Month: May 2017

Turning Toward the Unthinkable

On May 13, 2017

In Death, General, Meditation, Memoir, Positivity

Life is movement. As the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said: “The river where you set your foot just now is gone — those waters giving way to this, now this.” (Fragment 41); and: “The sun is new again, all day” (fragment 32). – Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated by Brooks Haxton.

Japanese Zen artist, Sengai (1750 – 1837): “Even before I can say it is like a lightning flash or a dewdrop, it is no more.”

It seems counter-intuitive, to find more life through being in touch with life’s evanescence and the certainty of death; by turning toward the unknown. Nevertheless, rather than become dispirited by the thought of death, by practising A Year to Live – for nearly two decades, renewing it yearly – I have increased my commitment to life, and not distorted it. My energy has turned toward more meaningful activities, relinquishing energy-draining pursuits, while there’s more love of life – and all this through the seeming irony of doing daily practices which remind me of the certainty of death.

I have been inspired all along, in my contemplation of death, by Guenther’s statement: “…the thought of death is rather a powerful stimulus that brings me back to myself as the unique occasion for the search for the meaning of life…”

What kind if meaning of life is there to find in the face of death? Is life meaningful, in itself – without the filter or buffer of belief systems? That’s a question I address experientially in this project.

Certainly, as a severely abused child, by the age of sixteen I tended toward the conclusion that there was no meaning to life. My companions all thought this. I became nihilistic; and, I often wished for death. Then, via the Beatles’ encounter with Indian meditation practice – which came at the very same time in which I found Socrates – I discovered the possibility of a more wholesome line of inquiry. The task became to find out for myself, the truth of consciousness.

Was there an uncharted land, I wondered, in my own mind? One which could confirm meaningfulness from within – not through the stressful activities of my outer world, with its prevailing industrial values, cut-throat competition, its genocides and wars? It seemed to me as a teenager that contemplation of life as it is in itself might be possible? Socrates, with his courage in the face of death, and his commitment to selfless values, was inspirational. And then, at seventeen, meditation presented itself, as a support for the actualization of this free, independent way of life.

Next, my encounter with Zen Buddhism at nineteen confirmed what Socrates had asserted, that a conscious practice of facing death is far from a wish for death; it is an affirmation of a reality greater than death. The Zen Buddhists speak of ‘the great matter,’ which is the inescapable presence of ‘birth and death.’ My reading of Zen suggested that, skilfully conducted, facing death brings an attunement to life. Zen writers suggested that one’s own wholeness was discoverable through facing death.

Such freedom is not to be found by merely believing some religious blather. There is no freedom in believing in some ideal fantasy of a heaven after death. For me, this freedom must be right here in this very difficult life of sickness, old age and death. We die. So, can we live creatively – not in immature defiance of death – but with open-hearted inclusion of death. The ‘historical’ Buddha (I’ll explain the apostrophes, later) suggested that we face these five things:
1. I am subject to old age. I am not exempt from old age.
2. I am subject to illness. I am not exempt from illness.
3. I am subject to death. I am not exempt from death.
4. There is alteration in, and parting from, everything that is dear and pleasing to me.
5. I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions. They are my matrix, I am related through them, they are my mediator. I become the heir of whatever actions I do, good or bad.
– The Five Remembrances, Translated by Christopher J. Ash

Then, at some stage, during an instance of my A Year to Live practice I decided that this matter of being one hundred percent for death in life (while being one hundred percent for the life in death) was something worth unpacking slowly with others. So, I began a blog to share the enquiry into this irony that life is ephemeral, yet intrinsically meaningful. This series which you are now reading is an edited version of that sharing.

This Brief Candle, a Unique Occasion

By admin

On May 12, 2017

In Death, Enquiry, Mindfulness, Positivity, Radiant Citta

Herbert Guenther: “…the thought of death is rather a powerful stimulus that brings me back to myself as the unique occasion for the search for the meaning of life…”

What kind if meaning of life can Guenther be speaking about? Often people live as though death is the negation of meaning. The question is how to whole-heartedly include our consciousness of death, and to find what meaning is present in that inclusion. Of course, the meaning of life is itself a living, not at all satisfying as mere belief. When the Dalai Lama was asked, at a teaching: “What is the meaning of life?” he shrugged his shoulders and said: “I don’t know.” What kind of ‘don’t know’ is that? How do we live it, feel it, know it intimately? And, how do we relate to our loved ones, once this is digested thoroughly?

If it is truly living ‘don’t know,’ it is a luminous matter. If it is a ‘don’t know’ perfumed with avoidance, it’s a dull, and dulling, quality of awareness. But, lived, it is openness of Being.

