A big, brawny storm can seize me with an utter fascination. Pretty much, such storms always have.
The more sizzle in a lightning flash, the mightier its thunder, the more oomph in the burly gusts, the more dense any given gyre of hurtling leaves, the more amazing and stimulating it all becomes for me.
Back when I was a kid, I’d scamper from our house amid any summer thunder squall, rush out into the slanting sheets of rain and the lash of wind to fling my arms around in wild gestures and caper about on our lawn like some lil’ wacko baby Zeus.
I’d even try to do this in the late hours bracketing both sides of midnight, while the rest of my family slept on. Or sought to…
In that throbbing darkness, I was enthralled by harsh strobes of light that for an instant showed me tall, brooding towers of cumulonimbus clouds, the incessant drumming of rain on our tin roof, the reverberations of thunderclaps that echoed then faded as they rolled over the landscape. I felt myself at one with all those ancient forest gods who frolicked in the wind, the ancient live oaks with laughing faces formed of jostling branches, and their long, wagging beards formed by plumes of Spanish moss.
Perhaps those feelings of affinity result from the fact that I was born in a hurricane.
That particular storm was dubbed King, and it hit as a potent Cat III. Arrival of its low-pressure center happened to induce labor in my mom a month before I was due. My father heaped limestone boulders in the back of a WWII-era Jeep so he could keep it on the pavement as he drove her to the tiny hospital of our rural town near the Everglades. My arrival was a close call; I nearly entered this world on that hospital’s front doorstep.
“Well, you certainly waited long enough!” James Archer Smith’s crochety senior nurse snipped at my mom. Some forty years later, my mother could still fume for a solid minute over the rudeness and injustice of her comment.
FLIP OF A YAP ISLAND COIN
And yet, much as I admire any great storm, my fascination does not end at meteorologic mayhem.
I also greatly enjoyed Florida’s tranquil, semi-tropical evenings, when beams of gold-green light sifted gently through our surrounding forest, and a galaxy of fireflies began to wink on-and-off in shoals of deepening shade. Whip-poor-wills would voice their haunting calls, while a horned owl began to softly hoot from a roost atop the tallest oak in the woods. And if a full moon happened to be rising, and if a scent of jasmine filled the air, well, my entire world for that moment would seem healed, whole and perfect.
Life in general seems to vibrate back-and-forth on a continuum between mayhem and peace, chaos and order. And as we struggle to locate and navigate a path, our inner selves oft seem to ricochet between conditions that can be loosely categorized as pain or pleasure, ecstasy or suffering. And so we get presented with a core challenge of existence: how to best trek through such a confused and contradictory tumult? Where’s a perspective that can embrace such widely disparate poles of experience, to help us find our footing and make good sense of things?
The challenge of gaining some grip on life surely must mean more than appreciating various phases of our external, natural weather. What about also finding a way to deal with toxic storms in politics, art and culture, ecology and economy, or a way to handle humans who try to manifest as saviors while acting as tyrants? And what about the flow and ebb of wellness and disease, joy and sadness, or confusion and clarity, within our personal psychologies?
TIPS FROM FELLOW TIME TRAVELERS
We tread our trails as individuals. Yet we can surely benefit from the many signals left by those who’ve walked before us. The principle of a collective harvest is just as true of philosophic and mystical notions as it is of civilization’s more practical tools and techniques.
For example, a sharp Greek named Archytas who lived around 400 BC is credited with inventing the rotating inclined plane, i.e. the spiral screw. This development next proceeded to gift humanity with both the wine press and the olive press—which grandly improved the quality of life in both Greece and Italy. (The horizontal screw had been developed long before, which is why those places were already so populous…)
A century-plus on, another hotshot emerged on that scene, Archimedes. Among other achievements, he stuffed Archytas’ screw into a tube, thus turning it into a pump that could raise water—for example—to improve irrigation. Back in those days, a philosopher and a mathematician and a physicist and an alchemist and a physicist and a magician could all be the same person. Your job as a wise guy meant taking on a full-time set of multi-faceted roles.
