Fairy tales often convey deep meaning. Take Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the ugly duckling. A baby swan is orphaned and raised by ducks. The ducks know he is not one of them, and the little creature suffers a lot of abuse from them.

fundamental confusion

The baby swan then leaves in search of where he feels he belongs. He comes upon some hens who tell him “You are not a hen.” It goes off very lonely, sad and confused, thinking to himself “I don’t belong anywhere.”

reflection

He sees a flock of swans on a lake, and in despair decides to throw himself at the flock of swans deciding that it is better to be killed by these impressive birds than to live a life of ugliness and misery. He is shocked when the swans welcome him, only to realize by looking at his reflection in the water that he has grown into one of them.

The flock takes to the air, and the now beautiful swan spreads his wings and takes flight with the rest of his new family.

awakening to what we are

This story may resonate with what many of us reading these newsletters are up to: searching for deeper sense of who we are, and awakening to our true nature. It’s poignant this awakening happened when the swan recognized who he was in his reflection in the water.

The meditative path provides a very reliable compass that points to a profound inner knowing of ourselves, as Socrates implored. At his trail, Socrates uttered “the unexamined life is not worth living.” His life was about encouraging people to profoundly understand themselves and give meaning to their lives.

ignorance

In the Buddhist teachings, the three poisons of ignorance, attachment, and aversion keep us hostage to samsara, repeating over and over unskillful actions that cause us grief and confusion, and keep this liberating inner knowing out of reach.

recognition

The meditative path helps clear this confusion, allowing a profound recognition of what we are not – an isolated, confused, orphaned entity. Like the little swan in our story, we take flight in the sky of inter-being, manifesting as pure and total aliveness, surrendered into a non-grasping, radically inclusive, loving presence.

wholeness

The basis of our problem is ignorance. Ignorance is not a state that we find ourselves in, but an inability to recognize our wholeness. Our culture teaches us to believe in things which are not true. We are caught in a story of me and mine, and obsessed with self-protection and aggrandizement. The ego is hungry and guarded.

James Low claims that “all psychiatric disorders are forms of preoccupation.” We just can’t seem to let go of this preoccupation with self and all its manifestations. In yesterday’s Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin reported that the Dalai Lama was worried that, under Trump, the United States was becoming more “selfish, nationalist.”

our practice: a priceless jewel

We are living in tumultuous times, a perfect storm of catastrophes, a list of which is too long to include here. Our practice is a priceless jewel that cuts through all the bullshit, recognizes our inter-being, and manifests as self-less love and compassion.

Our very survival may depend on it.

The other night my wife and kids threw me a 60th birthday party where, after the usual social stuff, folks started dancing to 60’s music. Great songs from the Beatle’s White Album segued into the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Starship, and Van Morrison, for a deliciously long time, with Jose Feliciano’s Light My Fire as an afterhour’s sonic nightcap.

At one point an old friend said while we were both dancing “this brings up so many memories.” It was an incredibly sweet and fulfilling moment.

The following day, while meditating, I found myself struggling, somewhat philosophically, with the pull of nostalgic feelings leftover from the ambrosial moments I remembered while dancing to songs like Back In The USSR, Here Comes your 19th Nervous Breakdown, Astral Weeks, and, of course, the Grateful Dead’s Truckin’.

What was I “supposed” to do in meditation? Note them as “nostalgic feelings” while calmly observing them moment by moment, or allow them in to flood my being with the warmth and joy with which they came, uninvited, but happily and intuitively welcomed like old friends I haven’t seen in decades?

Is feeling authentically warmed and heartened by nostalgia a giving in to samsara?

The answers you would get would greatly vary depending on who you ask.

This is not an email purporting to have an answer. But I will share my own experiences from that night and the following days.

I cleverly (egoic-ly) reminded myself that the Buddhist term translated into English as “mindfulness” originates in the Pali term “sati” and in its Sanskrit counterpart smṛti.

Smṛti originally meant “to remember”, “to recollect”, “to bear in mind”, as in the Vedic tradition of remembering sacred texts. The Pali term “sati” also means “to remember” — in the Satipațțhāna-sutta the term “sati” means to remember the dharmas as a springboard to the deep deconstruction of reality culminating in liberation.

So remembering and savoring the sweet dharmas from my playlist it must be cool, right?

The next day, before sitting, while doing dishes, I decided to put on some of my favorite 60’s bands, and savored the songs like exquisite pasta while soapy hands did their thing in the sink.

But here’s the rub, in the pleasant rush of my newly discovered secret tryst with the past, I found myself wanting more. I can’t remember how many times I interrupted the dishes routine, dried my hands, so as to safely choose special, individual albums on Spotify on my phone, and re-engage in the in the dishes, mumbling to myself, gee, this album isn’t as good as I remembered.

I felt like an addict trying to milk a fix for all it had.

I took a breath and could see the wanting, comparing mind propelling me on a mission to find the perfect nostalgic high, which would Not Fade Away (by Buddy Holly, The Stones, but by my favorite, by The Grateful Dead).

Basic Four Noble Truths stuff here — wanting leads to clinging, which leads to disillusionment and stress, all in the blink of an eye sometimes.

My heartfelt takeaway: that there is a sweet spot with nostalgia, in the blessed middle between the arising of nostalgic ambrosia, its nourishing blossoming in the heart, and the arising of clinging and wanting more; and judging and comparing albums and versions of songs.

In meditation I sat immersed in nostalgic bliss and practiced watching the arising of clinging, and allowing it to pass, while still savoring the sweet feeling tones as body sensations.

I got curious and hit the search engines.

