The next book in the Mystic Heart series is a book written by Thomas Keating, a modern mystic. We will sit with this text on March 12th at 8:00 am. Please register by March 10th through the registration tab on the homepage. The Zoom link will be sent the day before.
The book is called The Human Condition. What a paradox that such a big subject is captured in 44 pages! It is a short but profound book that follows nicely from Suzuki’s question, “What am I?” and the teachings on finding faith from emptiness where all ideas and expertise are dissolved into absolute compassion and readiness for All. It amplifies Suzuki’s teachings on sincerity …. revealed in the simplest form of zazen which is no particular posture and “nothing at all” to speak of, where form is form and emptiness is emptiness.
“Let this be a mother’s gift to her child….Find yourself a faith. It helps. No, not just helps: it’s everything,” said Princess Alice to her son Prince Charles.
That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence: throw away respect, Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while: I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king?
Richard II, Act III, Scene 2
Richard II – A3S2 – For within the hollow crown – Prince Charles – Crown 3
From a letter written in 1966 by Thomas Merton to Jim Forrest, which can be found in his book, The Hidden Ground of Love
“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.
As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”
Shunryu Suzuki, direct descendent of Zen masters, left us the teachings of Beginner’s Mind. If the teachings have awakened what you already know through life’s experiences, you will understand that he did not write the teachings. And, he makes clear, it would be a gross misunderstanding if you receive the teachings as any “particular” religious belief. Rather, it is not only compatible with all religions but essential to knowing your religion and yourself without becoming its’ prisoner, a slave to form without your true identity or real understanding. Zen practice is a practice of “putting self in order” and returning bit by bit to your original unique oneness with the infinite, nameless, formless, All that is One.
On February 12th at 8:00 am on zoom we will be engaging in an experiential application of the Beginner’s Mind tenets through the use of psychodrama and zazen meditation. May it be a true bridge to the teachings, expressing sincere gratitude to those who have pointed and point still to the humble practices born out of true “way seeking minds” amidst adversity and “mind weeds,” born out of wounds, old and new, in need of revelatory compassion that extends to all.
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky in The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master
This poem by Hafiz is dedicated to the Mothers and Fathers brave enough to go into that private room with God, ready to be shaken for the sake of the children in your care, awakened to agape.
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By our hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
Remember how you experienced the world with the wonder and joy of innocence as a child? When everything was Mystery? Is this where the Mystic Teachings lead us toward?
On Saturday, February 12th, we sit with the Beginner’s Mind teachings of Shunryu Suzuki. To register, go to KairosCenter4Change.com. Registration closes on February 10th.
The sound of the in-breath, Sooooooo, and the sound of the exhale, Hummmmmm, rhythmically dance us all day long with the drumming of our original heartbeat, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. There is a divine “two” in constant dialogue, one not being able to exist without the other. This principle extends from breath and heartbeat to every reality that lies in consciousness: there are always two in dialogue, dancing one another, dancing us on the personal and collective level to birth life….or decline, for something else.
And so, what dances and dialogues with choice? How is it dancing us who are the third, watching, when we dare? What of Life are our choices birthing?
The conditions around choice are always relevant to the outcomes of our labors are they not? When we choose out of the condition of obligation/subservience are we choosing at all? Perhaps we need to be more specific. There can be many reasons we are operating out of obligation/subservience, too many to enumerate here. But, just to start us off…
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to the status quo (habits), what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to mindless compulsion, what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to our personal notions of “freedom,” what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to the vistas of our desire that satisfy the senses, what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to a moral teaching, what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we bring our conscious awareness to our notions of freedom, our pallet of desires, and our vista of compulsions to the moral teachings, what are we inviting in? What are we activating? What are we distilling for the world?
At first glance, isn’t she terrifying? If your answer to the question, “Do you want to meet her?” is with an undeniable “NO!” that may be a very, very, very good and wise choice. However, as you read on, you might change your mind.
The Baba Yaga may have appeared in your dreams or nightmares a few hundred times and you didn’t know it. Can you imagine? “Nooooooooooo,” you might say. “Impossible! Not mine.” Hard to believe, but true, that there is an unconscious realm that we can be beholden to or prisoner of by the power of primordial spells that keep us encased in glass caskets like Snow White or held in a tower without doors like Rapunzel. It may or may not help to know that this is only one of her infinite forms that speaks to us, in a very real way, about where we are…. in the hidden, and what she is telling us we need to do to move forward.
This figurative Slavic, mythical, supernatural figure lives in a house that moves on chicken legs symbolizing constant flux and birthing. When she lies down, spread out, her limbs touch every corner of her home and her nose touches the ceiling! As I enter this description I am having an experiential recall of dreams of early childhood, of images expanding and shrinking, expanding and shrinking. This is actually a common nightmare of children crossing thresholds, thrusting them into the arms of parents in the middle of the dark of night for reassurance. When asked, the terror is unexplainable, the contents are all so benign. The terror is MOVEMENT itself into the unknown, commonly known as “night terrors” that trip at predictable ages and milestones when more brain areas are coming on line!
