Flawed Bodhisattva Blues

Life happens. Does seem to be a life happens sort of day today. So yes, life happens, even when I’m not looking for it and maybe not even ready for it. Life still happens and so it goes. A circumstance arose and somewhere I found a transcendent me to respond with kindness and make a leap of faith.

Well, sort of. Actually I don’t think the word faith is really that appropriate in this situation. Manifesting as I was, there was no faith necessary. I was infinite and inexhaustable. However, I was not without my faculties and I knew that there was risk involved and I knowingly made the leap anyway. It wasn’t a leap of faith however, because I recall no sense, either then or now, that there was any sort of safety net at all. There was surely a leap, but it was, I think, a leap of lovingkindness (to borrow the buddhist phrase) and not really one of faith. I felt the need for the action, not the sense that my kindness would be repaid or the comforting sense that it would all somehow work out just fine.

Sunshine asked me if I believe in fate, and I responded with a philosophical discussion about the nature of physical causality and the skepticism slowly creeping into the back of my head about the naive treatment of causality and the arrow of time in modern physics. (Not to mention the weird creepy stuff coming out of entangled quantum states which really is beginning to make me wonder if Danny’s time machine might not really work).. But all this aside, I think the truth is that I don’t really draw any faith from the notion of fate. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that there was someone or something pulling strings for me or anyone else. Life happens, and other stuff happens too, and I don’t see any global sense of meaning to it all. I see lots of patterns and influence, but no intelligence or hand of kindness conducting the dance. I can recognize what seems like fantastic synchronicity, but I also recognize that there is a survival bonus in recognizing patterns and that, as an offspring of millions of generations of survivors, there is a tremendous anthropic selection effect at work which makes it very likely for me to be susceptible to seeing such patterns in the turbulence of life. The reason Zen Buddhism works for me where other western spiritual paths do not is that it does not require any faith in faith or fate. Surprisingly, despite it’s image of being about nonsensical paradox, I find Zen eminently sensible and logical, and while it can be wonderful and a source of great strength, it is also sometimes cold comfort precisely because of this lack of faith. There are no safety nets, only life and the transcendent which are not two.

So here I am, mid-leap, off the map and suspended in white vacuum. Launched from the platform of Big Heart incarnate, I find myself without landmarks or anything to guide me but my own internal compass. Keenly aware that I’m off the map I consciously work to banish dragons by act of will. I am open and things are fine not through the guiding kind hand of fate but rather by virtue of my own consciously maintained internal balance. Through continued effort I try to maintain the bodhisattva dance and continue to try and channel lovingkindness through a heart at least intermittently in touch with the transcendent.

When manifesting, of course, this is effortless. But I have not the depth of training to manifest continually, and I don’t think it is wise to try anyway. The transcendent is only half the story and one has to live in the world as well as being divine. Yesterday, I was in-the-zone. The dance continued and all was fine. Today, I’m still mostly fine, but awoke just slightly off and that’s where the concern comes in. Cause I’m not Kanzeon. I’m not a saint, and there are flaws in the gemstone through which the laser-light of lovingkindness flows. Thus far my heart has been able to weather the flow but the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. This is the top of the mountain and I’m not sure of the surrounding territory. I have half-formed picture postcard ideas of what the stable equilibrium would look like, but I’ve no map from here to there and I’ve no idea if there’s a great big mountain in the way. Somehow I need keep dancing on the head of this pin until I find a path or quantum tunnel to the stable point. I have more strength than I would have thought, and I’m not completely alone, but this high-wire act is not being performed with the safety net of faith, but rather over a mine-field of buried fear and despair (and perhaps non-existant dragons).

Ice-cube tray people

Where did we get this notion that ones “private” life should not overlap with ones “professional” life? I mean, I can certainly understand the reasoning motivating such a principle. Employers want predictable, reliable employees, and personal lives, fraught as they are with emotions and other messy complications tend to make people act unpredictably. But the notion that such a compartmentalized ideal is actually achievable seems to me to forget that professionals are, in fact, still human beings. The only way to reliably keep your personal life from affecting your professional one is not to have a personal life at all. The fact that we are reminded of this in scandal after scandal after scandal, and still look at them as scandals is a sobering reminder of how dehumanized our society has become. (Our unforgivably failed social norms about the proper care of children is another). I’m beginning to think that the true citizens in our society are not human beings any more, but corporations and other similar collective entities, and this is a thought that is beginning to scare me.

How come everybody wanna keep it like the kaiser?

Here’s an unusual perspective you don’t hear much about. It is possible to love someone you’ve never met, never even spoken a word to. It’s possible to love them completely and totally unreservedly, with no strings and no expectations. In fact, i daresay its quite common. I’ve loved my son since well before I met him. He never had to earn such affection. It was given freely and without hesitation without merit. With no guarantee for my own return I tied my heart to his and have never counted the (not inconsiderable) cost of doing so.

And yet it seems as a people we don’t apply such notions beyond the parent/child relationship. For love between peers we look for some sort of quid pro quo. There are probably many reasons for this and some of them may even be valid and true. To be sure you need to be secure in your own situation first. You must have faith your own needs will be met to be open. Indeed, the drunken idiocy of fresh romantic love might even be a biological adaptation which catalyzes pair-bonding. In our stupid twitterpated state we never ask the tough questions of quid pro quo which we worry so much about the rest of our lives. Buzzed and horny we just take a leap of faith and hope it all works out. Then, when the buzz wears off, we start keeping score again and start getting divorced.

But ponder for a moment how much it diminishes us. This planet is full of so many lonely Eleanor Rigby’s, so many broken hearted souls freezing in the cold indifference of the world. Fear and loneliness make us so terribly small. But imagine the bliss of opening our hearts to others without need of return. Imagine the limitless, meritless love of new-minted parenthood writ large on the canvas of life. Imagine being not small, but limitless and inexhaustible. Imagine being big heart. Or better yet, don’t imagine, manifest. You are big heart. We all are. We just tend to forget.

I did. I’d even found it again for a while, and amazingly forgot it anew. And then, out of nowhere, amid a most disorienting and chaotic emotional tempest, a crisis which threatened to plunge me deep into dark places forgotten for 20 years, it was there. Open. Like someone switched a light on in me. Big heart incarnate, flooding the world with life. Still blissing on it as I write. I’ve missed this.

Welcome home.
Namaste