I was called again, yesterday. Called to stand at the edge of the largest body of water on the planet—the Pacific Ocean. I even like saying the name—I’m in awe of it.
To get to the sea from where I live, you first must cross over the coastal range of mountains and through miles of old growth redwood forests. The western sides of the mountains settles slowly down to a flat sort of plain before the cliffs drop off abruptly into the Pacific. The view of the ocean always comes as a surprise. I haven’t traveled the road enough times to know exactly where I’m going to have the first glimpse. So it is always a unique moment with the sea always being unexpectedly beautiful.
Yesterday, it was rough, as it was the last time I was called to look. There were white caps on the top of every wave and when I drove over to the very edge of the cliffs I was surprised at how tall the waves were. Maybe because it was a sunny day, the big powerful waves seemed out of place—like they should’ve been part of a dark swirling storm.
But when went to get out of my truck, the wind was so strong I had to fight to push open the door. The wind was blowing from the northwest so I chose to let it push me to the south along a path running along the top of the cliff. Coming back, I was forced to turn my cap around, facing the brim around to the back so the wind wouldn’t blow it off my head.
It was very cold, with the wind coming off the water. But I felt it was necessary to walk along the shore for awhile—to breathe in the Pacific.
I was happy afterwards, to head back inland to the other side of the mountains where the air is warmer and the wind less strong. But sometimes I just have to go to where I went, to stand on the top of the cliffs and be in awe.
Beyond war lies peace. Beyond peace lies war. So what is in between the two? There lies the SPACE I’ve been thinking about! It may be in that space where what is beyond both war and peace lives. The state of nothing-at-all.
Sometimes even thinking of peace seems to bring conflict. Because it is one end of the duality of peace and war. But, between the two, there exists no duality. It just is what it is.
In politics, there are doves and hawks. In the space between them there is just the sky. I always feel calm when I lie back and look up at the sky. Day or night, it is always the same. The sky is one reason I like living in California. There is plenty of room on the ground to view the whole thing while standing here on planet Earth.
Longhair Steve’s comment to one of my recent blogs. "How to Stop Channel Surfing" inspired me to think more deeply. I thank him for that.
Thinking on the subject of war made me, for some reason, reach for Thich Nhat Hanh’s book "Living Buddha, Living Christ. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who has been protesting violence for more than 30 years, explains my own sentiment so beautifully:
"Touching each part of our body in mindfulness, we make peace with our body, and we can do the same with our feelings. There are many conflicting feelings and ideas within us, and it is important for us to look deeply and know what is going on. When there are wars within us, it will not be long before we are at war with others, even those we love. The violence, hatred, discrimination, and fear in society water the seeds of the violence, hatred, discrimination, and fear in us. If we go back to ourselves and touch our feelings, we will see the ways that we furnish fuel for the wars going on inside. Meditation is, first of all, a tool for surveying our own territory so we can know what is going on. With the energy of mindfulness, we can calm things down, understand them, and bring harmony back to the conflicting elements inside us. If we can learn ways to touch the peace, joy, and happiness that are already there, we will become healthy and strong, and a resource for others."
The native flower, the California Poppy is a color so vibrant and beautiful I think it might in some highly-realized people cause a bout of pure ecstasy.
The flowers are popping up all over. In our backyard there were a couple. On the corner of our street there are more than twenty and then around the corner, on the roadside, there is a line of them bordering the vineyard.
Artists talk about the "light" in France as if it is a miracle of nature created just for painters. The light here, in Mendocino County, is as clear as it is there and hotter. It’s as if even the sun itself shines brighter on this state.
The sky is a pure, crystal kind of blue making the clouds seem even whiter than they are in other places on the globe.
Every so often a red-tailed hawk soars overhead as if it has chosen this sky out of all the skies extant, just because it is so beautiful. It’s a place he can show off or maybe just be California Dreaming while it catches the updrafts that take him higher and higher.
The ground is different too. It’s dry and hard and definite. When you walk through a field of golden grass up in the hills, you know you are stepping on the earth. No squishy tentative feeling about it. It’s real, hard ground beneath your boots.
People talk about having a "sense of place." And this is a place where you can feel you ARE somewhere. Not going to or from someplace else. It’s a place that’s so easy to be, to live in, to fit into, that you start to feel more deeply connected not only to yourself, but to the world at large. And, because of the expansiveness of the landscape, you feel more connected to the universe itself—you know, the place where we all reside.
In a very real sense, California, when you are aware of living in it, becomes a universe itself.
Q: When does it stop?
A: Whenever I want it to.
All I have to do is turn off the television to be closer to my Self. To connect with my deeper self. To dive beneath the surface of the pond to where our true nature lies. To be with me.
I need only to…stop.
I used to think I needed to meditate, or to pray or focus on my belly button. But now I know, all I have to do is stop, turn off the incessant noise of the TV and there I am. And then I’m with me. I’m still on the couch, still with the clicker in my hand but now I know that’s where I am.
