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YOU’RE NOT SAFE; YOU’RE ETERNAL
Ego salivates in the face of crisis. Why? Because the more frightening the headline, the more the anxiously ephemeral dream of “me” gets to feel solid, separate and real as we answer the question, Where am I in relationship to this news?
Confronted by an un-actionable threat, existing nowhere but on the glowing screen in front of us, an innocent trickle of me-stories freezes into a formidable entity; It’s an uneasy beast, frightened and alone; but it’s proudly protected by a perimeter of spikey opinion.
And just like that, a bundle of dizzy mystic states is murdered by “knowledge I need to survive.”
A fleeting color on the screen of consciousness feels as solid as a rock.
Clearly, some part of us “wants” the media masters to take over our inner narrative. Look around. With increasing fervor, we beg them to light up our reptilian brain stem. Why are we doing this? Simple.
We’re not Surfing; We’re Praying
In states of fear and crisis, ego-humbling activities like prayer and meditation and self-inquiry go dark. Confession and repentance are trampled by instinctual urgency. Nagging doubts about identity, purpose and direction are replaced by the one sure right thing to do: survive.
In short, we succumb to media’s creepy narrative for the same reason we reach for a snack or suddenly fall asleep during meditation’s initial stages of disorientation. As soon as the humiliating restlessness and pathetic grasping at me-stories begins to pick up speed, we ghost ourselves. Mortified by the anxiety of mind-on-a-countdown, we search for a media mind to take us over. We think we are surfing, but actually, we’re praying:
Bless you, beloved Media Masters, for assigning me your miserably secure GPS coordinates; for locating me in a world full of reactive, ego-hardened slime so I don’t have to face the mind-shattering mystery of the divine play unfolding, by design. For confirming that, in this eerie, alienated world, sublimity of brain cannot be sustained, so we must settle for Hunger Game cocaine.
Hunger Game Cocaine
There’s no moving forward until we admit it: A significant part of us prefers the identity-pumping dread of war over the tepid role play of peacetime– the thrill and despair of survival fear over the sober self-reckoning afforded by peacetime- and until we tap into a “meditatively arresting equivalent” to the media’s adrenaline-spiking survival fear, we will gladly sacrifice the soul’s spacious freedom for nervous immersion into news stories that dispense: Hunger Game cocaine.
But wait. Isn’t this just more cocaine?
No. It defines the essential spiritual practice of the iPhone era: to balance ego-hardening media consumption with time spent marinating in our true nature. First step, confession:
I’m asking this glowing screen to provide something that it cannot: otherworldly refuge. I’m asking a piece of trance-inducing technology to provide what only the marinating in my own timeless presence could provide. There is never going to be enough news stories about the dangers “out there” to make me feel safe “in here” because the safety I’m after isn’t physical; it’s metaphysical.
I’m hungry for a taste of my deathless being: the causeless happiness that arises when I sip the tea of self-inquiry and sit proud in my infinity.
Okay, if screen-staring is an unconscious religious ritual, we best learn how to scroll reverently, no? To this end, I recommend pasting the following phrase at the top of your phone or puter.
I’m not safe; I’m eternal.
The next time you cozy up to an online oracle claiming to care about you by helping you prepare for a dark and grisly future, stop! Repeat this phrase inwardly or aloud, I’m not safe; I’m eternal. Keep returning to it whenever you start feeling uneasy, sad or afraid. There. Now the darkness is arising in a greater field of light.
I’m not safe; I’m eternal.
Packs a punch, no? A kind of micro-prayer.
Not the praying type? No problem. Use it as a gateway drug into the hard stuff. Repeat it over and over, in the spirit of confession, until the heart softens and the soul starts to speak.
This gateway drug can also be administered poetically. Try reciting the following dharma poem every day for a week.
Safe-Sick
Vaxed or un-vaxed
War-torn or tranquil
I’m not safe
Light years from safe,
I’m eternal
Bankrupt or flush
Locked down or global
I’m not safe
I’m “safe-sick” with no tear
For the eternal
Palatial or homeless
Single or taken
I’m not safe
Light years from safe,
I’m eternal
Youthful or greying
Athletic or ailing,
I’m not safe
I’m “safe sick” with no tear,
for the eternal
So true, no?
–Hunter Reynolds
One day- if we’re lucky- “eternity with eyes” will stare serenely through macular degeneration. Only a madman would fail to prepare.
Ah, the true meaning of “prepper.”
(SECOND DHARMA BELL)
Why do so many search, but never find, fullness of being? Perhaps because the price of admission is a humiliating loss. Drag-and-drop personhood dies on the cross of timeless presence. Silence moves into the foreground. Role play, its happy slave.
You probably know…or, at least, you’ve sensed it: seeing through the meditative lens has the power to turn your world upside down. Here’s two commonly held truths that meditation calls out as “fake news.”
Two Misconceptions
Misconception #1. Meditation is different than prayer.
