Month: August 2019

How does the Creator find peace?

Much of an individual’s human life is focused on him or herself. The other part is focused on others. If you are anything like me, only when you and those you love are doing reasonably well do you tend to relax, to find something approximating the concept of peace. If a parent, child, spouse, or close friend isn’t thriving, it is a cause for worry. And worry challenges the notion of calm. Of peace. I can meditate, exercise, and use many of the skills of relaxation all I want but my subconscious knows full well when something is amiss with someone I care about. And it does not like to be ignored.

Which has got me wondering: how could God, Allah, the Almighty, or the appropriate term for many religious conceptions of the Creator or prime mover ever feel at peace when so much of creation, including humankind, has so many troubles? How could what many consider the ultimate expression of peace ever Him or Herself feel at peace when there is an overabundance of things to worry about in the world that She/He created?

People are ill. Life is suffering. The planet is deteriorating. How can God not feel at least a little bit anxious?

I believe in evolution. I believe in free will. I believe in a presence in our world that is the essence of kindness, compassion, and love. I just struggle to understand how such an essence of being, even if She represents mercy in humanly unfathomable and incomprehensible ways, can concurrently represent unbounding peace and tranquility.

Sure, I see the paradox. Humans aren’t divine. So we shouldn’t try to understand it. Something that is by nature unfathomable to the human mind will not bend itself to that mind’s efforts to know it. The humble mind should accept this. It should use techniques of silence, breathing, prayer, movement, and the like to grab what it can of peaceful moments, of tranquil time slices.

Buddhism kindly maps a way forward, as do other traditions. Each offers invaluable gifts for someone such as me, someone searching to find balance, enlightenment, and slivers of joy. And when I let myself experience the truths shared from such luminous traditions, I do feel the embrace of acceptance, at least briefly. Sometimes.

But I still worry about my children. And my wife. And people I care for. And other people whom I’ve never met that I learn are suffering in my community and in this world.

I sometimes physically feel their struggles – in some small way – as if they are my own.

“Oh you’re an empath.”

That’s what someone once told me.

“You need to be careful about that, you know. You should learn how to wall yourself off from that. You’ll never survive a career in medicine if you don’t.”

I did try – at least for a while. With some practice, I learned how to form a sort of emotional forcefield around myself. It seemed to make sense that activating that protective buffer, even part-time in the present, was what was required to stay empathetic and compassionate, over a lifetime. Remaining open to the suffering of others could potentially make me suffer as well, and perhaps even make me sick.

I was wrong. Shielding myself did not make me healthier. Instead, it made me less aware. The less aware I was, the less I worried. And the less I worried, the less I related. Relating less was isolating. Being isolated felt contrary to the initial reason for considering the shielding.

We are all “empaths”. It is the nature of our being. We feel things that aren’t happening specifically to us. We sense things that are occurring to others in the so-called external world. Much of our education and cultural experience has led us to believe that we are separate; the nature of adolescence is, in fact, the embodiment of the drive for independence. And yet it is the return to dependence, the recognition that we are more than individuals, even the budding awareness at some point in life that we are mysteriously interconnected that defines the emerging lessons of adult life. There is indeed a forcefield between people. It is not, however, a field that shields. It is instead a force that binds. We share life. Together, with each other and with the animal and plant world around us, we are life.

It is frequently said that we are star children, beings comprised of a limited number of physical atoms and elements that were once compressed into a common density before the universe banged into existence. Such a beginning hardly seems peaceful. Neither does much of the history of the cosmos and the unfolding drama of life on the sphere we call earth.

So why should I worry, even wonder, whether and how the Creator finds peace?

I don’t know. Perhaps it is instinct, a simplistic desire that peace may be both our origin and our destination. Strife and conflict feel contradictory to the reason to be. I long for a return to something that approximates the whole. I need to know that the God of my belief system is such a whole. I want the whole to have a center that holds it together as one.

Maybe I’ve got the concept of peace all wrong. Rather than it being a release of worry and concern, a separation of me from all that is “not me”, might it instead be the experience of everything as interwoven and interdependent, the exhalation of me into the breath that is us?

Snippets. Moments. Glimpses. Peace not as the dissociation of life into the particulate spectrum of color refracted by the prism of human observation. Peace instead as the fundamental integration of sensation and experience into the boundless wonder that is the infinite.

Worry may not be an obstacle to peace. Somehow, it may be a path into it.

We all get lost. If you are anything like me, you may feel at least a little bit lost, some or most of the time.

I’m not talking about the experience of failing to recognize location. Fortunately, I am still blessed with a mind sufficiently sound to read or envision a map and place a mental “x” in it regarding my physical whereabouts. The lost I’m referring to is different to geospatial bewilderment. It’s a sort of purpose lost –  a sense of not knowing where I fit into familiar surroundings, of not having an idea of where I’m heading in those surroundings, of feeling uncertain where I should be heading. There is place – here – and there is direction – towards some there. The two are related but quite distinct.

