A Word from Wayne

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

Dar­bella and I are presently in Que­bec City, shep­herd­ing (herd­ing?) 130 8^th graders around the city. This is Que­bec City’s 400^th birth­day year, so likely we are also bat­tling crowds.

It’s almost the end of the school year for Dar­bella, and that means one more year to go before we “shift gears.”

Trust­ing all is well with you!

A New Series—The Body Speaks

(In the first in this series of arti­cles, I pro­vided you with a handy lit­tle chart that pro­vides the loca­tion, descrip­tion, and char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Chakras. Use the link if you want to refer to it.)

This is the last arti­cle in the Chakra Series

Well, we finally reached the end of our Chakra series. I’ve enjoyed think­ing about how to com­bine Zen prin­ci­ples with Chakra the­o­ries, but the truth of the mat­ter is, all of the East­ern wis­dom tra­di­tions fit together like hand in glove.

There is a cer­tain sad­ness to this explo­ration, as the con­cepts pre­sented are super­fi­cially easy.

There are a lot of peo­ple I know who get all of this stuff, at least intel­lec­tu­ally. What there is a decided lack of is actu­ally liv­ing any of it.

I remem­ber broach­ing Chakra the­ory, as it applied to one of my friends, and she said, “I know all about the Chakras.” What I was say­ing rather directly (and she ignores, equally directly) was that she may know all about it, but her knowl­edge wasn’t play­ing out in her life.

Most peo­ple, for exam­ple, “get” the idea of liv­ing in the moment. They just refuse to expe­ri­ence it.

“I could have sworn me
was me!”

In other words, the the­ory makes sense, but it’s really hard to give up the idea of a per­ma­nent self, past and future, and being really, really important.

Oth­ers have spent years becom­ing book smart, and then want to argue with me about the cor­rect­ness of their views.

Sim­ple Zen guy that I am, I’m only curi­ous about how they are actu­ally liv­ing their lives. If they are cre­at­ing mis­ery for them­selves, (and no doubt blam­ing all and sundry for their pain) I remain uncon­vinced that their book smarts is doing them much good.

Sim­i­larly, many peo­ple I know are Spir­i­tual junkies.

Which is sort of where today’s topic, and Chakra, are heading.

The sev­enth Chakra is located at the crown of the head. It’s often pic­tured like this.

Holy Stream­ing Chakra, Batman!

The image is of a fun­nel, firmly screwed into the head, receiv­ing the boun­ti­ful bless­ings of heaven.

And here’s where every­thing goes off the rails.

Life is, indeed, exactly like this. In case you haven’t noticed, if you’re not dead, the Cos­mos is pro­vid­ing every­thing you need. As a mat­ter of fact, it’s even pro­vid­ing stuff, expe­ri­ences, that you either don’t know you need, or wish you didn’t need. In other words, each of life’s chal­lenges is there for a reason.

Here’s the off the rails part.

Most peo­ple think that the Cos­mos oper­ates on a reward / pun­ish­ment sys­tem. In other words, if I’m a good lit­tle Doo­bie, “some­body up there” is going to shower down good­ness upon my lit­tle head. And all those peo­ple I don’t like? Well, I’ll just pray that they get straight­ened out, prefer­ably by being tor­tured in ways that I think appropriate.

Speak­ing of prayer, most peo­ple do this thing by grip­ing and com­plain­ing, and then telling “God” how to solve the prob­lem. Then they sit there, tap­ping their lit­tle feet­sies, wait­ing for God to go along with their lit­tle plan.

And often, they’re quite pissed off when the bad thing they want to hap­pen to the other per­son doesn’t hap­pen. Hallelujah.

There is a line in the Bible that goes some­thing like, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.”

Fake-Spiritual peo­ple hate this line, as it just doesn’t seem fair.

In the Zen world, it’s impos­si­ble to tell exactly what just and unjust looks like, apart from my own, skewed per­sonal pref­er­ence. Despite the fact that all of us think we know the dif­fer­ence. Here’s a hint: we don’t.

This goes right back to what we’ve been talk­ing about for the past many weeks. Our exis­tence is totally, 100%, subjective.

It’s all about the sto­ries we tell ourselves.

In the last arti­cle, I made an attempt to con­trast See­ing with think­ing, or bet­ter put, sto­ry­telling. See­ing is all about sim­ple per­cep­tion of the ongo­ing nature of life — of the ongo­ing nature of the universe.

As soon as you start think­ing about it, and ana­lyz­ing it, you’ve left the flow of the moment-by-moment expe­ri­ence, and ended up back in your head, where noth­ing is real, and dis­trac­tions abound.

Truly See­ing is, oddly, noth­ing more than liv­ing moment-by-moment in the here and now.

