Quote of the Week #86 - No Man Is an Island

There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.

--Lewis Thomas

Quote of the Week #85 - Walking in the Woods

When we walk in the woods, do we see a flower, or do we think of ourselves as somebody walking in the woods and looking at a flower? They’re very different. We’re caught by the power of our self-consciousness, thinking about ourselves instead of letting go and stepping off into the unknown.

--from an interview with Stephen Levine in The Sun magazine

Quote of the Week #84 - Contrasting and Bridging the Scientific and the Indigenous

From as far back as I can remember, I had this notion of plants as companions and teachers, neighbors and friends. Then, when I went to college, a shift occurred for me. As an aspiring botany major, I was pressured to adopt the scientific worldview; to conceive of these living beings as mere objects; to ask not, “Who are you?” but, “How does it work?” This was a real challenge for me. But I was madly in love with plants, so I worked hard to accommodate myself to this new approach.

Later in my career, after I’d gotten my PHD and started teaching, I was invited to sit among indigenous knowledge holders who understood plants as beings with their own songs and sensibilities. In their presence, and in the presence of the plants themselves, I woke from the sleep I’d fallen into. I was reminded of what I’d always known in my core: that my primary relationship with plants was one of apprenticeship. I’m learning from plants, as opposed to only learning about them.

Let me add that my appreciation of plants has been greatly enriched by knowing the beauty of chlorophyll and photosynthesis, and hormones and cellular biology. Ideally the two ways of knowing can reinforce one another.

Both Western science and traditional ecological knowledge are methods of reading the land. That’s where they come together. But they’re reading the land in different ways. Scientists use the intellect and the senses, usually enhanced by technology. They set spirit and emotion off to the side, and bar them from participating. Often science dismisses indigenous knowledge as folklore – not objective or empirical, and thus not valid. But indigenous knowledge, too, is based on observation, on experiment. The difference is that it includes spiritual relationships and spiritual explanations. Traditional knowledge brings together the seen and the unseen, whereas Western science says that if we can’t measure something, it doesn’t exist.

Western science explicitly separates observer and observed. It’s rule number one: keep yourself out of the experiment. But to the indigenous way of thinking, the observer is always in relationship with the observed, and thus it’s important that she know herself: As I watch that bee and flower, as I study how water moves, as I observe the growth of the grass in this meadow, I understand that the kind of being I am colors how I see and feel and know. Furthermore, my presence might even be influencing how the world is working around me. It’s important to recognize the relationship that exists between the observer and the observed.

--Robin Wall Kimmerer, a native American with a PhD in botany, interviewed by Leath Tonino in The Sun magazine, April 2016

Quote of the Week #83 - Zen Perspective on Gardening

Nevertheless, the flowers fall with our attachment, and the weeds spring up with our aversion. --Dogen

Quote of the Week #82- Intoxicated Joy

But the Jewish tradition also contains something else, something which finds splendid expression in many of the Psalms, namely, a sort of intoxicated joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can form just a faint notion. This joy is the feeling from which true scientific research draws its spiritual sustenance, but which also seems to find expression in the songs of birds. --Albert Einstein

Quote of the Week #81 - Chakras and Sefirot

According to the science of Yoga, beneath a human being’s physical frame is a subtle field of energy centers. These centers infuse the physical form with life and consciousness. In Sanskrit these centers are called chakras.

In the Kabbalah, the mystical teachings of Judaism, we find a similar description of a network of energy centers…In Hebrew, these energy centers are called sefirot…The centers, or sefirot, have two major functions. First and foremost they are conduits for the passage of energy. Every living thing is composed of energy. There is a dynamic exchange of spiritual power flowing back and forth all the time. Everything is emanating and absorbing the life force at every single moment. Each sefirah is composed of a particular energy, and this energy is of a grosser or more refined nature depending on our state of evolution. Our goal in life is to develop our centers until they are composed of pure spiritual force. We then become effective instruments for the distribution of this refined energy into the greater world around us. The second function of the centers, or sefirot, is to establish the nature of our consciousness.