Notions raised by these people could therefore resonate far and wide. And for a very long time. Like, you know, millennia.
My absolutely fave line from good ol’ Archimedes is this shrewd bit: “Grant me a lever long enough, as well as a place to stand, and I can move the Earth.”
I’d aver that there exists no single formulation more perceptive or useful for manipulating one’s reality than that line right there. Whether it’s your inner reality or outer—the saying can apply to our whole shootin’ match.
A GLEAM IN THE GEM OF THE LOTUS
Even earlier than those two old-timers, along traipsed another incandescent trailblazer, one Gautama Buddha, born in Nepal. Some take the view that Buddha founded a religion; and some consider that faith to be either a heresy of Hinduism, or a theologic evolution of it. However, I don’t consider it a religion at all, and those who seek to label it one are rather missing his point. I see the essence of Buddhist practice as: the discernment and development of an existential, philosophical posture. It’s a view that aims to deliver a tranquil, yet immensely potent mental poise.
And what’s the nub of it? A thorough-going detachment from all human delusions, passions and graspings, even a release from our identification with and as a human self. This is achieved through cultivation of a state of Nirvana or Nibbana.
In the West (when we’re not thinking of Nirvana as a famed grunge rock band) we tend to think of it as a condition of utter spiritual bliss. But if any such ecstatic moment does happen to crop up amid Buddhist practice, it’s also beside the point. Not necessarily irrelevant, yet it can play out as a useless distraction. You’re not meant to go grasping after bliss or happiness or an abundance of satisfaction, none of these. Your goal is a liberal and literal extinction of every effort to own or possess anything, and that includes ridding yourself of lust to win any supposed spiritual good or status.
To contemplate the true condition of a “thus-gone” Buddha, attempt to answer a koan: Where does the light go when a candle is blown out?
“Everywhere” and “Nowhere” are both correct answers.
And now, to briefly close a rhetorical circle, the profound meditative stillness of the Buddha makes a sweet location that answers Archimedes’ request for “a place to stand.” And now to further round out my extended metaphor, the lever used to move the Earth is mind. And the entire Earth that moves also is mind. And you are, as well.
ENTRY IN THE DIARY OF A DESPONDENT
There was a period in my life, a few decades back, when I was about as depressed as a person could be and yet live. The sole task my nervous system could accomplish was to recycle sorrow and the miserable shards of a shattered story. I felt siloed in a doom-loop of negative self-talk.
I couldn’t sleep, could barely manage to feed myself. The only stuff I stuck in my mouth was repulsive junk. Bathing grew infrequent and hygiene haphazard. I felt so mortified by my condition that I began shunning all human contact. A high point of most of my days was lighting up another Camel “straight” (unfiltered) cigarette. No attempt to find a solution, change mental channels or engineer a shift in mood ever seemed to work. So, I gave up.
Yet, anyway, amid my stark lack of alternatives, I plopped my sorry ass down on a zafu cushion for what seemed like a final time. But this time, I gazed out through a dirty window at a sandy, unkempt garden that held only a few ragged plants. The one closest to me was half-dead, a clump of brown, bare twigs and a few struggling green leaves—which was hardly an inspirational view.
“What if,” the thought came to me, “instead of thinking about yourself at all, you simply looked at that plant? I mean, truly looked at it. As if it happened to be the only being left alive in this universe…”
Which is what I proceeded to do. The session lasted for a couple hours, at least. I utterly lost track of time by losing myself in that small, struggling puff of vegetation. Well, I didn’t have anything else to do. And as it turned out, I didn’t have anything better to do, either. That exercise turned a key on a locked escape hatch to liberate me from depression.
