Tag: Perspective

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Deep Listening

The way we frame things changes how we see. I’ve recently started viewing my spiritual practice through the lens of listening, and I have been surprised and enriched at the many layers.

Because I’m a visual and mental person, listening shifts my attention to a different mode, less used, underappreciated. A stream of thoughts is always running in my mind, flowing at different rates, but pausing to listen can slow it to a trickle. The pause makes room for my perceptions to widen, to gather jewels I would normally miss. At any point in the day, I can stop and pay attention to the sounds around me. Even in the most urban environments, I can hear the notes of birdsong, or the whisper of a breeze. Underneath the melody of a song I’ve heard a hundred times, there is a rolling bass line I’d never noticed. When I tune in, there is more.

Or in conversation, if I concentrate on listening instead of drafting replies in my head, I pick up tone and nuance that paint a fuller picture. For any of us, there is more going on inside than we can express with words. Listening puts me in touch with the person behind the words, and it is the person, after all, I want to understand. It is as if I bring a part of the person inside myself. If I listen well, the other person feels heard. The intimacy between us deepens.

In meditation, my listening begins as auditory, hearing sounds in the room, or the sound of my breathing, but usually shifts to placing attention on my beingness. Listening turns inside itself, an organ or perception that is not physical, an entry into other worlds. The curtains of my inner life rustle. The lesser spaces that are normally unnoticed come into focus and flourish, responding to my attention like plants to sunlight. The physical and nonphysical start to merge. My breath, drifting in and out of my chest and belly, aligns with energies that were hidden. I listen to find what is here, what these energies want to do, if they want to move or remain. Rolling tide or spacious calm; magnetic force or gravity at rest; a fountain of sparks or silence. Moments come when listening is not an action I am doing, the verb and noun collapse, there is only pure curiosity. I sense anticipation, but without the forward leaning I usually add – the urge to know what will arrive and compare it with my expectations.

My identity, which depends so heavily on my need to know, loosens. My self-image was always a bubble, a mental construct that kept essence at a distance. But essence keeps tapping my shoulder, reminding me that my need for certainty is not a need, but a choice. Deep listening leaves me wide open. It is not that the window is fully open, it is that there are no walls to hold a window.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

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Stop Quibbling

I have a tendency to be short-sighted.

Lately, my life seems stuck, caught in a trickle of details that matter little. Events are careening across the planet, unsettling the ground and stretching reality. I want to do something to stop the chaos and cruelty, but I feel small and numb. How can I help push us toward sanity, even a smidgen? My choices do not seem to matter.

But then, that’s me. When fear grips me, I tend to catastrophize and lose track of the larger cycles I am part of. To gain perspective, I have to step back. Way back.

It’s true, of course, my life has been a series of choices. Decisions I made in school, work, and romance, the interests and passions that rose and faded, were all forks in the road, taken or abandoned. I’m here because I knocked on door two instead of door three, answered this ad and not that one. All had consequences. But it’s a mistake to think the choices were mine alone. If I lift my head from my current worries, I see a line of ancestors stretching into the distance who have been making choices for a long time.

My family came to this country almost three hundred years ago on a three-masted ship called The Crown. They huddled in the squalid cargo hold for two months with five hundred other people. I don’t know why they left their homes, but the fertile river valley they lived in had been in dispute between warring powers for centuries. The times must have seemed desperate. And my ancestors further back? Ancient Europe, the caves at Lascaux, the plains of Africa? Who knows, but I doubt life was easier. I’m sure they all faced hardship, and yet their courage and perseverance brought me to this moment. 

I feel their presence, as if they are watching me, waiting to see how I will act. I don’t need to know the particulars of their lives to know they wanted to be safe, to flourish, and to nurture a future where their progeny could do the same. However limited their options, they took small steps in the direction of hope so that tomorrow might be brighter than today.

From this perspective, I realize I have more choice and face less danger than any of my ancestors. I am here because of a long line of choices by people who cared. Don’t I care too? Why am I complaining, whining myself into paralysis? I hear their voices, “Stop quibbling; act yourself into the future; take your own small steps that continue the work of creation; make us proud.”

Photo by Kate Kasiutich on Unsplash

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Unlearn the Constellations

“We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”

          Jack Gilbert, from his poem, “Tear it Down”

When did we first try to corral the stars – was it the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Mayans, Chinese astronomers of the Zhou dynasty? According to their traditions, the first Australians have been mapping the skies for 50,000 years. Or was it further back, archaic humans, their memories lost in time, who looked up in awe and wondered themselves into the night sky?