I don’t mean to sound morose; I’ve grown accustomed to the existential dizziness of directional disorientation. It no longer unnerves me, at least not completely. Being adrift in one’s heading doesn’t necessarily keep a person from being happy, healthy, and enjoying, intermittently and regularly, the beauty of life. That’s why I’m exploring the importance of routines; consistency in schedule can offer excellent comfort during times of turbulence or uncertainty. It’s also why I’ve been trying to learn more about humility. A release to humbleness can offer neat bulwark against the experiential pressure to see ahead in life’s course, to recognize and manage expectations related to current position and the plot of a map for moving forward. It is impossible to know what lies before me. Humility necessitates that I try not to try.

And yet something confronts me when I consider humility and its role in my life. I don’t understand humility, not really. The more I consider it, the more I’m not sure what it is I should be understanding.

On the one hand, humility seems foundational to the search for wisdom. On the other hand, it seems equally contributory to the strengthening of self image as a person ages and seeks, quite naturally, to become wise.

I should live for more than myself. Got it – that’s the humility essence. So I must think less of myself and give more to others, with minimal thought (if I can) about my own needs.

So how am I doing, when it comes to living that essence? Well, yesterday , perhaps not so great. I reacted in such and such a way when I should have reacted in such and such a better way. Today, however, I’ve been a bit better. And overall, maybe this week (or month) was better than last.

Am I more humble? I think so. I’m trying to be so. Yeah, on balance, I’m probably more so.

Well – good. That’s progress. I’m learning. I’m advancing. I’m becoming a bit more wise.

And wham!, just like that, I’ve fallen into the humility trap. By trying to be more humble, and by assessing my success along the path to being more humble, I step willingly, even enthusiastically, into the large hole that ego has expertly camouflaged along the trail. Ego’s ambush can be so deceptive that I may not actually notice that I’ve fallen into it. My eyes are still lifted upward. I’ve lost sight of the place where my feet make contact with the earth.

I can become proud of becoming humble. And pride is the antithesis of a humility essence.

It is tricky, this journey we are on. We don’t know where we have come from. We don’t know where we are going. The timing of transitions is obscure. The opportunity for confusion abounds.

Am I to reject humility on the grounds of its close proximity, if care isn’t maintained, to pride?

I think not. But I also think that I should reframe my perspective on the humble. It cannot be a goal. It must, instead, be a value. A virtue. A way to be and not a destination to reach. A color rather than a surface which has color. I should be humble in the moments rather than the hours. I should be outside myself without looking back on whether I’m outside myself.

Maybe feeling lost is not so bad after all. Maybe a focus on contact with the ground is a good approach to knowing where I am – and always being able to be found.

We are awash in rhetoric. The president tweets with abandon. The democrats debate with a lust for power. And the media is flooded with analysis and commentary.

Where is the simplicity of conscience?

I read about the tragedies this weekend from gun violence and I feel deeply saddened. We can do better. We should do better. And yet we debate about the soul of our society as if it is something that can be intellectually analyzed.

It cannot. It must be felt. It must be believed in.

So hello there, Democratic candidates for President of the US. And hello there too, Mr. Sitting President. Please stop with the hatred and the combative language. Give the statistics a rest. This country – our world – may not survive the onslaught of this modern madness unless somebody with a microphone or a twitter following starts to lead with values, with dignity and decency, with conscience.

A person need not follow one type of religion, need not be of one color or class, or need not be adhere to one political tradition to subscribe to a common conscience. It is really quite straightforward: we should care about more than ourselves. We should then do our best to find ways – together – to help each other and to live in a society where success means more than dollars, titles, and authority. We should cherish what we hold in common, not delight in bickering over what is different. We should remind ourselves that it is our core beliefs, our shared values, that will enable us to leave our children a better world than the one we were left.

Where points the moral compass of this place we call the United States of America? This is not a question about the nature of your belief in a supreme being. It is a question about the nature of your belief in good. In collaboration. In the collective. In the us of USA.

I am tired of the predictable yet action-free talk that follows mass shootings. People are dying – unnecessarily. Are we not capable of doing something? Or are we not capable of doing something perfectly, something without disagreement, something without political aggrandizement and recognition? It seems that we are paralyzed by personal pride, the need to be right, and the importance of not upsetting some sacrosanct loyalty to documents signed over two hundred years ago by human beings no less fallible than ourselves. Wake up! The people we revere in our nation’s history would be horrified by our lack of substance – as human beings – our inability to adapt – to contemporary challenges – and our vapid excuses for inaction in the face of preventable malice and calamity.

And, if they were not horrified, they do not deserve the faith we have placed in the documents and traditions they have left us.

So take heed, politicians! Enough of all the blather. We do not need the intellectual babble. And no longer shall we excuse the dividing verbiage of blatantly racist and individualistic views. My support and vote will be for the one of you with the courage to talk about the values that I learned in grade school led to the idea behind this country: unity, tolerance, diversity, and liberty. Will the soul of the United States be decided by the details of someone’s specific plan for universal health care? No. Will the deaths from future mass shootings be avoided by endless circular arguments related to the second amendment of the US Constitution? No.

Stop wasting words. Stand up for common values. Defend what it means to be a society. Inspire us to live with conscience.

e pluribus unum.