This is something worth unpacking slowly, as I will do throughout this project. Perhaps, these aren’t two, the evanescence of life and life’s value. Avoid the thought of death, and we live a false version of life. When the haiku poet Issa Kobayashi (1763 – 1828) alluded to the traditional teaching that this is a “dewdrop world,” in his poem written on the death of his daughter, he may have been thinking of the Diamond Sutra’s famous last verse:

“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence:
Like a dewdrop, a bubble; like a flash of lightning,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”

Yet, Issa brought this great matter home to the ever-so-human fact that love always perfectly has a natural hurt implicit implicit in its vibrant life. He wrote:

this world of dew
is, yes, a world of dew.
And yet…

Issa’s poem was life living itself forward in a new way. He doesn’t recoil from intimacy with the dewdrop world. It suggests that even in the face of his daughter’s death Issa knows her life is (in Mary Oliver’s way of saying) “one wild and precious life.”

Some Surprising Inspirations

By admin

On May 11, 2017

In Death, Memoir, Positivity, Practices

Biological life doesn’t stand still. Our bodily health changes through illness and accident. The healthy may easily have a conceit of good health, unaware of how close death can be. I suffered three special corrections to such a trance, all in 2014. Two accidents, then cancer. My long-standing practice of including death in my daily awareness turned these occasions into gifts.

The gift in these occasions was the confirmation of traditional wisdom that peace of mind is our greatest treasure. During this time the forms – such as reminding myself with rituals that this could be my last day – were far less important than actually living in mental ease. I found I was naturally more present in each breath. The formal ‘practice’ came into alignment with my everyday life.

In April of 2014 (four months before the cancer diagnosis), in the dark pre-dawn and in the rain, I fell down the steep stairs at the front of our house. I was alone that weekend, and so I guided my bruised body around without support from my family. It was a lesson in the humanising quality of vulnerability. It turned out that I had broken a rib in the fall – something I didn’t find out until we were doing a bone scan for cancer months later.

Next, in the beginning of June, I am coming back from an ultrasound (checking for the possible cancer), and – bang! – a head-on collision with a ute, on the highway in my hometown. The incident was instructive: it told me how my practice was going. My calm during and after the collision and my kindness toward others were notable.

The car was written off, though, and I could see how, without warning, in a brief and unexpected moment, your life could be finished. One doesn’t know one’s lifespan.

The results of that ultrasound showed that there was a suspicious shadow, so soon after I spent a night in hospital for a biopsy, which gave the unambiguous diagnosis. I am glad that I had been meeting the fact of death via the Third Remembrance for many years. Now, too, all those years of practising Stephen Levine’s A Year to Live (introduced by Stephen in his book of the same name) bore striking fruit.

I was less shocked about the diagnosis than I was of the car crash. (I had much more conceit around my driving!) In relation to the cancer I said, “Of course.” I said, “Biology means vulnerability. Biology means old age, sickness and death – and accident!” There was no, ‘Why me?’ The absence of which makes action much easier and wiser.

And, so, even though my ‘A Year to Live’ practice felt (for the rest of 2014) somewhat less formal, it felt like the most powerful year of practice yet – so much aliveness in the midst of ‘misfortune.’

But, isn’t our condition always one of vulnerability? That is exactly what this ‘A Year to Live’ practice is for – to wake us up, to show the bleeding obvious; that vulnerability is in every moment of human life. And the development of constant mindfulness is at its core.

As Stephen writes: “You have to remember one life, one death – this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, at each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity.”
― Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last, (p. 24)

(Here’s a good interview with Stephen, by the late Michael Toms, called Learning to Die in Order to Live. I recommend you browse the wonderful interviews from the New Dimensions site. Stephen himself died during the year I was writing this project. More of that soon.)

The biggest reason to do this practice, though, comes in health as much as in sickness. It is about meaning. Herbert Guenther writes, in his introduction to Book I, chapter two, of the fourteenth-century Tibetan meditation master Longchenpa Rabjampa’s Kindly Bent to Ease Us:

“…the thought of death is rather a powerful stimulus that brings me back to myself as the unique occasion for the search for the meaning of life, and it makes me recognize the importance of this very moment, as it highlights the real possibilities that are still before me. It is in the light of death that I am prompted to act in such a way that, should death strike, my life may have had some total significance. The thought of death prevents me from losing myself in the fictions with which I tend to surround myself in order to escape from Being…”

In this spirit, for more than fifteen years, I’ve used ‘A Year to Live’ practice to turn toward the certainty of my death, as a means of growth and deepening into life; and especially, as an inspiration to keep in touch with the luminous mind, the mirror of the ground of Being. The practice enhances connection to who we really are.