--from Walking the Path of the Jewish Mystic, by Rabbi Yoel Glick

Quote of the Week #80 - The Great and Only Real Heresy

 The great heresy and the only real heresy is the idea that anything is separate, distinct, and different essentially from other things. That is a wandering from natural fact and law, for nature is nothing but coordination, cooperation, mutual helpfulness; and the rule of fundamental unity is perfectly universal: everything in he universe lives for everything else.

--Gottfried de Purucker, Golden Precepts of Esotericism

Quote of the Week #79 - The Result of Studies

Studies taught me the only thing they could, namely, that the truth is one and that some respect and love are enough to discover it in the depths of our consciousness.

--O.V. de L. Milosz

Quote of the Week #76 - Close to the Ground: The Secret of Abiding Joy

I’m sitting, watching Parker perform her first dance masterpiece. Its baseline is a collection of moves from her gymnastics class. She has layered on top of these most of the components of the sun salutation as well as some ferocious wing fluttering and shimmying. Periodically she stops cold for a few beats—a two-year-old’s interpretation of a Philip Glass composition. Her grin couldn’t be bigger. Sometimes it explodes into a giggle of pure happiness. I am thrilled for her.

Parker’s great fun is reminding me of an important Zen teaching that often gets swept under our meditation mats: that our job is to dance with life. We seem to be forgetting this aspect of the tradition, even though it is woven into many of the classic stories taught by our teachers. A favorite of mine has to do with the great Zen Master Hakuin and one of his students. Hakuin was known for his seriousness and ferocious personality. At the same time he also had a sweet spot in his heart for the ordinary people living in the villages around him. As a result they would often visit him, even though many a formal Zen student feared his presence.

One of Hakuin’s many visitors was an old woman who apparently had been chanting Buddha’s name for years but couldn’t quite slide into complete awakeness. He encourages her to keep practicing by looking into her own heart. She goes off and chews on his words like a dog with a bone. At night she practices. In the mornings she practices. She practices while she is doing her chores, walking, washing, and going to the toilet. She even practices in her sleep. Finally, one morning while she is washing the dishes, all the falsehoods of her life drop away and she is completely and utterly awake.

Thrilled, she rushes to see Hakuin, telling him that her whole body is filled with Buddha and that all of the mountains and rivers, forests and fields are shining with great enlightenment.

He looks at her. “Oh really?” he says. “And is this great light also shining up your butt?”

Even though the old woman is tiny, she pushes him over, shouting, “Well, I can see you still have work to do yourself, old man!” They laugh themselves silly and are so happy that they dance and dance and dance—awakeness meeting awakeness.

There is no question that we live in a broken world. As I write, all of Eugene is abuzz with trepidation about a probable earthquake that could happen in the coming years. It is expected to be a big one, possibly so big that many will be killed. Meanwhile, many of us are realizing, maybe for the first time, that this great democracy we call home has some horrific undertones, starting with a history of building itself on the backs of our brothers and sisters. The laudable, honorable aspects of the Islamic tradition have been caught in the undertow of a radical militarism that is holding the world hostage. Many of us are learning how to live on way less than we ever thought possible, thanks to a government that has lost its way and a great recession that has never let up in some quarters. And don’t get me started on the prison system.

And yet.

In my many years of teaching I’ve watched many students achieve the quiet of emptiness. And each time my hope is that they will keep going, keep training, keep studying, because there is so much more. When I see them start to cry easily, unapologetically, when something is even a little sad or sweet, I continue to hope they will keep going. Why? Because they still have waiting for them the great gift discovered by Hakuin’s old woman—great, abiding holy-shit-I-wouldn’t-believe-it-if-I-weren’t-feeling-it joy. This isn’t loud joy. It is a quiet, pulsating, porous, “it’s OK” joy that feeds us and gives us the energy to continue to be of service to the world as it is. Without expectations. This is the joy that gives us the courage to speak truth to power. To protest. To climb flagpoles that need climbing. To apologize for a history of unspeakable abuse. To clean up. And to dance. To dance with our whole breath, our whole body, the whole world, the whole universe.

Because that’s our job.

--Geri Larkin, Spirituality and Health Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2015 Issue