Life can be overwhelming. Especially when we look at it. I used to love horror movies, but these days its enough to watch the news. Sometimes it seems we’re living in the apocolypse, as written by Steven King.
At this writing we are heading toward a pivotal, some say existential, national election. The two primary presidential candidates have come under fire. One fending attacks against their age and mental acuity. The other, quite literally, in a narrowly missed assassination attempt. Both of these situations have caused us to stop and reconsider solid paradigmatic points of view.
Maybe it’s not a bad thing to be forced to look at what we convey and what we see. Are we being clear? Are we looking with an objective awareness at how things work? Or, are we only selling our point of view to ourselves and our world? I have been guilty of the latter. More egregiously, I have felt justified in doing so. If we feel we are right, we might feel justified in piling on, exaggerating or satirizing to substantiate our point of view. I am more inclined to this when speaking to my choir. I pontificate as the heads nod. But where will this lead? Justification feels so right, but in reality, it often leads to disordance and misunderstanding. The stronger we hold to our point of view, the less we understand alternative reasoning. This creates a false permanence, which is counter to the natural laws of the universe. Becoming stuck on our point of view is an invitation for the universe to dislodge us. Often this forced shift leads to a period of chaos where our values and perceptions come into question. When firmly held perceptions shift, we go through a period when things are out of phase producing a dissonant static that is challenging to navigate.
Along with change, chaos is a primary law of the universe. Although unsettling, it’s a natural part of our lives. Applying “functional awareness” chaos can be seen as a gateway from a familiar paradigm to a new vantage point. “Objective awareness” is seeing what is actually happening, rather than how we feel or what it all means, which is more of a subjective awareness. It’s good to acknowledge how we feel. But it doesn’t mean that is how others feel. And it doesn’t mean that it is easy to see beyond ourselves. That shift from our precious point of view into another space is often preceded by a moment of ego death, which is chaotic and unsettling.
If we look objectively at how chaotic moments in our life have played out, we’ll see that we have made it through these unsettling passages each time. Perhaps we have stepped into more fortunate circumstances. And maybe we have developed greater awareness from being dislodged from our zone of familiarity. If we look at how it works, chaos sometimes feels bad, but is a very necessary step in our growth process. So, waking up in this turmoil requires us to accept that the unknowing of chaos is sometimes necessary. It is also important to see that resisting change is a primary condition of suffering. But does this mean we blindly go along with an alternative? No. In fact, the alternative is also subject to change. A true paradigm shift is not shifting from one leg to the other. It is accepting that at this moment, we have no legs at all to stand on. As we are not having to become something, there is no reason to resist anything.
Binaries are fictions we create to better understand chaos. There is a good, and there is a bad. We have right and we have wrong. We feel comfort in fending off chaos with these solid beliefs. All of us have something we feel is real. But clinging to those beliefs create suffering as readily as clinging to material things or other people. This is called materialism of view. We believe our ideas are real. Well, good luck with that. I’ve actually come to see that binaries are by their nature never real. They are crude designations, the first step in the mental triage in trying to address the unsettling unknowing of chaos. The remedy? Hahaha. Relax. We are struggling through a natural process of rebirth. There is no reason to struggle. Our disquiet is urging us to discomfort. Our discomfort tells the part of ourselves charged with being in control that we are under siege. And so we prove our mettle by digging in. We turn false binaries in rhetoric and rhetoric into violence. At this point, the chaos in our mind becomes chaos in our life.
However, Meditation Master Chogyam Trungpa was fond of saying “chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.” It seems despite our discomfort, this natural process might lead to a deeper, more nuanced connection to life. It may be that life itself is a series of birthing. Maybe instead of projecting where we wish it will all lead, we might pray to end up where we least intend. If we close our eyes right now and visualize what we want from life we are creating a fiction that will never happen as we project it will. And it is possible that we are selling ourselves short. Perhaps life can be so much more than our conditioned thinking would indicate. We can only project from what we know. If our knowing changes, our projections may change accordingly. Who knows what we’ll want tomorrow, and, by extension, where that may lead us?
Of course, we can’t abandon all principles. That would be like abandoning all our clothing. We need clothing. However, we may no longer be comfortable in bell bottoms. Yet, if our principles change with the seasons we are just adding to the chaos. In our last class, Erik With a K suggested that we can find a seat that might offer ballast in order to navigate turbulence in our journey. Daily Meditation gives us the connection to the now that breeds the confidence to be here despite the chaos. WE. ARE. HERE. And knowing that “here” has no obligation to us, our work is to open our hearts and see what is actually happening. And just as life has no obligation to conform to us, we have no obligation to do anything but remain here, navigating our way with our eyes open.
Trungpa would say, life is like falling out a window. But, the good news is there is no ground. So how do we find our balance through chaos if there is no ground? Perhaps we find a navigation point in finding comfort in where we are. Perhaps a balance point is deep within ourselves. All we can change is ourselves. All we are responsible to is our mind. Protect your mind and you will see your way through.
