Mar 21, 2010

Today I turned my chair around.

Today I turned my chair around in my office at home. Here-to-fore I have faced essentially east, looking into the room. Now I am looking west and out a window, a nice switch really, with a sense of connection to the natural world that has been missing until now. I think a switch in perspective is a good thing now and then. It is easy to get bogged down in the safety of sameness. Of course, we all want that safety, at least to some degree. We long for predictability and consistency because with little doubt it calms us down, reduces the chatter that crowds our minds and creates an opportunity for life to stop and for us to get a breath of fresh air.

Predictability, however calming, is also somewhat of a trap, for if we work hard only to create a stable position in life, the inevitability of change will undoubtedly tap us on the shoulder when we least expect, or want it. So more, perhaps than stability in what life offers us, our search should be for stability in what we offer life; that is, the way we manage the inevitable twists and turns that will be thrown in our direction. I have come to see this as a matter of control: not in the sense that we figure out how to respond to the noise that so often feels like our instability—to solve the problem, so to speak—but rather control that allows us to choose a response that silences the noise such that our perspective can change.

One thing I have found interesting as I have more deeply pursued becoming a better spiritual teacher is that some people do not even know that they have noise in their head until they experience silence. This has been, frankly, a bit startling, because, as I suspect we all do, I consider myself to be much the same as everyone else; that is, the way I think, the way I obsess, etc. Over time, I have come to suspect is that the older I get, the less true this is. Not that we diverge from who we are as we get older, but that as we learn to access and use the wisdom that arises from our experience, our perspective changes and even as we mellow a bit, our differences become more apparent. Also, I have realized that I have always been drawn to self-contemplation, often in a less than productive manner, but that for other people, many others in fact, my kind of self-examination either does not matter, and never has mattered, or it has only seemed necessary in extreme occasions in their lives. Frankly, with the amount of noise in my head, I consider them lucky not to have been strapped with a similar affliction, although I have come to love my own way of being.

One thing that I have learned from all my chanting and leading sacred singing is the value of silence. Silence is the gift of music, something that I have said before but I value more and more as I delve into silence more deeply. And silence is where perspective change usually happens.

Silence has two components. One is the silence that we experience in our ears. This kind of silence is an absence of noise. It happens in a gentle snow storm when all sound is muted by a cushion of snow. It can happen late at night when we awaken to the silence of a sleeping world. It happens on occasion here in this sanctuary, after prayer, when no car or motorcycle roars off from the stop sign. What is nice about this kind of silence is that it really is a gift. We focus on the absence of sound--emphasis on the word focus—and it is really a joy to be rid of the tug that noises have on our attention.

We are on occasion fooled into thinking we are experiencing an absence of noise at times like when we are lying on a beach and the waves create white noise in the background. Or perhaps when we walk in the woods and hear the hiss of leaves or the gurgle of a brook mixed with the noises of animal life and the rest of the natural world. But once again, the real issue is our focus. We do not really stop hearing sounds nor experience aural silence; but our concentration, our focus, on something other than that which we grind on in our head, offers us relief from a noisy mind. This, by far, is the more profound silence. It is, I think, within the silence of mind and the resulting changes in our perspective, that we end up answering some of our toughest challenges. It is within the silence of mind that true safety, stability and consistency lies.

In 1980 my father lost a business contract that accounted for 90% of his business. He was ready to retire, to hang up his business shoes and kick back. I am sure the shock of realizing that he either had to start over or figure out some less than wholly satisfying alternative was initially terrifying, awful; basically, not pleasant in any way. My father was a very consistent person. He respected maverick action, but was very much a product of 50’s thinking. In this instance, however, he did a pretty surprising thing. He went sailing. He had done this in crisis’ before, but usually for a couple of weeks and, even then, most of those crisis’ were not nearly as overwhelming as this final straw. This time he went sailing for 6 weeks. When he came back, he had solved the problem in a way that allowed him to retire, to save the business, to keep all the employees in work, and to make an extremely good life for the person (the son of a friend) who became the owner of the business.