What if attention, itself, is prayer? Who or what are the functional deities we most frequently bow down to? It’s the kind of question most people won’t touch until they’re on their deathbed, looking back. Some part of us knows that the humiliation would be so great as to force us into one of two camps: the hardened cynics or the drunken mystics. Either way, it’s tectonic.
Misconception #2. Good and evil are different than conscious and unconscious.
Meditation also puts a mystical spin on good and evil which erases the difference between those who pray to a personal god and those who commune with a universal consciousness. Consider this.
What if “evil” means,
The empathic failure that arises from “compulsive selfing,” without which mind-on-a-countdown would vanish.
And what if “good” means,
The soul-seeing communion that overflows from eternity-with-eyes, freed of any distracting me-stories.
How storylessly “good” a person do you wish to become? How deeply will you repent for the sin of solidity?
Call it the “work of the devil” or karmically inherited habits of mind, the result is the same: empathic failures that cause injury to self and other.
Alan Watts said it this way:
So long as you can be talked out of yourself, you deserve to be.
Said another way, we’re here to…
Forgive the Dream
The closest that our nail-biting mind-on-a-countdown gets to happiness is charming panic and scenery-devouring distraction. Ken Wilbur calls it, “wave jumping in search of wetness.” Makes sense, right? Time, after all, is eating us alive and until we learn to let someone or something “talk us out of ourself” we wander like hungry ghosts, from one flimsy promise of security to another; never relaxing enough into the dream, to forgive it.
And what does a planet full of hungry ghosts look like? How bout the lockdown years leading up to the war in Ukraine?
The War in Ukraine
Housebound and alone with mind for much of the last two years, we– the meditatively unwashed masses– tried, but largely failed, to wrap the arms of the Merciful Witness around little “Orphie,” our orphaned ego panic. Day after day, a “beggar in rags” stood shivering at our collective doorstep. Day after day, millions of us slammed the door on little “Orphie.” Too busy, even in lockdown, to confront our existential loneliness and fear; too carnal to ask for otherworldly assistance.
Did Orphie’s pain go underground, only to resurface again in Ukraine? Is Ukraine chronicling the unmet violence that played out privately, within us, during the lockdown years?
There are two ways to meet war. The first is reactive, ego-hardening. We take a side. This causes the dream to turn solid. The second is soulful, heroic. We ask disturbing existential questions, like,
Did my painful habits of mind sprinkle gas on the bonfire that is Ukraine? Suddenly, the war isn’t “over there,” and there’s something we can do about it.
Seen through the meditative lens, we are one interpenetrating consciousness. Forgetting this, we succumb to the illusion that cynicism and hard-heartiness can stay private, compartmentalized, and that our casually hurled “zingers” and other acts of projected self-hatred have no wider impact on world events. This is how we became psychically sloppy. Ego spot fires that could have been meditatively doused spread unnoticed into the street.
Whatever psychic sloppiness the war in Ukraine motivates us to confess, it will, from a Buddhist perspective, fall under the heading of “compulsive selfing:” a failure to yield to a larger, shepherding presence.
It’s not enough to be anti-war; we must make amends by becoming… immense.
If we’re not sewn together by the beauty of the One Being, we will unite through a fight. Until sublimity stains our inner terrain, the missiles can, and must, rain.
What to do? Perhaps this koan practice will help.
Koan Practice: War is at peace with itself
Slowly recite it a few times:
War is at peace with itself. Awareness is at peace with war. Equanimity has always been a kind of madness.
Pause between each line to take a few breaths. Don’t think. Just recite. Then sit silently, allowing the koan to subconsciously integrate. Repeat this process, over and over, at your own natural rate for 15 minutes.
War is at peace with itself. Awareness is at peace with war. Equanimity has always been a kind of madness.
Feeling resistance? Great. That means it’s working.
War is at peace with itself. Awareness is at peace with war. Equanimity has always been a kind of madness.
Notice: war and peace are both witness-able. That means we are before them. They rise and fall within us.
War is at peace with itself. Awareness is at peace with war. Equanimity has always been a kind of madness.
Feeling frustrated, numb, angry? Try repeating the koan back and forth with a partner. That’s what soul-mirrors are for. To help us relax and remember: this is divine play.
(THIRD DHARMA BELL)
Our Natural State
Let’s pause to appreciate the delirious opportunity that stands before us.
The undifferentiated vastness of God has taken root in us as “Eternity with eyes.” A light play of personhood has been gifted us, so we might serve as soul-mirrors for others. In this way, awareness falls in love with itself. Yes, this is a love story.
The dream of separation: too ephemeral to be believed, but solid enough to navigate and burn karma in. The purpose of life? To behold the immanent and transcendent, the gross and subtle faces of the divine, and, in this way, enter a state of grace: our natural state, revealed again and again whenever we sprinkle our speech with divine pauses, relax into silent seeing and savor the otherworldly ease of meditative relating.
