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).