by Sarah Bowen
REBELLIOUS VARIATIONS
Silence your phone: Turn off alerts for an hour or a full day. Yes, the world can go on without you keeping track of it online. If you worry about people not being able to get a hold of you, let them know beforehand. (Once, for a month, I left my phone off every Saturday in a self-created digital Sabbath—and missed nothing epic.)
I like to move it: Mindfully move through your day for an hour in silence. Go about your normal activities, but avoid words, opinions, and judgments.
In the car: Take a break from music in your car. Instead, take the time to be aware of the scenery around you. (And practice not scrutinizing other drivers!)
Cancel the noise: Do you live in a chaotic city? Have a long subway commute? Have chattering coworkers, a rowdy household, or a partner who snores? A set of noise-canceling headphones might be just what brings you peace. (I’ve been addicted to mine since first use.)
Clear your cache: Experience a blissful grownup nap time, relaxing yin yoga class, or enveloping gong bath.
DISCOVER DEEPLY
• Attend a silent retreat or meditation class.
• Listen to natural silence from Washington’s Hoh Rainforest at onesquareinch.org.
• Read In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré.
• Download Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village: Zen Buddhism Meditations app.
• Read Living Presence: The Sufi Path to Mindfulness and the Essential Self by Kabir Edmund Helminski.
Talking Tuesday
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WEEK 3: THE KIND LEADING THE KIND
“Please do not take pictures to the turtles,” I read aloud. Perking her ears up, my sister Amy responds, “WTF?” So I elaborate, “The hotel guidebook says we are not allowed to ‘take pictures to the turtles.’” And I giggle. Flipping through more pages, I’m in stitches as I read additional rules to her, “Men are not allowed to use T-shirts.” Then, “Do not take glass bottles out his room, an involuntary break in area of beach can cause accident, others manner allows the manager mini bar know.” Huh? Next, I stumble on to this helpful information, “Neither the hotel is responsible for the actions of the authorities, popular rebellions, vandalism, sabotage, strikes, terrorism, invasion, etc.” Invasion?? That’s quite a thorough list.
In the middle of our snarky fun, I realize the only Spanish I speak is: Si. No. Yo quiero una botella de agua. And a sentence that isn’t fit to print in a book on spirituality. Yet I’m sitting here in a ridiculous amount of judgment over someone else’s translations. My impertinent mind jumps back in with, “Yeah, but this is a business and they should find someone to do this right.” Luckily, something kicks in and reminds me that one of my spiritual practices is Wise Speech.
This practice means I aspire to abstain from lying, malicious speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter. It requires that I acknowledge that words have power, and I have a choice of how I use them: to be kind or to tear others down. Although Wise Speech (or Right Speech) is best known as one of the elements of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, the concept shows up in many spiritual traditions. My favorite is the Baal Shem Tov, a well-known Jewish mystical rabbi, who suggested we reflect on this idea: You were born with a fixed number of words, and once you use them up, you die. It’s not a story meant to scare or shame us. It’s a Jewish koan, asking us to ponder: How would you feel if the last sentence you uttered was, in fact, your last?
I’m sure I don’t want my final words on Earth to be: “This is a business, and they should find someone to do this right.” Nor any of the other sassy things I uttered this morning, overtired from a long flight. That includes the story I told myself about how I compare to all the other people at the weeklong workshop I’m attending. Once the plane touched down, my amygdala jumped into hyperdrive, with my thoughts turning quickly to judge who is like me versus who is other. My spiritual sanity devolved into comparison, judgment, and gossip, moving from allness to meness. I am this, they are that.
Paradoxically, the workshop foundation was Tat Tvam Asi, one of the “Great Sayings” from the Upanishads. Roughly translated as Thou art that or You are that, the phrase is a pointer to unity: the Self in its primordial state is identical to the Ultimate Reality, the ground of being. Or another spin: You are like an ocean wave, coming into being, then returning to the ocean. We all came from something, into isness that is sameness with the oneness. Yet here I am, ego screaming, “I am special!” along with a bit of “I am better!”
It’s not my fault—or so I tell myself—because humans are a storytelling species. When our words become memories, they become our narrative. Instead of being rooted in awareness and beingness, we can get stuck in the story, closing to what is unfolding around us. Our stories are rarely objective, instead, they are polished, curated versions of how we want others to see us combined with reasons we create for why things happened.
Which brings me back to the turtles. Present in many cultural archetypes, the turtle symbolizes longevity and immortality. Which makes sense, since turtles live a long time. Case in point: Adwaita, an Aldabra giant tortoise, is recorded to have lived 255 years. From Adwaita’s view, I suspect the specifics of my daily stories would be inconsequential. Please do not take pictures to the turtles. Instead, let go of my story, my personal brand, my pictures. Speak to the turtle from a place of nowness.