What ‘practice’ means in actuality changes from year to year (and I will share the kinds of experiments in living which one can do), but in general what the practice means, for me, is: daily reminding myself that this is possibly my last year, living more fully in the present, and practising all kinds of exercises that confront me with the both the certainty of, and the process of, death. In general it means plumbing the depths of aliveness – to be open to, and appreciative of, the inexplicable wonder that anything is going on at all.

Knowing I am alive is the same as knowing that death is present: there’s no difference between living fully in the present, and living in the light of death. You can come at the miracle of existence through either door. However, the doors are the same door. They are both perspectives on reality, which imply each other.

So, a normal healthy life can benefit from this practice. We live differently – more consciously and kindly in the light of death.

Nothing Surpasses the Art of Dying

By admin

On May 10, 2017

In Death, General, Practices

“Already this morning I’ve gone through three deaths.” – Tenzin Gyatso, the XIVth Dalai Lama.

This is maybe leaping in the deep end for some of you, I know; but it might be instructive for you to see what some contemplative folks get up to. These are those who practice the invaluable meditation on the ‘Dissolution of the Elements.’

The ‘elements’ referred to here aren’t (at least, not primarily) the literal elements of earth, water, fire, air and space. They instead point to one’s experiencing processes; that is: the dissolution, at the time of death, of bodily form, of feeling-tones, sense-perceptions, intentionality (the shaping or fashioning tendencies of experience), and of the inner subtle levels called ‘consciousness.’ In this particular meditation, body and ‘mind’ fall away, (as Japanese Zen teacher Dogen said). We can expect that to happen in dying, and during death. It is also subtly happening constantly, while living. So the practice is essentially an introduction to how to live.

A friend of mine who had just finished a retreat with the Dalai Lama (in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney) said that the Dalai Lama had suggested to the retreatants that they should do this practice every day. He does it everyday.

Once, in a 2010 teaching, in Dharamsala in India, he said:
“According to the tantric teachings, at the time of death there’s the eight-stage dissolution of the elements – the grosser levels of the elements of the body dissolve, and then the more subtle levels also dissolve. Tantric practitioners need to include this in their daily meditation. Every day, I meditate on death – in different mandala practices – at least five times, so still I’m alive! Already this morning I’ve gone through three deaths.”

I’ve practised this meditation regularly during my ‘A Year to Live’ practise in the past, and I’m curious as to why I haven’t leapt into it, during this my latest cycle of the ‘A Year to Live.’ Maybe it has to do with post-operative shock, after the removal of my cancer. Maybe it is due to conceit.

Recently, a meditation student asked me (I’m giving you the gist): “Why, when you could be practising the great catalysts of Love, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity, why would you contemplate the Five Remembrances?” (I’ll write about them later, but the third of these is about the certainty of dying.) In response, I checked into the middle of my body, to see what I felt, and the answer that came there was: “Because it pricks my bubble of conceit.”

That’s certainly true. And, practising the Dissolution of the Elements, likewise defuses human conceit – conceits of all kinds. I’ll go more deeply into what I mean by this, later in the project.

The version of this meditation which I practise is given by Joan Halifax on her CD album, Being with Dying. I’ve put it on my iPod, so it’s always easily accessible. You can get her script here (link), if you want to familiarise yourself with it. Indeed, you too may want to familiarise yourself with the process of death – the dissolution of the coming and going aspects of being.

If you’re in the Blue Mountains, and want to talk about this, give me a call. Over a cup of tea we can talk about the art of dying. As George Harrison said, in his song The Art of Dying: ”…nothing in this life that I’ve been trying/Could equal or surpass the art of dying.”

The contemplations that follow explore how this is can be so.

The Real Meaning of Being

By admin

On May 10, 2017

In General

I’ve been asked to collect the posts on this site, which I mostly wrote in 2015/16, into a book for my beloved family. I’ve also recently begun a new cycle of A Year to Live practice. So, as a part of my practice, I thought I’d read an entry a day, and in response to the request, I’d edit it for the book project. Also, I thought you might appreciate contemplating them, again.

I’ll rearrange them only a little, because those who made the request asked me not to do much editing. They thought there was a coherence in the progression of the originals. What follows, then – presumably for the next year, though that’s not guaranteed – is in the service of the presence in our life of the wisdom and riches of Being.

“Although you may hold, in this your life,
To it as true, it will most likely deceive you.
Once you have fully understood that you cannot rely
On that which is impermanent and without essence,
Attend to the real meaning of Being straight away.”

Tibetan teacher Longchenpa (1308–1364), Now That I Come to Die. Dharma Publications.