I don’t need to call myself a meditator, or a Buddhist or Hindu or Catholic or even a seeker. I don’t even need to call myself a stopper. I am simply someone who stops and listens for Me. And there I am. Here I am.
As I said, I am not looking for another guru, another set of rules to live by. I am walking through this world, looking around like some lost innocent child. I learn things at my own pace because I am who I am. Sometimes, when I’m tired, in order to relax, I lie on the couch in front of the television and surf.
In this case, I was channel surfing. I do that a lot when I watch TV. I move from channel to channel, my mind going to what is more pleasing to it. News of Iraq, music videos, stock reports, Happy Days, CNN, news in Spanish, the movie channel, HBO, back to the news of Iraq.
Maharishi describes living on the surface as being a leaf blown by the wind going this way and that—all at the mercy of the wind.
Channel surfing is a microcosm of that—a great short film of our bigger lives where we drift around from activity to activity, project to project, from food to food, job to job, relationship to relationship—all these things as if we’re being blown around helter-skelter by the wind. Nothing is there to ground us—to give meaning to our lives. Instead we are just going from thing to thing in some meaningless dance.
But every so often something or someone along the way stops me. Something catches my eye. That was Gangaji. Her beautiful white, blonde hair and her engaging smile is what caught me at first. Then I started to listen what she was saying.
Basically, she was saying that all we need we have. There is nothing to add, nothing to take away. What I was hearing was exactly what I know to be true. I no longer have the need to be taught anything more. There is nothing to teach if we have it all, already. All there is to do is to know this.
I am perfect as I am. We all are. We only need to recognize this.
People like Gangaji are here to remind us. I’m glad I found her on my television.
I am a seeker but I am not looking for another guru. I already have one. So, when I walked over to the coffee counter at Schat’s Deli and saw the poster with the pretty blonde woman’s face smiling at me, I thought something like, "no, I don’t want to meet another teacher who will give me another set of rules to live by." I have enough trouble following the rules I already have.
But, when I lived back East still, I’d watched this woman on television and was always captivated by the way she taught. She has someone from the audience come up on the stage and sit beside her and they talk. The person asks questions, Gangaji asks questions, and they have a conversation which she guides—incredibly skillfully—closer and closer to the truth until, invariably, the student has some revelation, some "ah-ha". It always amazed me how the student always seemed to get closer to their own reality, to who they are, by the time the conversation was up.
So, remembering Gangaji, only from the TV, I raced down to the San Rafael Community Center this past Sunday, balancing "not trying to get a ticket" with "trying to get to Gangaji’s talk on time." Miraculously, I made it in the time prescribed on the website where I’d gone for directions: "20 minutes before 5:00 PM." This, I learned was time to be taken for the audience to settle down, to meditate. This was a good thing. Because I showed up fairly stressed out from my race down 101.
Pulling into the parking lot, I was immediately reminded that I hadn’t been around a group of seekers in awhile. A woman in her 40’s with a long skirt directed me to a parking spot with a blissful smile. It seemed like everybody was hugging. And, what shocked me most was I recognized myself in the crowd. We all, somehow, looked like each other. Middle-aged, graying, long-haired or bearded—that sort of thing. We were all well dressed in a casual Marin County "seeker" sort of way. I’d actually put on a nicer shirt and pair of slacks than I normally wear up here in Mendocino County where things are not nearly so "hip" and "aware".
I found a seat up close enough to make me happy—just a few rows behind the avid followers who were sitting in full lotus at "the feet of the master." I recognized these folks who are, in the business of seeking, affectionately known as "bliss ninnies." The ones who can actually sit with their legs folded under them throughout an entire meeting.
During the twenty minutes, I opened my eyes a number of times to check things out and was not surprised at all to catch others doing the same thing. I was eager to catch Gangaji walking in because I was sitting on the side closest to the door. Sure enough, peeking with only one eye open, I did catch her in the act of…walking in.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that she was even pretier in person than on TV or the poster. She was a young-looking middle-aged woman of average height, with a beautiful head of almost white blonde hair. She walked with the bearing of a dancer—or of a yogi—Kundalini flowing up her spine. She was dressed in a sky blue silk shirt and silk pants. She didn’t exactly dress like a holy person, but as it turns out, she acted like one.
One of the first things she did was to confuse me—and fairly everyone in the large hall. This, she did on purpose. She began by expanding the mind of everyone in the room by stating contradictions; that she was not a teacher but in fact she was, and that she had nothing to teach, and yet she did. Those kinds of things. She did it all with a sense of humor. And it worked: In the hour and a half that followed, she took the minds of everyone there on a journey deeper and closer to his or her own core. It was exactly as I’d remembered watching on TV back East. Only now it was here, in person, and more powerful.
At one point, Gangaji wanted to know how we got there. Had we in fact seen her on TV? Or in a dream? Or what? In my case, I felt like somehow I’d driven all the way across the country to get there. I didn’t jump up and say that, but that’s what it felt like. Sitting there, listening to her talk with a young man about his life, and watching her slowly bring him closer to his own reality, did in fact bring me closer to mine.