Constellations are human constructs, framing the stars with stories that explain something to us, about us; that we are brave, or foolish, or brokenhearted. We project our fears, desires, and frailties onto a glorious cast of characters – a guardian dragon, a boastful hunter, a vain queen, seven sisters seeking safety, wise animals offering guidance, the twins who stand at the portal between the worlds. Constellations reflect our nature back to us so we can ponder who we are.

I love stories because they help me make sense of things. They make the incomprehensible grandeur of the cosmos something I can relate to. But reducing reality into meaning diminishes the light and color of the stars themselves, as any filter must. We are arrogant if we think the stars have meaning because we name them. There was a time when they had no names, and we looked at them directly, fully as they are.

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Simply Notice

Tension has seeped into my musculature and made itself at home. It’s a hidden force that sits along the ridge of my shoulders and neck, like an army occupying the high ground awaiting an attack. The grip is silent and unnoticed until I place my attention there. Once seen, it’s advantage shrinks, and the tightness starts to dissipate like slow air from a balloon. I continue watching, take a long breath, adjust my posture, and exhale. Simply noticing my body causes things to ease.

I can be gripped by the nonphysical too, thought loops rolling across the musculature of my mind. Ruminations manufacture whole scenarios, embellished stories about the past, or fantasy futures I am wishing for or against. Placing my attention on these mental fabrications can deflate them, too. In some ways, thoughts are stickier because they’re not concrete and can slip by unquestioned. Thinking carries a false authority until we see that not all thoughts are true. Some, maybe most, are working drafts to occupy a mind prone to worry.

The first step is to notice. A world of benefits follow, but it’s hard to get there if I don’t cultivate the foundational skill of noticing. This requires a stepping out and a looking at; pushing pause on the movie of my life and peeking behind the camera. Often, I’m so caught in activity mode that the images rushing by create a convincing reality, when in truth, my perception has narrowed to a slim range. When I push pause and look deeper, reality becomes much, much bigger:  I recognize my muscles are tense, holding a pain I did not realize was grief; I sense my thoughts are racing, but they lose their speed and urgency when I give them my attention; even the sprouting tulips are more red, more fragile, once I truly see them.

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The Two Roots – Awareness and Love

The physical world rests upon a substrate, base components at the fundamental layer of existence. Electrons, protons, and neutrons swirl in a dance of atoms, combining to make hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, water, air, soil, and everything else. All that we can see or touch derives from these basic building blocks.

The metaphysical world rests upon a substrate too. At the fundamental layer are the irreducible forces of awareness and love, the base components from which everything derives. All that we can hope for in a spiritual life sprouts from this double helix.

Appearance, sensation, perception, attention, thought, reflection, insight, ideas – none of these are possible without the faculty of awareness. Its absence cannot even be described as a dark void, because darkness and emptiness can be sensed, and without sentience, there is nothing. Simply and completely nothing. Awareness makes the vibrancy of life accessible.

Empathy, compassion, affection, friendship, fellowship, community, generosity, mercy, union – these are the shades of love that give meaning to what arises in awareness; its absence would reduce sentience to the dry and motionless act of observance. Love makes the experience of life worthwhile.

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Our Basic Nature is Goodness

I approach life with the assumption that people act with good intent. This is not wishful thinking, it’s an observation. Look at how we proceed through life and through history. It seems each human life repeats the progress of our species.

We all have desires, dreams, goals we’re reaching toward. But the focus of what we want changes depending on where we are in our growth trajectory. We start with a core need for physical and emotional survival. We learn how to get by in a world we are grappling to understand, and as our basic needs are met, we’re drawn to something more. As we learn the basic skills of school, work, and career, we also explore our needs for creativity and engagement, topics and activities that interest and excite us. And, of course, we feel the strong need to connect with others in bonds of friendship, community, and love.

As we walk through life, all of these needs are continually pulled by a moral gravity to higher orders of consciousness. While our early efforts are directed toward ourselves, maturity brings an expansion outward. We’re no longer satisfied with only selfish concerns, our focus grows to include the welfare of others. Anyone who reaches a basic level of maturity strives to enhance the world for others, to make the world a better place.

This matches the growth trajectory of human history on a grander scale. Over the millennia, an innate drive has pulled us constantly toward greater freedom, fairness, and interconnection. From warring tribes to nation states to an interdependent global economy, each evolutionary step required a critical mass of common conviction that more freedom, more equality, more collaboration, more recognition that working together for a larger community was better for us all.  Modern society could not function if the vast majority of us did not act honestly, morally, and with concern for our neighbors.

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Becoming a Master

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of the master. Early in my spiritual journey, I secretly aspired to be one, hoping spiritual practices, would perfect me, honing my skills and erasing my blemishes, changing me into someone worthy of the title. Paradoxically, I was also uncomfortable with the word, sensing my goal was rooted in arrogance and somehow missing the mark.

