Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Tag: Krishnamurti

a keener love of simplicity
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around. Traveling lightly, we feel airborne. We move into a keener love of simplicity.
There is a story by Mark Twain about someone who dies and goes to “heaven” and gets a pair of wings and a harp. At first, they used the wings as a way of moving around the new place, and plucked on the strings of the harp trying to get some divine tunes out of it.
They soon realize, though, that in this place you don’t need wings to go anywhere and simply by desiring to hear divine tunes, celestial musicians (their house band, I suppose) show up and play.
After dropping the wings and the harp, they found a profound fulfillment in simply being.
We all just want to be happy and feel at home in our own lives, but, as the song goes, we are looking in all the wrong places.
We burden ourselves with unnecessary wings or harps thinking that happiness is all about having certain things or acting in a special way. Many of the voices we listen to lead us on a long walk on the hedonic treadmill Buddhists call samsara.
But one day we have this marvelous insight: we already have what we need.
This meditation is a radical act of self-discovery. We uncover the treasure of our very own being. We lose interest in listening to the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.
One of my teachers Sharon Salzberg says:
We learn not to get caught in trying to reach after things we never really needed to begin with.
Along these lines, the poet Rumi asks:
How long will we fill our pockets
Like children with dirt and stones?
Let the world go. Holding it
We never know ourselves, never are air-born.
Rumi, translated by Andrew Harvey
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around so we can be airborne and travel lightly. We move into a keener love of simplicity — of lifestyle, speech, and even how to do the dishes and arrange our sitting space.
We get less caught up in what others say about us, or imagine they say.
The grip on our likes and dislikes softens.
We eventually get how much nicer it is to relax into our natural, free and easy being-ness that is already right here, right now, than it is to struggle with having things be other than they are how they are.
But if we haven’t tasted this free-and-easy being-ness, it can be a hard sell to the psyche.
You’ll know the sweet taste of being-ness by accidentally stumbling upon it in your practice.
You can’t make this happen on purpose.
You just need to develop a daily meditation habit and put the time in. As the late Indian author and speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti remarked:
Enlightenment is an accident. Meditation makes you accident prone.
Then, each moment is fine. Each moment is enough.
Each moment, no matter how mundane or annoying, is profound and meaningful.
We practice, as the poet Wendell Berry tells us in this his poem The Wild Geese:
… not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
Be well, dear reader.
02/02/2024
it’s now or never
Mindfulness loosens the “interminable chain of longing” as Robert Frost puts it, so I have half a chance of living this moment now.
One of my first meditation teachers, Sharon Salzberg, often talks about her early days learning how to meditate in India under her teacher, Munindra. One of his first counsels to her was:
Try to be with each breath as though it was your first, and as though it was your last.
Anagarika Munindra
Being with each breath as if it were the first is a training wheel exercise for being with any moment as if it were for the first time.
Can we live each conversation we have over breakfast with our housemate as it it were our first?
Can we search for that super important email as though it were for the first time we misplaced an email- without the uncessary inner friction (e.g. why does this always happen)?
if I don’t remember this, I get bored or restless
I notice that when I don’t try to do this I fall into a kind of wistfulness, boredom, or restlessness; mind states Robert Frost perhaps describes in this line from one of his last poems:
All is an interminable chain of longing.
The Anxiety of Happiness
Just being here, being present is enough– I didn’t do a good job at modeling this maxim of mindfulness to our kids as they were growing up. When some cool new event was coming up, like a birthday, or an outing, I would remind tell them from time to time- you know, your friend’s birthday party is coming up.
As if anticipating a birthday party were more important than whatever it was we were doing at the moment, like getting ready for the day or eating dinner.
Isn’t this something we all do- sacrifice the present moment for some imagined future one?
I catch myself wanting, waiting for, or expecting something, anything but this boring present moment- practically all day long.
It’s like I’m on hold on a call I placed to myself.
Mindfulness helps loosen the “interminable chainof longing” as Frost puts it, so I have half a chance of living this moment now. And having a more intimate experience with whatever is arising.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya of Burma reminds us:
Nothing is ever the same, every moment is always new. Once you can really see this, your mind will always be interested in whatever it observes. No moment will ever bore because your experience shows that “things” are forever changing
Sayadaw U Tejaniya
Mindfulness loosens the grip of concepts and opinions have on me about how things should be. I feel more open and soft with how things are if I can remember to invite mindfulness.
U to Shirasagi by Utamaro Kitagawa (1753-1806); original from Library of Congress
That last part of Munindra’s advice to Sharon, to be with each breath as though it were the last, becomes more meaningful the older I get. It brings front and center a complacency that can set in when my practice starts to feel stale.
It’s amazing how out of touch with reality I can get if I’m not mindful.
Sharon’s teaching partner of many decades, Joseph Goldstein, observes:
It’s like we’ve been put under a spell—believing that this or that is going to be the source of our ultimate freedom or happiness. And to wake up from that spell, to be more aligned with what is true, it brings us much greater happiness.
This is the priceless gift of our mindfulness practice- to be intimate with our moment by moment experience whatever it is– is to wake from this spell of postponement.
To answer that call you placed to yourself after being on hold so long.
In the words of the late Krishnamurti:
Freedom is now or never.
Choose now.
08/06/2023
not a caravan of despair
Do you have a fear of missing out on a more spiritual experience doing a mountain of laundry, washing a sinkful of dishes, or raking leaves till kingdom come?
The meditation teacher Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece published in Lion’s Roar, rightfully calls us on this thought, while describing how the domestic lives of the communal Zen masters of old offered many a critical course correction:
Rather than think of daily life chores as something to get through; it’s fully experiencing the “getting through” part that frees the mind more profoundly than running off to a cave in the misty mountains.