At the cusp of conflagration, may our eyes lift from our screens, as we plunge out into the forest and streams, to hear the spirit of the earth whispering,
Lay down some twigs on those smoldering embers
of prayers you forgot, but your childhood remembers.
C’mon, just let a spark
wander into the sky,
doesn’t even matter if you lie.
Mama’s gunna make you feel
like crying out for something real.
Mama’s got some time to kill
that Robosapien mind.
(FOURTH DHARMA BELL)
The title of this month’s Astrodharma Transit Report is:
Identity Transplant
April knows what success looks like: personal guts dancing with mystical cooperation. Ready to “get funky” on the ashes of a crumbling society? All planets are direct and the floor is yours.
Here’s a quick overview of April:
Against a backdrop of continuing world chaos (Saturn/Uranus Square), we receive a new vision (Jupiter/Neptune conjunction), break it down into steps with a timeline (Nodal T-Square with Saturn) then launch ourselves into to a new role in the world community (Saturn/Mars/Venus conjunct in Aquarius).
Right on cue, the month begins with a heroic, death-or-glory New Moon in Aries on April 1st. With one swing of the sword, Aries slits the throat of our survival fears, spits in the face of our prayerless funk and commands us to finish our Bodhisatva homework. Yes, obstacles persist. Periods of sprinting are punctuated with calculated crawl. “So what,” says Aries. “Deal with it. It’s show time.”
As we move closer to April 12th, the alternating gas/brake energy fades. With Venus and Mars now free of the inhibiting influence Saturn, Jupiter celebrates by falling into a swoony, 10 week embrace of Neptune in the sign of Pisces.
This is a big deal. The last time these two locked eyes in the sign of Pisces was more than 150 years ago (1856). On the plus side, the veil is thin. Signs and symbols speak louder than usual. A sublime time to begin a new spiritual practice. Jupiter/Neptune restores our faith in life, reveals our soul-path and blesses us with miraculous manifesting abilities.
On the down side, look out for the God complex: The “spiritual knower” trampling the Tao of what’s graceful and ripe to be said. Faith in life twists into magical thinking, foolish risk-taking and “escape travel” during a time when we need to ground, prepare.
Impressed by a spiritual teacher? Time to ask:
Do they embody the heartbreak and the joy, the sobriety and the intoxication of being human, even as they are awake to the One?
Or are they employing dry-eyed concepts and charisma to sell “escape travel:” an “awakeness” that has no ego-wounding price of admission?
My advice: go for the heartbreak and you’re ripe for some serious revelation: otherwise known as, “Identity Transplant.”
On April 16th the Full Moon in Libra is square Pluto, embedded into a sublime kite formation involving a grand trine with Mars and shadow-friendly Lilith. If the superpowers get shrewd Plutonic negotiators- capable of “saving face” for the leaders on both sides- this could signal a breakthrough. If not, the window of opportunity closes. Prepare for prolonged conflict.
The second half of April (16th-30th) asks, Do your Piscean visions make Taurus business sense? Considering the way the dreamy stellium in Pisces slides into a second stellium in pragmatic Taurus, there’s a better than average chance that they do. The question is,
Is this a natural next step in a disciplined trajectory? Or are you reaching for the stars in some kind of “escape travel?”
Keep the manifestation “pedal to the metal” until the April 30th Solar Eclipse in Taurus. With Pluto freshly retrograde, the line between do-able dreams and escape travel should be getting clearer, as we take a step back in preparation for Mercury retrograde (May 10th- June 3rd).
(FIFTH DHARMA BELL)
The title of this month’s meditation and self-inquiry practice is:
The French Fry Meditation
It begins with the recitation of a mantra:
Seething like a thousand chips in hot oil,
This mind will never understand me.
Next, I spend a few moments silently gazing at a picture of French fries dunked into bubbling hot oil. (See link on show notes). This makes me smile. Suddenly, I remember: this is not serious; it’s do-able divine play.
By saying “yes” to something deliciously decadent, I say “yes” to my humanness, which opens my heart. I’m just a guy getting ready to savor something incredibly tasty and satisfying.
Then, I repeat the mantra aloud a few more times.
Seething like a thousand chips in hot oil,
This mind will never understand me.
Next, I take the image inside, as I close my eyes. Often, the image quickly fades and I sink into silence. Other times, if I’m agitated, I work with the image. Playfully, I drop all the restless activity of my mind into an impossibly vast and bubbling vat: this psyche of cosmic dimensions that I am, already, immersed in.
Ah, saturated, drunk, divine. Silence arises naturally.
Warning: French fries will never be the same and, if you’re anything like me, silence and salivating will be forever joined at the hip.
Now if that doesn’t motivate you to get your but on a cushion for 20 minutes per day, nothing will!
Remember: this is divine play. Laughter means you’re doing it right. Crying too!
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