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Engaged at ZSS – The Infinite Teacher

November 24, 2024 by Devyani Sadh

By Michael Fayne

“Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious coworker, every illness, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.” Charlotte Joko Beck

Charlotte Joko Beck (1917-2011) was an esteemed American Zen teacher who led sanghas in California and in the Southwest. This statement, which appears in her book “Everyday Zen: Love and Work,” is a particularly concise expression of a truth we all aspire to realize in our practices and lives. It is one facet of the concept of non-duality – that any experience we face, any situation we find difficult, no matter how minute or massive, can be regarded in its fundamental nature as simply a call. It invites us to let go of yet one more of the inexhaustible desires and urges us to slip free just a bit more from the stranglehold that our sense of a separate self has on us. Every moment a teacher.

Joko Beck in this quote speaks of small daily “teachers.” But our life these days presents us with some monstrous and terrifying teachers – ongoing war, the erosion of human respect and decency among so much of our leadership, and of course the ever-looming reality of climate destruction. (As I write this, one more “unprecedented, record-breaking” hurricane rages across the Southeastern U.S.)

However, during our most recent climate-oriented Engaged Buddhism meeting (held each 4th Wednesday), we listened to a podcast conversation in which climate activist Christiana Figueres highlights three climate change trends. The first is the pervasive deterioration of the climate; the second is the ever-accelerating development of technological innovations to combat it; and the third is humanity’s slow but steady transformation toward being a species that sees itself as not separate from the natural world.

This is not to view our climate catastrophe through rose-colored glasses. It may well be that nothing averts destruction in the long run. But in light of the truth-seeking that brings us all together as a sangha, Ms. Figueres’ third trend is pointing toward a slow movement away from the egoistic and materialistic illusions that have driven our species for centuries, toward a dawning awareness of the not-separate truth of our nature.

This is the work that life presents us with in every moment: to realize, not as an intellectual concept but as a visceral and lived truth, that there is no separation. We are all every sentient being, we are all earth and trees and oceans and sky and all the vastness of space, and every grain of sand and every set of bones in every grave. (How easy to say, how seemingly impossible to truly feel.) 

May all beings attain, and live, this wisdom. 

May we not squander the opportunities for insight that tragedy can bring.

Filed Under: Dr. Michael Fayne

Engaged at ZSS – When Death Comes…

May 1, 2024 by Devyani Sadh

By Dr. Michael Fayne

As the Evening Gatha reminds us, “On this night, the days of our life are diminished by one.” No one knows that number, from which their days are relentlessly subtracted. It might not be a large number at all. This is an easy thing to say, but to hold in our hearts a deep understanding of this truth, is an awareness both shattering and liberating.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver addresses this matter in a work entitled “When Death Comes”, from which this excerpt is taken:

When death comes
like an iceberg beneath the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering,
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms…
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Ms. Oliver poses inconceivable questions for us to consider, again and again. How can we look directly at our mortality and feel joy? How can we acknowledge the impermanence and loss of all that we know and love, with a heartfelt peace?

She offers a way: Only by befriending our life, she says, can we befriend our death. Through a loving engagement with all things — “look[ing] upon everything as a brotherhood and sisterhood” — we can see with amazement the miracle and transcendent value of each life, each name, each body, each moment.

To look upon everything in its true nature, without exception.

To engage with life in this way would be to shake free of many chains of the mind. Breath by breath, in our practice we move closer to the truth that, in Ms. Oliver’s “cottage of darkness” — be it throughout this life or after it, or perhaps over many lifetimes — there is a tenderness from which nothing is ever cast away.
Ms. Oliver poses inconceivable questions for us to consider, again and again. How can we look directly at our mortality and feel joy? How can we acknowledge the impermanence and loss of all that we know and love, with a heartfelt peace?

Filed Under: Dr. Michael Fayne

Engaged at ZSS – Voices

January 20, 2024 by Devyani Sadh

By Dr. Michael Fayne

As we march into this new year, I find myself searching with ever-greater urgency for some sense of solid psychic ground on which to stand. But the more I search, the more I feel that this psychic shelter does not exist, or rather, perhaps I am looking for the wrong thing. I cannot find solace or reassurance that all will be well, but what I have found are many voices, some quite recent, from the world’s spiritual traditions. These voices use different metaphors and terms, but they all convey a similar message pointing toward the deepest truth and the path forward. Here are just a few.

There is the voice of Lama Anagarika Govinda, a European man in the mid-20th century who became a student, a scholar, and finally an influential teacher of Tibetan Buddhism: “Unselfish love and compassion towards all living beings is the first prerequisite of meditation….To gain this attitude one should look upon all beings as upon one’s own mother or one’s own children, since there is not a single being in the universe that in the infinity of time has not been closely related to us in one way or another.”

Then we have the voice of Fr. Thomas Merton, a prominent Christian author who in his later years became a passionate proponent of Christian-Buddhist dialogue, expressing an overwhelming insight he had while standing in the middle of a crowded street: “I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts. I saw where neither desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could all see themselves as they really are! If only we could see each other that way all the time! There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

Then there is the voice of Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi teacher in the mid-20th century: “… The third way of realizing the Sufi principle is to recognize in one’s own feeling the feeling of God – that is, to recognize every impulse of love that arises in one’s heart as a direction from God, to realize that that love is a divine spark in one’s heart, and to blow upon that spark until a flame may rise to illuminate the path of one’s life.”

And finally, there are these words from the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now, Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

When we hold even such tiny bits of wisdom from these divergent traditions alongside one another, we hold something far greater than the sum of the parts. The traditions say that everyone, everywhere, who has ever lived, is sacred. There are no exceptions to this truth. The traditions say: There are no separations, no “others,” no “me,” no “you,” no “them.” The world’s grief confronts us with a responsibility that is overwhelming yet sacred, and therefore a gift. Our path to peace, salvation, truth, and enlightenment, however we conceptualize it, lies in our daily readiness to “blow upon that spark” of these realizations, and then live accordingly in whatever ways we can.

May all beings draw nearer to Buddha’s wisdom in this coming year.

Filed Under: Dr. Michael Fayne

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