• Which is amaz­ingly hard to do.
• Which is some­thing that needs con­stant reinforcement.
• Which has absolutely noth­ing to do with any­one else, with oth­ers giv­ing you per­mis­sion to do it, or any­thing out­side of you.

It’s like zazen, or “just sit­ting.” You either do it, or you don’t. Blam­ing exter­nal cir­cum­stances, who you are liv­ing with, or whether you feel like it is sim­ply going back into your head and mak­ing another excuse.

So, back to the tra­di­tional pic­ture of the sev­enth Chakra.

Just what is all that stuff stream­ing into our heads, fill­ing us up?

I See it as both moment-by-moment expe­ri­ence, and the pro­vi­sion of exactly what we need, with­out our earn­ing or deserv­ing any of it.

I just fin­ished a book called, “Bud­dhism is Not What You Think,” by Steve Hagen. Here are a few quotes:

“Real­ity is always right here, right now. It’s just this—vibrant, imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence… Most of the time, how­ever, we super­im­pose some­thing onto what is imme­di­ate and Real. We project onto what we directly expe­ri­ence, and we extend that pro­jec­tion through time and space. Thus we cre­ate sub­jects and objects… The upshot is that we don’t engage the world as it actu­ally is. Instead, we react to the world as we assume it to be—or, worse, as we think or wish it ought to be.“
p.204–05

The games our mind plays with us go on until we die.

Nat­ter­ing, scat­ter­ing, and sto­ry­telling is what our minds are all about.

Our job, decid­edly, is NOT to fight against our mind. Our goal is to side­step our mind by “sim­ply notic­ing.” Quot­ing Hagen again,

“The awak­ened see Real­ity as it is. They see that enlight­en­ment is noth­ing more than not being deceived by the con­cep­tual world each of us cre­ates… The most basic split, of course, is “here I am” and “out there is every­thing else.” … The enlight­ened per­son isn’t taken in by such con­cep­tual dual­i­ties. Still, it isn’t that the illu­sion goes away. The illu­sion still appears, but it’s seen for what it is—an illu­sion. And this see­ing is utterly lib­er­at­ing.“
p. 206

And that stream of stuff, flow­ing into our heads? The flow is all there is.

Tiny bub­bles…

I once read some­where that we are, and every­thing we per­ceive is, sort of like a bub­ble in a rush­ing stream. The bub­ble appears bothy “real,” and “sep­a­rate” from the water.

The bub­ble is actu­ally “water-ness” that seems to appear on the sur­face of the water.

It appears, goes with the flow, and then pops, and vanishes.

At no time how­ever, can we think of the bub­ble as being sep­a­rate from the stream. Other than in our twisty — turny lit­tle minds.

To quote Hagen:

“It’s not that the uni­verse is made up of innu­mer­able objects in flux. There’s only flux. Noth­ing is (or can be) rid­ing along in the flux, like a cork in a stream; noth­ing actu­ally arises or passes away. There’s only stream.“
p. 220

Now, back to the dilemma.

Many peo­ple equate being Spir­i­tual with being spe­cial. Dar­bella and I were con­sid­er­ing, briefly, going off to Ohio to med­i­tate. I was really impressed that the Zen Cen­ter said that no one med­i­tat­ing there was to wear robes, or use their “Dharma name.” (A Dharma name is the name you are given when tak­ing Bud­dhist pre­cepts.) They indi­cated that every­one was the same at their Cen­ter—and I just amused myself, as

it’s also so that we are all the same at our cen­ter.

Lookin’ mighty fine…

Any­way, I’ve always been a guy who likes ” dress up.” Back when I was in the Min­istry, I had all the out­fits. It was entirely pos­si­ble for me to put on the full regalia, and that out­fit cost me $1000.

There were points when my hair and beard resem­bled what I thought of jok­ingly called my Rasputin look. You’ve seen this pic­ture before, but what the heck.

Part of me would love to hop into a set of Zen robes—many times, I wear Chi­nese style mar­tial arts cloth­ing when I sit. I exam­ine my moti­va­tion relent­lessly —and believe I wear them because they’re com­fort­able and have pockets.

But I rec­og­nize I have attrac­tion for cos­tumes. It reminds me of the old doggerel:

I see by your out­fit that you are a cow­boy.
I see by your out­fit that you’re a cow­boy too.
We see by our out­fits that we are both Cow­boys.
If you buy an out­fit you can be a cow­boy too.

Spe­cial, spe­cial, special.

Which makes it hard to sim­ply be the flow. Not of the flow, not in the flow, not the spe­cial, spe­cial part of the flow — the flow.

And the joke is, whether you get this or not, whether you believe this or not, whether you hate this or not, this is what there is — this is all there is — the flow.

