In case anyone is reading...

... I will be on retreat for the next month, posting again mid-January. Have a great holiday and happy new year everyone!

Spirit and the Search for Romance

I've just come home from a first date. Just coffee, you know, about 1.5 hours of "who the hell is this person"?

Am I the only one who feels that the modern practice of "dating" is just a little bit absurd? Back in the day, when we lived as extended families in caves and what not, they didn't have a local Starbuck's where you could meet up with someone who is still virtually a stranger and try to spark "chemistry". Things were a little more intimate from the get-go. There were clan gatherings and sexual initiations and aunts and uncles constantly trying to set you up. That's the society in which the emotions of romance evolved.

Whenever I get back from a date with a new person, I feel sad. Years ago, when I was younger, less experienced, and more desperate, this sadness was covered up with excitement or lust or self-doubt ("Did she like me? Boy she was hot. Will she see me again?") Now that I can cut through that, things are different.

This is the core sadness, the heart of sadness, the basic spiritual longing deep within all of us. It is the old, deep, primordial ache of the original separation from the One. And it comes out after a date like this because of the expectation and artificiality of the situation. Romantic love is a spiritual phenomenon, whether we know it or not. And when it fails to blossom - even if there is still a chance it will blossom later - it reminds us, forcefully, that we are fundamentally alone.

And yes, I had a good time and might see her again. Thank you very much. :-)

Putting it all aside

I have a job interview tomorrow.

Talk about the ultimate on the spot experience! Here I will be, under a microscope, being judged by people who will control whether or not I will brought into their fold - whether or not I will receive money from them, get my lifeblood from them, become one of them.

And yet these are the times in life when we are encouraged to be the most dishonest. "Don't mention this", we are advised. "Make a big deal out of that. Sell yourself!!"

Sell myself? If I present a picture that is distored, that has been tailored to please a particlar audience, am I selling myself? If I put it all aside - my spiritual beliefs, the way I genuinely connect with people, even the blotches on my record - will that lead to the best outcome for me? For them?

Finding a job is a stressful experience. We all need to work to survive, to take care of ourselves and others. For myself, having left my last job in exasperation several months ago and with a giant student debt looming, there is a lot riding on what happens tomorrow. But will I really do myself a service by begging, by playing the part they want me to play at all costs?

What if we could go into a job interview seeing it as a spiritual practice? One being of light and awareness, going to encounter other beings of light and awareness, to see if we connect in the right way. Nothing more. And trusting, fully trusting, that the more authentic we can be, the more authentic the outcome would be.

Now that takes guts.

Deep feeling fascination

Well, I had a talk with one of my teachers today that was something of a wake-up call (he's good with those). Yet again, I have been fascinated by fascination.

It is so easy to find something to attach to. What are you good at? Dancing? Singing? Arguing? Seducing? Writing a blog? Whatever it is, you can become fascinated by it and attached to continued success with it. Like a drug, you need to keep increasing the dose to feel good from it. Or, what are you bad at? What frustrates you more than anything else in this world? You can become fascinated with that too, wrapped up in the story of your inferiority, deriving a perverse pleasure from the idea that someday you will achieve the impossible goal - or perhaps, from the idea that you are a miserable wretch who never will.

Lately my fascination has been with meditation and chi. Yes, I am good at working with chi. Very good, in fact. So good that it becomes a roadblock and a high. I can make myself stoned just with the power of my thoughts. And even when I avoid doing that, the high finds other ways to penetrate my consciousness by taking other forms to fascinate me with. Only in rare moments of true, deep clarity do I escape the siren's call and just open to the raw beauty of existence.

What does it take to truly drop the ego and detach from everything? To lose obsessive fascination, and develop the ability to just be and enjoy?

Astrological addiction

Is there any room for astrology on the spiritual path?

Many traditions (including mine) emphasize the need to LET GO of the future. Let go of your little ego, worrying about what's going to happen to you, or what did happen to you. And they emphasize focusing on the present. NOW is where it's at. NOW is the key.

And I do my best to live in the NOW. But I still find myself fascinated by predictions about my future. Every Thursday when Vancouver's free daily comes out, what do I do? I take one out of the sidewalk box, flip to the back page, read my five-line horoscope, and then put it back. Goings-on around town be damned: I want to know about ME. And then on the first of every month, it's off to Astrology Zone for the full-on detailed update.

Astrology, fortune-telling, psychobabble, the whole shebang has been the purview of spiritual types since the beginning. Although in the last millenium or two the monotheistic West has attempted to make a break with this tradition and relegate such practices to "black magic", the appeal survives, and in this age of religious pluralism it is flourishing like never before. And in the East - as detailed in the fascinating read, "A Fortune Teller Told Me" - the tradition never stopped.