Deep Bows to Gene Gendlin

By admin

On May 7, 2017

In Death, Focusing, Gendlin, Positivity, Radiant Citta

My dear hero Gene Gendlin has died, naturally at the age of 90. It was several days ago, and I have been unable to write a word during this time. Now I’ve found something to say, and want to share it with you. (Apologies to those of you who may get a double posting.)

A week ago, I heard that he was dying, so I was readied for the final word. But, when that news came, I suddenly felt something I didn’t expect. Of course I cried, and felt the inevitable loss. But I felt something else, and when I checked in, I heard myself say with gentle certainty, “I’m standing on my own two feet, now.” And, I felt them connected to the immeasurable earth. I want to share a little of the background to that moment.
About twenty years ago, I said to a Buddhist friend, “I’m going to explore what the West has to offer.” He said to me, “Do you really think they have anything?” He meant ‘anything worth while.’ Now, these years later, I can say to my friend, “Oh, I’m so happy that, with the help of Eugene Gendlin’s amazing ‘Philosophy of the Implicit,’ I feel I’ve come home to the West, where I began, and where, culturally speaking, I belong.
My philosophical journey began as a seventeen-year-old, where I discovered Socrates and meditation, in the same year. Socrates’ love of wisdom and his bravery blew me away. But then, very soon after, I discovered Buddhism, and so – because they had accessible methods (with mindfulness and meditation), I began a (so far) fifty year excursion into Buddhist practice; and at some stage became a Buddhist teacher. So, it was significant to want to go West. I eventually felt the call of the culture that I had stood in, as a child, unknowingly.
‘Going West,’ for me, initially meant studying psychotherapy, and becoming a psychotherapist. Something practical. But that introduced me to Focusing. And, with the help of Bev Stevenson, Nada Lou, and my trainer Ann Weiser Cornell, I became a Focusing trainer.
Then, about twelve years ago, came one of the first teleconferences I did with Gene. It was organised by my (later) mentor Rob Parker, and its topic (if I remember rightly) was on the primacy of the body. There Gene said something which viscerally turned my reality inside out. I suddenly experientially realised that perception doesn’t give me a basis for ‘being.’
Someone said to me, today, that they hadn’t realised that they had a particular dependency, until the object of that dependency was suddenly not there. And that was what it was like, for me, in respect of perception. Gene said something about perception being derived from a more fundamental interaction-first life-process; and suddenly (in this little pokey office in North Sydney), I literally ‘saw’ without any dependency on perception. I felt released.
To explain a eye-sight seeing which rests on a felt ocean of implicit knowing would take an entire essay, but that’s what it was like. That says it. (That experience helped me understand many of the historical Buddha’s enigmatic comments.) I contacted Mary straight away, and she passed my joy and gratitude on to Gene, and conveyed that he was delighted. That was the beginning of my immersion in A Process Model.
From then on, I realised that I had two spiritual paths; two completely complementary paths. And that has remained so. So, it’s with this gratitude to a spiritual mentor, that I live in the memory of Gene.
Again and again, since then, in the teleconference courses that Ann has run, I have put the ‘alone edge’ of my expanding understanding to Gene, and his ‘Amen’ had me sighing with relief each time. They were like the checking questions the Zen teacher asks:
There’s a deeper presence than perception. “Amen.”
At the limit, stillness and movement are not two. “Amen.”
‘Body-en’ is a way of saying ‘mind.’ “Amen.”
(This last one, only a few months ago, settled a puzzle for me that had been around since I was four years old! It has opened up vistas for me.)
So, I got to depend on those courses. Was it my need for the good male authority, given the appalling violence of my upbringing? Sure. Compared to what my father said about my mind, to hear Gene say with affection how he loved my questions – of course that was healing. And, Gene’s kindness, his humour, his concern for the welfare of humanity – all that, too, I came to depend on it. And, Gene also introduced us in a very practical way (Focusing) to some of finest of the riches which the West has to offer.
He did this by pointing us back to the primacy of body. This is a very healing thing to do. Gene was a supreme healer. He sent us back to our own experience, encouraging us to inquire there, and especially to inquire kindly; to love philosophy, and to find in our own bodies the body that Socrates learned from.
Last week, in the days before he died, I watched (yet again) the TAE video that Nada gave me twenty years ago, where Gene says:
“There is the absolutely best laboratory – as far as we know, at least – in the whole cosmos; which you can have access to; because the absolute best laboratory in the whole cosmos – which has a direct line into… whatever everything is… that’s a human being.”
– Eugene T. Gendlin, at the opening to Gems from Gene, Tape 5 of Thinking at the Edge (a five tape VHS series)
May the exhausted world find this ever-available refreshment. (I hear him saying, “Amen.”) Thanks, Gene.