I had an image of the master as expert, someone who could answer any spiritual question, who could solve the dilemma of how to live a spiritual life in a material world of sense desires and human conflict. That image offered a sense of control, but it was incorrect. It borrowed from the material world, where content knowledge does create experts, answer questions, and solve problems. It doesn’t work that way on the path of spiritual growth, where answers and solutions are not the primary currency. The concept of mastery is very much alive, but less distant and more personal.

In recent years, I’ve begun to use a different term to describe my journey. I think of myself as an initiate, one who is always searching and exploring the spiritual realms as a beginner. This title carries less arrogant weight but retains the commitment. The idea of mastery remains, now referring to the continually dynamic process of mastering myself. I don’t mean this in terms of self-control, which would be another misplaced use of the word “master.” I mean the simple fact that I have been given a unique task that only I can accomplish.

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My Changing Constellation

“A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life … is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity.”

Maria Popova, The Marginalian

I tend to think of myself as a stable entity; solid, steady, durable. The illusion is strong because of the deep fissure running through me that goes all the way back. My earliest memories carry the recognizable strain of a personality, a personhood I still feel today, the image of who I think myself to be.

It’s not a complete illusion, like one created by the conjurist who makes an elephant disappear. The personality is real enough, it’s just that it’s the lesser part of me. My worries, irritations, preferences, the clothes I choose, how I flavor my food, the mirror glance to check my hair – these are ephemera. Even the things I think are important (and they are important, within their sphere), my beliefs, convictions, my sense of right and wrong, my dreams, my longings, these are outer reflections of an inner brightness. And I cling to my reflections tightly.

My ongoingness is discomforting. I don’t like that I am mostly a fluid constellation of moving parts, like the constellations I see at night, whose names give the illusion of a fixed image to stars that are hurtling through space. Incrementally, but inevitably, their shape will change. In a thousand or a million years, they will be altered into something else. And on a smaller scale, so will I, despite my clinging.

The still point is not the point. I did not enter the stream of life to arrive at a personality that was a collection of right answers. If life is an examination, it is not true-or-false; it’s an ever expanding lab experiment to a question that keeps evolving. My growth accelerates if I can engage my discomforts, loosen my hold on the fixed image I have of the bursting elements within me, and let the movements of the kaleidoscope proceed. There is information in the field I cannot see when I hold so fast to what I think I know.

Photo by Johnny Kaufman on Unsplash

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The Gift of My Discomfort

Every year, I face a seven-week challenge that hits a major weak spot. I’m not good at visualizing what others would want for gifts. Between December 25 and February 14, I have to contend with Christmas, my wife’s birthday, our wedding anniversary, and Valentine’s Day. That’s an entire year’s worth of stressful shopping and gift expectations distilled into 52 days.

To top it off, my wife is a fantastic shopper with tender insight into the needs and desires of others. My wife will see a handcrafted soap dish and say, “This would be perfect for your brother and sister-in-law, the colors match the wallpaper in their bathroom.” I am dumbstruck as I struggle to remember:  do they have a bathroom?

It’s good to acknowledge discomfort and recognize our reactions to it. For me, shopping for others causes anxiety, so I could easily decide to avoid it. But the edge of anxiety is where growth happens. If we only do what is comfortable and avoid what is uncomfortable, we stagnate. I’m committed to making this life a learning journey, not a catalog of the ways to lead a pleasurable life. I try to use the first inkling of discomfort as a signal that there is something here for me to learn, an old pattern of reactivity that might be ready to unravel. Instead of avoiding, I turn toward it to see how I can grow.

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The Cost of our Attention

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I usually think of myself as having “a life,” which sounds like one big thing, a summation, held at a slight intellectual distance. Thoreau’s wording makes me think differently. “Life” is more immediate, intimate, constantly flowing through me. If “life” is a medium of exchange, then it can be spent well or poorly. It can be wasted.

In Walden, Thoreau asked us to reconsider what was important. He saw that the house, the furnishings, the clothes, the gadgets, the status items, were all accoutrements that missed the point. Their hidden cost locked people into a cycle of work and consumption that did not enrich their lives. The cost was not just in dollars, but in loss of the essence of themselves, a loss of the value of the force he called “life.”

Thoreau’s insights are true today. We still waste time, energy, and essence on physical luxuries that detract from our well-being. And I think there is a more tragic loss that has accrued in modern society: the loss of our attention. Just as we are invited to over consume material goods, we are also constantly offered an overconsumption of stimulation, information, entertainment, and other demands on our attention. We have a limited budget of attention, and if we spend it on social media, or streaming services, or news, or digital scrolling, we degrade our capacity to pay attention and process information. Thoreau would say these voracious demands sap the life from us.

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