In Do Dishes, Rake Leaves, she asks:
Tell me, while I’m sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from my life?
Do Dishes, Rake Leaves
There is a break in this piece while she makes simple observations about folding clothes and washing dishes. Then she answers her own question:
Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes: the life I’m dreaming of.
Then another short narrative digression, ending with:
At the moment that I’m raking leaves, at the moment I’m doing anything, it is my life; it is all of time, and it is all of me.
Pause and ask yourself:
do you really and truly feel you are missing out on some more spiritual experience by being saddled with a mountain of laundry, a sink overflowing with dishes, or a yard full of leaves to rake?
I like Josh Korda’s line, that our mindfulness practice is
not really about being above it all; it’s about being with it all.
Whether in sitting meditation or raking leaves or doing the laundry, our core practice is to notice what is happening.
When you feel irritated, bothered, or bored, just be aware of mind states and their underlying feeling tones. Or the feeling tones and their undelying mind states.
As soon as you notice these feelings, and the awareness in which they arise, you are no longer lost in them.
As the Korean monk Haemin Sunim writes:
Awareness is inherently pure, like the open sky. Stress, irritation, and anger can temporarily cloud the sky, but they can never pollute it.
The wave of irritation, anger, boredom, or whatever it is, naturally recedes on its own as long as you don’t feed it by dwelling or spinning an interesting narrative around it.
This is not just detachment; we also learn to turn towards and gently open to the sadness or grief that seeks our attention, triggering perhaps sadness, shame or fear.
I love how Pema Chodron describes this essential skill:
We join our loss of heart with honesty and kindness. Instead of pulling back from the pain of irritation we move closer. We lean into the wave. We swim into the wave.
Mindful poetry
Mindfulness is this simple: we pay attention to what’s happening in the moment, let go of any stories we may tell ourselves about our experiences, and “swim into the wave.”
As Jiddu Krishnamurti put it:
Pure attention without judgment is not only the highest form of human intelligence but also the highest expression of love.
As you get better at it, you realize that challenging mental states are just the resistance to what is. And they rise and recede within the silent space of your awareness.
When you sit down to meditate today, feel any resistance which may come up — to aches, pains, or mental states such as boredom, restlessness, or doubt.
Savor the resistance, like a fine wine or a smooth boba tea.
As it dissipates, feel the joy of the quieting mind, which is always there.
Ours is a practice of uncovering joy and fulfillment in our lives just as they are, regardless of our circumstances.
Rumi has the last word this week; on his tomb is purportedly written:
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of life. Though you have broken your vow a hundred times, ours is not a caravan of despair.
Poems of Rumi
read another?
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07/13/2023
Buddhist death meditation: letting go of regrets
Buddhist death meditation encourages a gradual letting go of regrets.
In her most recent book, Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch, the 81-year-old Zen teacher, editor and writer Susan Moon relates an ordeal she went through while riding on public transit from Berkeley to the San Francisco airport.
When she got to the airport, she realized that her carry-on bag, which had her IDs, credit cards, cash, appointment book and teaching notes, had been stolen.
She writes she felt “stripped of everything.”
She could not board her flight to her teaching gig without her ID, but she still had her round-trip public transit ticket. So she took the train back to Berkeley. And on the way home, she had an epiphanic insight.
Yes, she lost some valuable stuff, but she suddenly realized she still had her life, her body, her family, and her friends.
“I touched my own knees in amazement, and wanted to jump up and down in the train, shouting, `I’m alive! I’m alive!’ She writes:
The theft was a strange gift. I lost some objects, yes, and I gained a sense of gratitude for my life that is still with me. I often forget how amazing it is to be alive, but if I concentrate, I can open a drawer in my mind and find the memory of that train ride.
My life feels more complicated each day, with a ridiculous number of choices to make and noise to filter out. I get stuck in overwhelm mode. My system gets bogged down, flooded with sticky memories triggered by the media.
As much as I try to practice culture war pacifism, the news still gets to me. But then I reflect on the words of the American Buddhist monk, Ajahn Nisabho:
There is a role for political discussion, for talking to people about what is meaningful. But it’s very important to understand that as practitioners of this path, you have stepped into a higher order narrative and received something which is far more important than the political debate of the day.
Reading this, I take a breath and try to connect with this “higher order narrative.”
I appreciate the late Indian philosopher Krishnamurti’s words here:
You think you’re thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts.
Yeah, and many of us even take our cell phones to bed with us. I admit to being guilty as charged (or maybe guilty when charged–my phone, that is.)
what is this higher order narrative?
The other day I sat in meditation, turning Ajahn Nisabho’s phrase over in my head: what is this higher order narrative I have stepped into? And as nature would have it, I had my own epiphanic insight.
I’m not sure I can describe it in my own words, but a few lines from the poem “When Death Comes,” by Mary Oliver kept coming up.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
perfect just as it is right now
Our simple mindfulness shows us this amazing, crazy world is perfect, just as it is right now. It couldn’t be otherwise.
Yes, even my life as it is right now: overweight, under-exercised, and not looking forward to the long drive home in heavy morning traffic from my night shift job.
I used to feel quite depressed. A part of me was consumed with fantasies and expectations: my kids, my marriage, my meditation practice, my crazy job.
I’m much happier now.
letting go of these fantasies of some other life
Finding happiness was about letting go of these fantasies and realizing that life is truly amazing without them. I would even say–especially without them.
My higher order narrative is just this: when I lie on my deathbed, can I let go of any regrets for having just been me?
Thank you Suan Moon, for the gift of having your bag stolen on public transit, and for sharing it with us.
05/30/2023