The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) defines “nostalgia” as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.” But when the Swiss doctor Johannes Hoffer first coined the term in 1688, nostalgia was seen as a neurological disease which was attributed to demonic causes. Symptoms of nostalgia were thought to include “bouts of weeping, anxiety, irregular heartbeat, anorexia, insomnia, and even smothering sensations.”

Sounds like extreme homesickness, not the sweet nostalgia I was feeling.

It was fascinating to discover, as I pursued this new joy via Google, that contemporary psychologists have come to view nostalgia in fundamentally positive ways.

Take for example these findings:

In the scientific paper entitled The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as Existential Resource Juhl et al. (2010) argue that while nostalgia has the potential to increase positive mood, bolster self-concept, and strengthen social connectedness, it also serves an existential function.

The researchers found that nostalgia worked not only to buffer the threat of death anxiety, but also helped to boost perceptions of one’s life as meaningful.
They found that nostalgia is a positive emotional reflection that fulfills a wide range of psychological functions, and argue in this paper that it should be seen as a psychological strength rather than a liability or pathology.

I found this line by Loyola psychologist Dr. Fred Bryant in another paper from 2006 illuminating:

“Nostalgia can give one a sense of being rooted, a sense of meaning and purpose–instead of being blown around by the whims of everyday life.”

Sounds like our dear mindfulness meditation, right?

Maybe we are on to something here.

Maybe, as in the refrain from the 1971 Carly Simon song Anticipation:

“These are the good old days.”

We all need each other

It’s been an eventful past couple of weeks. Two weeks ago we experienced yet another horror with the Charleston killing of 9 people as they were worshipping in what we all would take to be the place of Ultimate Security, their church. Mysterious fires in African-American churches in the south continue this week.

Last week, the Pope hosted a visit to the Vatican of 46 Buddhist teachers, educators and leaders who were unofficially representing so-called “Western” Buddhism in the USA. Romereports.com, a news outlet covering all this Papal, mentioned that “Pope Francis clearly enjoyed the event, as he was beaming on his way out of the meeting.”

In a meeting hosted by the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops this week, the Pope spoke to the group and said:

This is a visit of fraternity of dialogue and of friendship. And this is good. This is healthy. In this moment in our world which is wounded by wars and hatred these small gestures are seeds of peace and fraternity. I really thank you for this. And may God bless you.

This brought tears to my eyes, having been raised in a very devout Catholic environment.

Yes, we are different from each other

It’s really funny how different people are — men are completely different from women; it’s amazing that we can’t even talk to each other! Older folks are different from younger folks. People interested in spirituality are different from those who aren’t.

We differ in socio-economic conditions, political views, moral notions, and the list goes on — but at the same time there is something very much the same about all of us.

The hugely popular Christian pastor Rick Warren recently made this very important statement:

“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”

These words from two very different Christian leaders with huge followings, the Pope and Rick Warren, highlight what we who identify to some degree or other with the core Buddhist teachings aspire to practice every day.

We are certainly different from each other in many ways.

But are we really?

Although we are all so different, yes, In many ways we are all exactly the same. We are born, we die, we love somebody or hope to love somebody. Everybody has something that matters to them in just the same way. Even if what matters one person is radically different from what matters to another, the way in which things matter to us is exactly the same.

The Dalai Lama is fond of saying “Everyone just wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering.”

It just so astounding to me how much we are all alike and how little we notice this. When we meet each other our tendencies seem to be wary, to wonder about the differences, to wonder if the other person is acceptable to us or if we are accepted it acceptable to them. I think that’s what we notice most.

What’s just so incredibly important for me has been to actually feel with my own heart that loving and caring for others, the heart of both the Christian and Buddhist paths, can actually be learned and cultivated

It’s not just that you are either have it or you don’t, you’re born with it or not, it is or isn’t in your genes or family upbringing.

We can actually walk a path and perform daily exercises that build our compassion muscles, to actually cultivate altruistic joy and compassion, even if we feel misery and despondency.

This just blows me away when I reflect on it.

Jesus and the Buddha on Love

I reflect on the most important teachings I received in my Mahayana training days – the cultivation of bodhicitta, or the desire spiritual awakening. Now this doesn’t sound like compassion, this spiritual awakening business, unless you look a little deeper into the philosophy.

In this tradition “spiritual awakening” equals awakening to heartfelt concern for others, no matter who they are, period.

On first glance, this doesn’t sound as flashy as liberation from our troubling inner burdens or, sigh, experiencing limitless and unspeakable bliss.

Perhaps a terse Mahayana response would be something like “deal with it.”

Now the point here is not to favor any soteriological position over another, just to bring home this point, again — that is what spiritual awakening actually is, awakening to heartfelt concern for others, no matter who they are.

In the Christian view, Jesus died to save humanity from suffering, “he stretched his arms open wide and died for the salvation of all”, and absolutely no one was excluded from that sacrifice.

We really do need each other just as we are

This is one way I began to see, from my own Catholic background, to see that any selfish wish for my own cool spiritual jollies can never lead to genuine awakening, as it just leads to more and more narrowness and self-absorption, albeit on increasingly subtle levels, often below the horizon of conscious awareness.

Spiritual awakening is dropping this separateness, based on the deep insight that none of us is alone and that we all need each other. We can’t any more simply favor ourselves over others, even when these feelings arise.

We get to see really deeply in our own hearts just how painful these feelings of mistrust and wariness really are.

And the Pope’s recent, bold encyclical on climate change brings this home: not only do we need each other spiritually, but indeed, even to survive in the coming years.