Waking up in chaos: Accept the turmoil. Avoid judgements. Find our seat in that. Open our eyes. And enjoy the ride.
As this brain grew, it gained the processing ability to go beyond the defensive reaction of its dark beginnings and, learning to see a bigger picture, strategize its way past danger and toward sustenance. This remarkable ascension is still happening and that’s a wonderful thing. Yet, that growth happened so quickly, our minds are developing new skills while our brain is still holding to old processes. This creates a dissonance between a view of what may be possible and what we fear could happen.
So, how can we make this large picture practical for us? We can begin by loooking at ourselves, as we are. How can compassion make my life a better place? What can I do today to make my life easier and more productive so that I may better serve? This is not selfish, it’s practical. However, trying to make my life better than someone else’s, or a better place for only me and mine, is selfish because it’s narrow minded and myopic. Compassion is developing the tools to care for ourselves so that we can care for other beings. But, we are one of those beings. In fact, until we learn to effectively care for ourselves we will be unable to care for others.
Yet, if we accept that we are a work-in-progress then we can learn to gain confidence in ourselves. Self-aggrandizement, like the arrogance it engenders, covers leads to a lack of belief in ourselves. We know inside that we are not the ideal, and so believe we are less than the ideal. But that truth is if we can accept ourselves and vow to discover what we become, we are committing to a path of supporting ourselves. As we develop self-awareness, we naturally gain regard for ourselves. And though this regard for ourselves we begin to see others more clearly. Freed of the veils of defensive self interest we begin to see that we are not as estranged from our world as we had imagined.
With meditation practice we are training to notice subtler and more ordinary moments that stop the mind. And perhaps more importantly, we learn to accept these authentic moments, as they are, without commentary for longer periods of time. This serves to infiltrate the wall of separation that we fabricate to keep ourselves isolated from life. You might say, we are turning the lights on to our life. If our mind is supple enough, we can see all life as alive and interactive. In time, we see ourselves as a part of everything rather than struggling to overcome anything. In popular culture, this is known as being one with everything. In Meditation traditions this is known as non-dual experience. Nondual experiences are instances of clear perception when we are directly connected to the moment as opposed to dualistic experiences when we are separated out and looking in.
In meditation theory, the sun is used as a depiction of awareness. The sun shines on everything equally regardless of whether it is blocked by the moon, the clouds or the turning earth. Awareness is alive and awake in the universe whether or not we are conscious of it. It is the work of the meditator to uncover the veils of self-imposed obscuration that block access to awareness. We notice thoughts that are actually quite small in the scheme, and bring our attention back to the space afforded by the breath. As we do this, we are stepping back from the thought and revealing a larger context. Our blockage might appear less significant, even humorous. Over time, these obscurations become less solid and less imbued with “meaning”. They become right-sized. Sometimes they disappear altogether. Although the significant obscurations require less force, but more patience. Some will likely return. When that happens we are faced with the same task. Notice them as thinking, and return to the breath. This reconnects us to space, which is perspective. It sucks that we often have to be fooled again and again but that is the work of creating access to awareness. That sunlight will, in time, permeate our experience, but there is a lot of slogging to get there.
I tend to live life from one project to the next, believing that -despite all prior experience- this time I will get it right. This diet, this financial plan, this meditation, this love. Especially this love. True Love. That’s the one that gets me. Each love I fall into becomes my center of being. I have always failed to see that my relationship to loving has all the hallmarks of classic addiction. In his masterwork, The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm defined “true love” as two people who were both ready for the same thing at the same time. He specifically nudged the reader away from the idea that we were part of something special. But, despite the slight-of-hand of hormonal urges, true love is not destiny. True love, like life itself, is a random occurrence that happened to succeed. Life is opportunistic. Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. It seems, even a thinker as profoundly creative as Albert still searched for the occasional guarantee. If the universe doesn’t play dice it may be because dice only has 36 outcomes. The perplexing game of Go that has kept humans intrigued for 4,000 years, has less than 11,000 possible outcomes. If the universe is playing with us, It is using a much more vast and complex system than any game our brains can presently conjure. And, yet, within that ocean of possibility, we find that apple trees always breed apple trees. This interesting paradox is central to our existential being. Life is random and there are repetitive patterns throughout.
When emotions run high, the fear mind takes over and latches onto simple answers. And naturally, we believe we are right. This feeling of righteousness wants retribution and dismisses the inclusion of societal and familial issues as pandering snowflakery. The Buddha spoke of Karma as the law of cause and effect. He also spoke of the interdependence of every event to all else. Despite conditioned tendencies toward black and white binaries, the Buddha saw that the causes of any event are myriad and nuanced. This would seem frustrating to the raging defensive mind latching onto rightandwrong. But a reactive mind is generally devoid of nuance or compassion. Compassion doesn’t mean kindness to those who’ve caused harm. It means understanding those who cause harm.