It broke through a cycle of recurring dark thoughts. It jacked me out of the deep rut of negative self-cherishing that I’d dug, and been tromping round and round in. I realized that I did not need to focus on my big problems, and I didn’t have to focus on my small problems either. In fact, I did not need to study anyone’s problems at all… Except for those of that abandoned, wee clump of weeds, still doing its ardent best to simply survive. Despite its severe lack of moisture or nutrients, and despite the challenge of heavy fogs, lack of sun, regular assault by salty breezes, this small, vegetative entity was resolutely fighting on and on and on for its very existence.
Ultimately, accelerating aches in my hip, knee and ankle joints, as well as the lumbar vertebrae, summoned me back into awareness of my own body. Yet I also remained keenly aware that my mind didn’t need to stay confined there all the time or, indeed, at any given instant.
Every single shard of my mental content for now stood revealed as utterly fungible and arbitrary. I was free to choose whatever I might focus on, or not even countenance, from each moment to any moment. In retrospect, the solution to my mess was glaringly apparent: Dude, just quit thinking about yourself. Especially, obsessively!
So, at this unusual interstice of time & space, I shuffled on into the kitchen to obtain a glass of water. I gulped down half of it, then went outdoors to pour its other half onto that poor plant.
A PILGRIM’S PROGRESSION
That event launched me onto a renewed quest, a journey of much deeper inquiry. It has yet to end, and actually, it may never cease.
When a cadre of monks from Namgyal Monastery in Dharamshala arrived in San Francisco to create a massive Kalachakra sand mandala at the De Young Museum, I went there every morning to watch the work done by these thin, dark men swathed in robes of russet and gold.
With a steady and peaceful intensity—and absolutely no blueprints around except for the ones toted entirely inside their own heads—the monks scratched a stylus along the ridged sides of metal funnels to put brilliant trickles of powder (ground-up gem stones) in a complex pattern that had been transmitted by the 7th Dalai Lama in the 1700s, and conveyed to the faithful by generations of highly trained monks ever since. This was a conceptual, symbolic map, laid out with geometric precision. It presented a route through the ravages of karma and the wheel of delusion and suffering, ending in nirvana, buddhahood, and enlightenment.
This mandala began to look as if the monks had begun to painstakingly build a 5D microchip wafer, yet there was nothing micro about it. That thing was a large undertaking, an epic work of art.
When a deranged bystander vaulted up onto their table and into the midst of the almost-finished mandala, then wrecked it by scuffing it around with her wild kicks while her screams and curses reverberated through the museum, the monks just calmly observed. They allowed the museum’s guards to lead her away. Then they started over from the beginning.
“We cannot blame or accuse, we have no idea what her karma is,” one told the local media. They didn’t press any vandalism charges. Thus, that lady ended up in therapy, not jail. Later, after their renewed mandala was complete, the monks swept it all up themselves, then poured it into the sea.
Shortly afterward, when I overheard a rumor that the 14th Dalai Lama would quite soon provide a Kalachakra initiation to any interested parties in New York, I gave myself a present of making myself wholly present for that ancient ritual.
WEIGHING THE ANCHORITES
That initiation, plus its attendant events—a Q&A session with Sogyal Rinpoche, chats with other participants, a discovery of intriguing meditation forms—won me a lexicon that assisted with contemplation and understanding of my earlier experience.
I realized I’d not only attained a view into “the secret life of plants” (joke), but also a glimpse of a phenom that went far past that, a vision that soared on into a featureless realm, perhaps a condition of our universe just prior to that first spark of time. A location and a state that old-time Taoists might’ve termed the Unwobbling Pivot or the Uncarved Block. A situation of purity and peace and emptiness that might prove hard to imagine, given all the surging demands, the quotidian welter, of our ordinary human lives. And even so, it seem to me that mind was out there, inhabiting the awesomely barren void, too.
It could seem logical to assume such a distant condition is largely unreachable by us temporal, sentient beings on any regular basis. And yet, as has been said by others, we’re not merely a drop in the ocean, but also the ocean in a droplet. Every aspect or dimension of all of existence is ours by birthright, and likewise, we can also own aspects of non-existence into that bargain.