Why this pull? Why do even supposedly "highly enlightened" beings seek out and engage in these practices? Can we not dance with the cosmic mind as it happens, rather than trying to anticipate where it is evolving to?

Choice and fear

Yesterday I received one of the most inspired spiritual instructions I have yet heard. I wanted to share it (and also write it down so I won't forget it).

For the last several months, I have been preoccupied with choice and fear.

"OK," I've thought to myself. "I'm stepping out of my old habitual patterns... going beyond my normal egoic defences... climbing to the edge of my preconceptions... putting one foot out the door..."

Then suddenly: "AAAHHHGG! There's nothing out here! My road map is gone! I'm falling!! There's nothing to grab! What do I do?? HELP!!"

When you start to live deeply in the moment, you naturally begin to notice that you have defensive patterns that you cling too: a certain way that you deal with anger, perhaps, or with speaking in public, or with meeting a beautiful stranger. And once you see those patterns, you also begin to notice that you no longer have to stick to them. You have a choice. You begin to experience freedom.

But what to choose? Almost as soon as you taste freedom, you taste fear. You can't rely on what you know, and this provokes a sinking, disorienting, and sometimes dark feeling. Buddhists call it "groundlessness", and apparently it's a good sign. Western psychology calls it the "neutral zone", and apparently it's a natural part of the growth process.

I just call it freaky.

I've been asking my various teachers about how to deal with this, but haven't received much in the way of guidance. Until yesterday. Then I was given this:

We can think of ourselves as living in three concentric "zones" which encircle us. The first zone, closest in, is the "comfort" zone. In this zone we are in the familiar and the cozy, but things are sluggish and there is no sense of progress. Perhaps we can lie fallow here at times, but we cannot live here forever. The second zone, next out, is the "edge". In this zone we are challenged. There is some fear, and a bit of confusion, but we can handle it, and when we rise to the challenge, we learn and grow. The third zone, on the outside, is the darkness. Here, things are overwhelming. Fear and confusion cause us to shut down and burn out, and if we spend too much time here we can get seriously hurt.

Along the spiritual path, we cycle through all three of these zones. We often undergo challenging situations in our "edge", facing our fears with wisdom, bravery, and gentleness. But sooner or later, we get pushed over the edge into the darkness. We know we are there because our fear becomes overwhelming and we aren't able to make good choices any more. At that point, all we can do is stay present with the fear, know it is "just fear", and drop the need to do anything about it. Sometimes, we need to fall back into our comfort zone for a while, waiting to build strength so we can return to the edge and take on the next challenge. But this is OK! We haven't failed. To the contrary, we have succeeded: we have faced the darkness and survived.

As we watch our fears in this way, they melt. Facing the darkness over and over again slowly expands the size of our edge, so that situations we found paralyzing a year ago, or five years ago, or fifty years ago, become manageable now. And as the fears melt, we find that the energy they release becomes useful to us. Like magic, the fears gradually transform into confidence and wisdom, and then we are no longer lost. We can go beyond our habitual patterns without freaking out, and we are free, at least, to make real choices.

A special thank you to Brian Callaghan of the Halifax Shambhala sanga for this teaching. May this account be accurate, or at the very least, not a complete bastardization.

Dances of ecstacy part 3

At my meditation centre, we focus on... well, meditating. But surely on a contemplative path, there is room for movement as well. I know that some spiritual traditions have drawn on dancing - whirling dervishes for instance, and also Osho. And as described in the new book "Trance Formation", there is a budding spiritual movement among young people (and some not so young people) in rave and techno culture.

I have been to several events in the rave scene that felt more like a yoga retreat, or even a mass, than a nightclub or a giant party. And what I have experienced has been great - lots of connection, fun people, and open-hearted spirit. But I think we can go even further. While these ritualistic revelries make for a good time, and are far superior to the testosterone-and-silicon landscape of your typical discotheque, one important ingredient is lacking that I think could lead to an even more profound experience: wakefulness.

There is a certain awake intensity at meditative workshops and retreats. Sitting with your mind, learning how it works, and truly getting in touch with your egolessness allow you to live in the present and experience joy, deep peace, and faith. And there is also a certain vibrant intensity at spiritual rave events, which allow you to connect with others and to dance your hangups and blocks to exhaustion.

Could we somehow put these together? Could we start a dance party with a period of silence? Could we sit and recieve meditation instruction all day, perform rituals in the evening, and then dance all night in our hightened state of connectedness?

And if we did, how would we feel?