I left the talk, tired, and feeling more real—one of my goals in life. Or to put it another way, I left there feeling closer to being myself.
I’ve always believed that we’re all involved in the search for who we are. And, for me at least, it’s good to find someone to help remind me. This is what Gangaji did.
This morning, while sitting out on the deck looking up at the stars, out of the corner of my eye I suddenly saw this incredibly bright hook sitting just over the top of Enlightenment Mountain. Enlightenment Mountain is the name given for a singular peak, rounded at the top, which sits just above the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas about a mile away from me.
The "hook" revealed itself to be the top of a crescent moon. The Earth continued to turn as I watched the moon. The Earth’s black edge appeared to slide down the side of the bright yellow object until the crescent was fully revealed. As this was happening, it seemed as if the Earth was leaning down to let me see the object that had appeared to be a hook.
I had a thought, that if I was a primitive man and didn’t know that the moon was the moon and that the Earth turned on an axis, I would’ve been completely blown away by what I was looking at. As powerful as the sight was appearing against the black sky, as I watched at 5:00 AM alone in the silence, my intellect had to "tell" me all about it.
What I wished for instead, was to be innocent enough to just enjoy the sight of a "hook" coming up over the top of the mountain—and not to know anything more about it. It was that first sight of it that was the revelation—so pure, so clean, so free of other thoughts.
A bright yellow hook comes into the sky. That’s what it was. I’ll leave it at that.
There are spaces between things, like between two trees or mountains. Spaces between stars, cars, houses. Spaces between people. This makes life interesting because, although we are all the same in so many ways, we are different too.
Crossing the space between each of us we find what is interesting about the other—interesting can mean something you do that I don’t or vice versa. Or what might be interesting is finding out what you do that is the same. We have that "ah-ha" experience when we find out, "oh, you’re a photographer too! And, you use the same kind of camera!"
Embracing differences is fun because that’s where we can learn something new. "You’re an astrophysicist? What’s that? What do you do when you’re one of those?"
There are spaces between words, between thoughts; between blogs I write too. In the silence in those places is often where reality lives. When I’m not writing my blog, I’m living my life, dealing with my job writing for the newspaper, dealing with relationships, and doing all the mundane things too like feeding the dog and taking out the garbage.
But with those things—doing those things—there are spaces too. Wonderful full, meaningful spaces. Silence. Silence is golden. Silence is beautiful.
Living in California makes me aware of the preciousness of all that Nature has given we human beings to survive on. The air, the water, all the things that grow—and all our natural resources—the things we use to live on.
Water here in Northern California serves the mainly agricultural communities with the ability to grow the crops that feed our country. Living in the East, near New York, where we moved from it the importance of water is a thing quite removed from our normal day. We turn on the tap and there it is. Many people go to the store to buy bottles of pure spring water to drink. Our here there are water districts which control the flow of water from mountain streams and reservoirs to each community. Water is an important commodity for survival of the economy in the area where I live. After all, California supplies much of the fresh vegetables, fruit and meat for all of America. Because of that people here take the use of water much more seriously.
After I’d driven across the country in my brand new pickup truck, purchased in the East, I found I had to pay to have the emissions system re-qualified to meet California’s standards which are higher, more stringent. This made me think maybe I should have bought a hybrid vehicle instead. With gas prices what they are now, I think about this almost every day. My point is, California takes air quality more seriously than Connecticut. Because of the greater distances one has to travel out here—going from home to work or for other reasons—cars become more important factor of daily living.
Then there are the trees, which supply much of the lumber for homebuilding for our country and other countries. They take the issue of tree conservation very seriously. There are strict laws for what trees can be cut, how many and the age and size.
As far as farming, there is a huge movement of organic growing. There are organic produce sections in all the supermarkets with goods displaying Certified California Organic." Because organic farming sustains the soil and thus the ability to grow more and longer when the soil is used wisely, it is another way that consciousness is being raised among growers. It is no longer just a "health food store" thing. It is becoming a larger reality; it’s becoming mainstream.
All of the above makes one think about Nature’s bounty and how we use it. It is a very "in your face" fact of life in this state. When I look out my window across the valley to the mountains, I see how precious nature really is and am happy that so many are aware of taking care of Her.
To give something to someone else.
Things, especially relationships, are always difficult. At least that has been my experience. Dealing with another human being takes work and constant attention. I think that’s what real love is—being willing to put in the time.
But, in the end, having a good relationship can be the most rewarding thing we do. My theory is, that because each one of us is so very different, there is no simple way to generalize what happens between to human beings. It’s difficult enough for each one of us to deal with ourselves, let alone another person.
So once again, I have no answers. I know, for me, relationships with my closest family members can be excruciatingly difficult at times. What I’ve learned is just to be there. To be present.
It’s the same as just existing for ourselves except instead of giving ourselves encouragement, giving a little away. I guess the one difference is: giving something away. Giving of our self. Wanting the other person to succeed just as we want that for our self.
But, in the end, it comes back to us anyway. In this way it’s a selfish proposition so not so hard to do.