Now I could perceive a possible destination for myself, in much the same way that Magellan and Drake—and even Archimedes—in their day began to visualize a voyage that might transit the far side of our globe, which was then true terra incognita.
But I was also aware, at this point, I was merely a tourist in Buddhism, and in no way a genuine resident of that culture. I’d enjoyed my visit to a temple, yet I did not dwell in its precincts. Actually, most of my spiritual explorations up until then had been in an intellectual province thoroughly settled by Roman Catholics. I’d spent six years studying to be a priest. So it seemed apropos to put some time into observing what the Catholic mystics might have to say about the route that I contemplated.
After all, work of the monk Thomas Merton had long been an intellectual touchstone for me. Perhaps, those like him now could offer a magnetic lodestone to aid my search.
Consequently, during the next year, I spent quite a bit of time at Trappist and Benedictine monasteries in California and Colorado.
I found that my proposed quest didn’t resonate very well with any of those current monks. Their view of the Cosmos proved different; all they wanted was salvation, forgiveness, and Paradise, and good relations with Jesus and Mary. What interested me most about them were the waystations they’d built along this route. These monasteries served as roadhouses, inns, stagecoach stops, for a wide array of spiritual seekers, day-visitors, and long-retreat participants. People who needed a period of respite and retreat from our world’s oft savage business-as-usual.
It was a touching and compassionate service for monks to provide. On the surface, this appeared to be a by-product of their main practice. However, it seemed to me to be the most useful part of all they had on offer.
AT THE HINGE OF THE SCALES
Achievement of Nirvana in the first instance can and has been characterized as “Hinayana”—which means departing on a small boat or vehicle. It describes liberation for the individual. One entity slips away from the grasp of the wheel of suffering. This could be said of Gautama, as well as the many unknown Buddhas of various species who preceded him.
Except that Gautama did in fact stick around, and he did preach the Dharma to many people for decades. That suggests he actually launched “Mahayana”—the big boat vehicle. It’s the path of a bodhisattva, who postpones departure into full enlightenment till after a period of compassionately sharing truth and succor to other sentient beings.
Which direction should I choose to turn? Head to switching off all suffering as fully and finally as I could, or dive back into the seething stew of human life, blending whatever I’d learned with all the chores and tasks of mundane existence? Should I choose to nest in the calm, or dance in the storm? I decided, to the best of my ability, I’d seek to embody a blend of both themes.
For the record, I don’t consider myself to be an arhat, an adept, or anything other than some kind of shambling apprentice. And in truth, I don’t really seek to rate myself at all. That’s not interesting, and can easily prove counter-productive. I simply place one foot in front of the other whilst I attempt to share what conceivably might be somehat useful to others.
Such as: Not sweating any small stuff can be wonderful training for not sweating the big stuff.
Such as: If you hope to shift your reality in any manner, first find a solid spot to plant both feet.
Such as: Do you want to be a healthy trout? Well, quit rising to rancid bait. Whether it’s someone else’s or even your own.
PACKETS OR WAVES OF LIGHT
I cannot presume to present the following items as certitudes. If you wish to inject yourself with a dose of certainty, try getting advice from the Prosperity Evangelists presently lodging cheek-by-jowl with the occupiers of the White House.
Here we go:
Enlightenment can’t be claimed, vaunted, or owned. Nor be pursued, purchased, purloined, or pimped. Yet what if enlightenment forever stayed as near as your very next breath, or heartbeat, or thought? What if the trick was not to try to possess it, but simply to allow wisdom to enter and possess you?
Whereupon, enlightenment might prove as basic as preparing a patch of ground, then inviting a Buddha to occur near that location… or at some adjacent vicinity. Meaning, within your view.
Or, as the Beat poet Gary Snyder once told me, “It’s better to be a lousy Buddhist than no kind of Buddhist at all.”