Get­ting the joke about a sep­a­rate iden­tity (while still hav­ing one, we’re not nuts here) means that you are freed up — lib­er­ated — and are there­fore capa­ble of act­ing and being as you act and be, moment– by-moment. You see the stream, the flow, and you rec­og­nize it for what it is — that which empow­ers and enlivens us all. It’s not the pos­ses­sion of the spe­cial, it’s not a tool to be used to gain something.

It and you just are.

Back to sit­ting. Lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively, he says with a smile.

Many peo­ple show up to learn med­i­ta­tion, and they have a goal in mind. They want to relax, they want to man­age their pain, they want to find them­selves. They may even think that med­i­ta­tion will lead to enlightenment.

While it is pos­si­ble to achieve such prac­ti­cal goals, and indeed, as you med­i­tate, such things do hap­pen — the real pur­pose of med­i­ta­tion is to see the flow of life, and the end­less silli­ness of the thoughts we con­coct in our heads.

Med­i­ta­tion does not stop the thoughts — it can’t — noth­ing can.

Our egoic thoughts, our des­per­ate self­ish­ness, our burn­ing desire to be dif­fer­ent, is our con­stant com­pan­ion. Med­i­ta­tion helps us to see what we do up there in our lit­tle heads, and to just let it be.

Thoughts come, thoughts go, and are mean­ing­less and tempting.

We can attach to them and fol­low them, or we can laugh and let them go. If we do the lat­ter, we find our­selves “just sit­ting” in pure awareness.

If you read back over the arti­cles in this series, you’ll see themes emerging.

The most obvi­ous is the one about the mind, and the mind’s games.

Yet, if you look, you’ll see that none of the Chakras have any­thing to do with think­ing, ana­lyz­ing, or cat­e­go­riz­ing. Rather, from the Root Chakra to the Crown Chakra, it’s all about sim­ple experience.

At the Root Chakra, we find ground­ed­ness, bal­ance, and a sense of ener­getic flow.

At the Belly Chakra, we learn to relate to every­thing and every­one as they are—without judg­ment. We rec­og­nize our sameness—indeed, we’re all just bub­bles in the flow.

The Solar Plexus Chakra helps us to see our true nature—that our self is not per­sonal, at least not in an egoic way. The thing that, for con­ve­nience, I call “Wayne” does not exist as a thing, but is rather a moment-by-moment experience.

The Heart Chakra shows us a way of being in the world that is, well, open-hearted. As I said in the arti­cle, it’s encap­su­lated in the Buddha’s smile of infi­nite com­pas­sion. We know and see the game we play in our heads, we know and see that oth­ers are play­ing it too, and we rec­og­nize that enlight­en­ment and lib­er­a­tion is noth­ing more than get­ting the joke. From this place of wis­dom, we can enact com­pas­sion by stead­fastly refus­ing to deny what we see to be so—and act­ing from there.

The Throat Chakra is all about expres­sion. And by that I mean how we speak and how we live. In other words, this Chakra might be thought of as the loca­tion of self­less ser­vice. And not how we usu­ally mean self­less. Mostly when we hear that word we think of ser­vants com­pelled to do the dirty work for the Mas­ters. What I mean by self­less is sim­ply explained like this: self-less. No self. This is not just a Bud­dhist concept—there’s no-thing, it’s all illu­sion any­way. If we get out of our own way, we can actu­ally pro­duce some pretty amaz­ing things.

The Brow Chakra is the in-sight Chakra. This is where we re-mind our­selves that we are the authors of all that we see and expe­ri­ence. In a good way, it is all about us. Many peo­ple use the con­cept of “all about me” to try to get the world to coöperate—once again look­ing out­side for res­cue, for hap­pi­ness, for love, for enlight­en­ment. None of which exists out­side of you. What you’re get­ting right now is what you’re mak­ing right now. If you don’t like it, get over your­self, and do your life dif­fer­ently by bring­ing your atten­tion inward, see­ing the game, hav­ing a laugh, and com­ing back to the moment.

The Crown Chakra is a reminder that every­thing you need is already here—to put it Zen-ish-ly, you are already per­fect, you are already the Buddha.

That’s the joke behind the line, “If you meet the Bud­dha on the road, kill him.” You can’t see the Bud­dha out­side of your­self, because there is noth­ing out­side of your­self, and if you’re see­ing him out there some­where, you’re miss­ing the point.

Now, all good West­ern­ers know, (have been brow­beaten into believ­ing,) that we are all born in sin and need a Sav­ior. Good luck with that. The Crown Chakra reminds us that sal­va­tion, like every­thing else, is an inside job. That you con­tin­u­ally for­get this, and look out­side for sal­va­tion, is not the fault of the Cosmos.

Well, here we are at the end of this series. I got sev­eral responses to the lit­tle sur­vey, and “Zen approaches to life” per­co­lated to the top. Next week, we’ll see where things go, and I’ll let you know which top­ics are going to appear over the next while.