What did my father do? By going sailing, where he found time for his peace of mind and he was able to change his perspective. He silenced his mind, and in that silence, he found the answer to his problem. He found what would make him happy in his retirement. After that it was a cinch to put the puzzle together.

If there is anything that my trip to India changed in me, it is my ability to shift my perspective. Well, perhaps it did not exactly change me, but solidified what has been an ongoing process for a number of years. I imagine that most of you have had this experience: you go away on vacation to some relatively exotic place. You lie on the beach, trek around in the mountains, visit a museum or two, and slowly you calm down and everyday life fades into the background. But, then you come home, and, BANG, you are right back into it, and not only does it seem that nothing has changed, but that the frustrations are magnified tenfold by the contrast to the coveted holiday state of mind.

Our hope seems to be that when we return, the perspective change we have had will have similarly and magically taken place at home or on the job, or that it will rub off on others fast enough so as to jive with our own changes. When this does not work, the first couple of weeks home from a vacation can make us feel worse than we did before we left.

Though I’m sure it started before India, what I learned on coming back from India was to look for change only the most subtle of places. When I was in India, everything changed; from food, to schedule, to culture, to even how I chose to dress. But when I came back, the only thing different was me. I realized that if I concentrated on what was going on around me, I would never find what had changed within me, which is far more subtle. I realized that we experience difference all at once, but real change is far less dramatic. It was merely a change in my perspective.

Particularly when it comes to spiritual issues, I think perspective is extremely important. Not perspective in the sense of point of view or belief, but in how we go about looking at things; not the stance we take, but the process by which we reach as stance. This, I guess, brings us back to the idea that instead of trying to find answers, it is more important to ask the right questions. I think this becomes more true with spiritual quandaries, in which answers requires a certain amount of faith, and are rarely answers that are unalterably true. So I want to posit two or three spiritual questions that might help you think about spiritual issues with a different perspective. Let me make one note: I use the word God for the sake of expetitiousness, replace it with whatever works for you. So, here they are—oh, and by the way, with no answers.

First, do we find God more readily by asking questions or by not asking questions? This quandry can be flanked with thoughts of faith versus knowledge, with fact versus truth, and/or with assurances versus trust.

Next: is God internal force waiting to be expressed or an external force waiting to be included? This question can also be reframed in the following manner: Do we find God more readily by thinking God is inside and there for us to accept and find, or by assuming God is outside and we have to open ourselves to let God in? This contrasts Eastern (wisdom) and Western (prophetic) religious traditions, but also has an impact on what kind of work we choose to do in our spiritual development—though either perspective may spawn the same results. Next; Does making our connection with God become stronger through total knowledge or through total surrender? Is our understanding of God made stronger through intellect or through intuition? Or Both?

Next: If we are searching for God, will we ever really find it? By searching for God, are we assuming that we have something to find? Or something left to find? IF we are searching for God are we assuming that it does not exist within us already?

Next: If we surrender to God, can we ever be sure that that to which we have surrendered is all there is?

Next; Do we find God more readily by searching for a connection or by accepting that connection is a given, automatic, and ever present?

Finally; where does God exist: In the gross, material world? or in the subtle ethereal world? Or Both?

Well, if those kinds of questions don’t bind you up a bit, I don’t know what will. But they do, I think, lead to one additional question: do the answers matter?

I’m not sure they do. What does matter, however, is that we understand that there are different perspectives on spiritual issues and that we need to be open to them all. This, I think, is even more important when we are talking about religious issues, where it is all too easy for perspectives to become fixed in people such that they become intolerant.

There is no right way of finding God. There are no right answers, nor are there wrong questions when it comes to the exploration of the divine—both what we find to be the divine outside us and inside us. But there are better questions and always more questions that can help deepen our understanding of God and its meaning to us. And in the end, it is only by asking questions that we realize we have a choice. We have a choice between noise and silence, between separation and unity, between connecting with our divinity and letting it go fallow. By making our own choices, we can find God, we can find safety and times of peace and calm in our lives. By making choices we learn to accept the responsibility for our own spiritual path and to create the clarity that allows us to live our divinity day after day.

Blessed Be and Amen.