine he has lost his soul.  Thus we are all suffering from a weakness which may become a serious disease.”  pp. 90-91

This concept of ‘being’, cultivating awareness to our interdependence with All, seems to fly in the face of many cultural American traits now being pushed.  The push to dismantle health and education safety nets, to promote pride as a positive virtue at the expense of humility and grace, to push competition over collaboration, and to feed the greed of special interest without thorough examination of ‘who gets hurt’, these are symptoms of the ‘serious disease’ Ellul speaks of.

Our suffering deepens when we separate.  We can try to rely on our smaller circles of belonging, lining up with those who think like we think, or look like we look, or have blood lines or location similarities.  Yet, to live this way is to be uneasy because we all know there is disappointment and challenge down this road.  Ultimately, lasting peace is found in deepening faith that All is gift, God is in everything and everywhere, and we can rest in peace knowing the Self is taking care of the Self.  Katagiri Roshi calls this ‘big hope’:

“In this unity, you give energy to your activity as object, and simultaneously you accept lots of information from your object.  That is called total functioning—cause and effect are one simultaneous action of input and output.  You give and receive information simultaneously.  That is communion of heart with heart, going constantly, in and out.  At that time your activity becomes Buddha’s (Divine) activity;  time becomes supreme time, beyond any concept of past, present, or future; place becomes supreme place, beyond any dualistic concept; and person become supreme person, who is melted into the universe (Divine).

That situation is unknowable with our consciousness.  It’s impossible for me to express it in words.  But maybe you can feel that this it true.”  p. 145 from Each Moment is the Universe (insertion of Divine by me)

So as our culture spends more and more money trying to get us to choose sides, to diminish our circles of belonging, and to build confidence in their myths, perhaps it’s critical time to just let go our anxiety about ‘fixing things’, about pushing our particular point of view, about locking into who’s right and who’s wrong.  Maybe some good old spiritual wisdom will get us once again to start asking, “How can I help?”, “How can we cause minimum harm in stewardship to what’s been given?”, “How can we humble ourselves in the glory of God (Divine, Self) with the aim to let the flower of our life blossom when we work to make the flower of all the world, people, and things which we now face blossom, knowing that this is when the flower of Universal (God) life blossoms.  This is Big Mind, this is Open Mind, this is reliance upon Divine Providence.

This is trust, faith and freedom from neurosis.  It’s my sincere hope you’ll make space to touch stillness, to rest in the Divine present moment, in glory to the gift of the given.

Everybody belongs.  You can’t ‘not belong’.  Yet, this is what we do to each other, ‘thinking’ we’re somehow better or worse.  Yet, in the end, when we humble ourselves to see the divine belonging in all, we’re filled.  When we push a sense of superiority on others from our pride, we’re left restless, our sense of belonging ultimately tarnished.  And then we suffer.

Those who usually cause the most harm are those who were somehow damaged in youth by someone telling them they ‘don’t belong’, or they ‘are not good enough’.  They then often perpetuate this cruelty in their later years, pushing for damaging powers over others.

Ultimately, we’re here to wake up to our real belonging.  The illusion of our separateness has cost us dearly as we’ve harmed so many.   Yet, when we wake to a bigger belonging we feel real peace and an abiding which gives us courage to meet the surprise of the next moment.  When we truly recognize how we can’t be separated, we can’t ‘not belong’, our anxiety diminishes.  Our competitive urge to ‘win’ at another’s expense relaxes as we move to simply ‘being’ the best creative expression of ourselves.

This ‘feeling’ of deep belonging is beyond words.  It’s our antidote to the poisons of greed, fear and ignorance.  It’s where we touch the Ground of our Being, what some have called the Holy Spirit.  It’s what others have called Big Hope.

So next time you notice anxiety building, noticing the mind starting to freak you out, find a quiet place and surrender to the loving arms of deep abiding peace found in surrender to a deeper sense of belonging.  Surrender the notion that belonging is in anyway dependent upon the approval of others.  Just cultivate awareness to stillness, breathing in and breathing out, in awareness to a deeper support that goes well beyond our reasoning minds, well beyond our concepts of time and space.  Katagiri Roshi has written:

“To be completely absorbed you have to devote yourself totally, with sincerity, and then you can be absorbed—you can see the unity of your body, your mind, and your object.

In this unity, you give energy to the activity as object, and simultaneously you accept lots of information from your object.  That is called total functioning—cause and effect are one simultaneous action of input and output.

This is communion of heart with heart, going constantly, in and out.  At that time your activity becomes Buddha’s  activity:  time becomes supreme time, beyond any concept of past, present, or future; place becomes supreme place, beyond any dualistic concept; and person becomes supreme person, who is melted in the universe.

That situation is unknowable with our consciousness.  It’s impossible for me to express it in words.  But maybe you can feel that this is true, that Buddha’s activity is something that could appear in your life in the future.  If so, that feeling becomes a kind of prediction, foreknowledge, or hope.  That is called big hope.”   p. 145 from “Each Moment is the Universe”

This is real ‘waking up’.  This is direct contact with the Holy Spirit, in service to the well being of All.  This is the peace found in deeply knowing we can’t be separate, no matter how hard others try to feed that experience.  We’re always supported, beyond notions of birth and death.  With each arising breath, I’m fill with gratitude for this support.  This is the place of wisdom, where we move from self interest to the bigger question of refined action in awareness to ‘help vs. harm’.