Returning to the image, as I gather myself to learn what the image foretells, I turn to the fertility of the chicken whose legs MOVE her house around, from dreamer to dreamer. “Birthing,” at first glance is a MOVEMENT, admittedly painful but profoundly beautiful …. yet the image challenges me to move further into and dwell longer in the fertility symbolism. After acknowledging the PAIN AND TERROR of MOVING through the birth canal, which we know is all good, I ask “Well, does she birth what IS good or does she birth what IS evil?” From the image I’m leaning toward the latter. Wouldn’t you?! The stories, however, say something different, building the tension of dissonance, a loss of harmony and balance assuring of positive outcome or at least of our control. Uncertainty, characteristic of the paradox of wisdom and humility, now arrives in my awareness, experientially.
More hints or alarms are in the image. They are so loud and strong that it is hard to call them “hints.” Surrounding her home is a fence with skulls atop their posts, most of them with hair, a symbol of intellect, suggesting it had no power against their demise. A kind of ferociousness is communicated, alluding to battle or many battles past. Fences or fortresses protect and skulls lying on them tend to represent warnings of terror and certain death. And so I ask into the subject of her ferociousness, I ask about the object of her battle. I ask:
“What is she a protectress of? What does she devour? Protectress and devourer? Protectress and devourer? Of what? what? what? what? I need to know this to know if she is good or if she is bad, if she is benevolent or if she is evil. So I ask: “Is she a ferocious protectress or a ferocious devourer of life? of good” or “Is she a ferocious protectress or ferocious devourer of death? of evil?”Is it safer to go in or safer to stay out?! Does the fence keep bad or good or all people from going in…or going out?
She is clutching a limp child by her hand. “Is she a protectress or devourer of the innocent, the grieving, the weak, the children, the poor, the down-trodden?” Looking at the figure of the boy, we might easily conclude that she is a devourer of the children, the weak, after all. We might even be certain! God forbid. But, based on the tales of old, the answer to all these questions would be….yes. Such an answer amplifies the dissonance, the cacophony to new heights!
So lets suspend the image so that I may take another route to see if I am getting colder or hotter in my estimations. As the image communicates clues so does the name. What it doesn’t clarify it may affirm or disconfirm impressions already made. Embedded in her name… Baba … are the roots of pejorative attitudes widespread across cultures (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene) who have explicitly found her in their fairytales, suggesting she is a characterless bald man or a foolish old woman, perhaps even a sweet cake, a snake, a mushroom, and even a pear. The part of her name, Yaga, has its origins in meaning of shudder, witch, horror, and anger. In sum, her name has a particular design that releases the energetics of “Wake up or else!” It has that quality of chaos where anything goes if you don’t understand. These energetics are sent on the waves of the words into our collective psychic ears to palpate the heart into territories we do not want to tread with compulsion or fantasy or….God forbid, isolation.
If we must enter with compulsion or fantasy, which inevitably we all must do because that is all we can do at most every crossroad into new life life that really counts, may we have the courage and character strength to know what we do not know or to know that we may not know anything at all before we step forward or pause before we jump in! This is the beginning of all real transformation, after all, where we are of true beginner’s mind, cleared out and naked of identity, affiliation, and agenda that serve as blindspots for spiritual engagements. Failure and ignorance (the unknowing of our hearts desire, motivation, weakness) are the fertile ground of humility and transformation.
The Baba Yaga thus may be viewed as a figure, a symbol, that points to our character strengths and weaknesses, daring us to not only know them but to speak honestly about what she shows us, knowing that when we do we may be releasing treasured goals and loves into the endless chasm between reverie and reality, fantasy and Truth. This sort of heartbreak is real and we are never prepared, using the phrase of Rabbi Lew.
May we hear the constant echo resounding through the airwaves from the beginning of time, softly whispering: “Speak to the unknowing of your heart and its’ motivations with sincerity, with courage, with a most reverent attitude.” This may be the basic, most essential, and hardest practice, hardest MOVEMENT to acquire and sustain in the effort (not the achievement). When we do, we become bound to the container and power of the secret Mysteries that stand by us and for us in our danger when faced with the towering, hideous, irate Baba Yaga.
In the stories, the ones who are not chilled to the bone by Truth and Sorrow and Injustice are the ones who she eats or who have been eaten already by Power, Greed, and Injustice. It is their skulls that lie atop her bordering fence, whose essence can no longer take claim of the young vulnerable boy finding himself now in the Baba Yaga’s clutches, limp of all that no longer can sustain him and so gorgeously full of all that will return him, again and again. So, if you have met the Baba Yaga you know, she is initiating him into what is real, into sacred belonging and eternal life. She is not the villian, she is the teacher, the midwife who births light.
Things aren’t always what they appear to be, at first glance. What a tragedy, indeed, if you have not met the Baba Yaga in your dreams, while awake or asleep in the dark of night . Is it not?