Luckily, many wise sages before us have created frameworks for helping keep our speech on track: the kind leading the kind.
HOW IT WORKS
1. At various times during the day today, before speaking, ask yourself the following questions (often called the Three Gates or Three Sieves):
• Is it true?
• Is it necessary?
• Is it kind?
2. Adjust what you were going to say, if needed, so that the answer to all three is yes. (Or if the answer to all three is no, think about zipping it.)
3. Repeat. Consider the same questions before texting, posting, commenting, or emailing.
4. Reflect. Jot down any tendencies on a Reflections & Ahas page.
REBELLIOUS VARIATIONS
Be noble: Use these guiding principles from the Buddhist tradition: It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of goodwill.
Invoke the Baal Shem Tov: Spend your day with awareness of what you say. Endeavor to make all the words you speak ones you would be okay with if they were your last.
Do “The Work”: In her book Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life, author Byron Katie suggests asking the following questions about thoughts that trouble us: Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it is true? How do you react (what happens) when you believe that thought? Who would you be without the thought?
The Four Agreements: In the wildly popular book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, Don Miguel Ruiz proposes four guiding principles. The first is “Be impeccable with your word.” How? Ruiz suggests: “Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.”
Take it from Bill W., of Alcoholics Anonymous: When experiencing jealousy, envy, self-pity, or hurt pride, there is a 12-step phrase that can come in handy: “Nothing pays off like restraint of pen and tongue.” When swimming in an emotional sea, it can be hard to speak kindly or compassionately. Sometimes the best course of action is to say nothing, do a spiritual practice, and return to the conversation when your head is back on straight. I find this phrase especially helpful when dealing with social feeds. If I read something that causes my heart to race and breath to quicken, it’s time to exercise a little restraint of keyboard until I can come from a place of balance rather than anger.
Stop the Gossip: Before I met my friend Diane, I gossiped profusely but didn’t know it. She defined gossip as “anytime you talk about someone who is not in th
e room.” It’s an intense definition, but it certainly changed my speech. For just today, try not speaking about anyone who isn’t present in the conversation.
Learn Nonviolent Communication (NVC): Marshall Rosenberg developed a framework for compassionate communication that can be especially helpful in dealing with conflict and highly-charged conversations. Based on the idea people are trying to meet basic needs, and when those needs clash, we clash, the four-part process includes expressing observations, feelings, needs, and requests. If you are annoyed by your interactions with a friend or find yourself in constant conflict with someone at work, learning NVC may help you have more effective conversations.
DISCOVER DEEPLY
• Read What Would Buddha Say?: 1,501 Right-Speech Teachings for Communicating Mindfully by Barbara Ann Kipfer.
• Listen to the audiobook The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz.
• Download The Work App or visit thework.com.
• Read Living Nonviolent Communication: Practical Tools to Connect and Communicate Skillfully in Every Situation by Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D.
Wonder-filled Wednesday
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WEEK 3: HERE COMES THE SUN
Today my friend Charlie and I narrowly escaped being run down on the street. Okay, maybe that’s overdramatic. But Charlie and I were standing dangerously in the middle of the road, debating the subtler points of spirituality. Again. For years we’ve been having the same debate, rarely agreeing on much of anything except our immense friendship. We are proof that it is possible to be warmhearted with people who do not share our same political or religious views.
“I have facts,” Charlie asserts. “You have a perspective,” I counter. He ups the ante, “I have evidence.” Not to be outdone, I quip, “Your evidence is affected by your observer effect,” invoking Schrödinger’s cat.*
Fortunately, our debates are not always this polarized. Each conversation may start with us at seemingly opposite ends of an issue, yet we often end up realizing that we’re arguing on the same side of the topic—just with different proof points and perspectives. One of our favorite items is the relationship between science and spirituality. We can go on for hours, on a circular route that never proves anything with 100 percent clarity except that we both like to talk.
Some of my other friends are not as delightful to debate with as Charlie. Another friend told me, “Science is the opposite of religion. In fact, science disproves spirituality; the two cannot coexist.” I tossed some Einstein back at her: “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” Agreeing with these words from Einstein’s essay “Religion and Science,” which first appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930, I view each as a language to explain our human experience, able to inform each other. Both paths are ways that we humans document what is going on around us. And both can be “true.” (Further, both views can also be subject to being turned into dogma.)
Science is an important part of explaining our lived experience. And yet, scientific theories are continuously redefined and superseded. Humanity has gone from believing in a flat single Earth to exploring an expanding (and accelerating) universe we are only just beginning to understand. As Sir Arthur Eddington (a contemporary of Einstein) famously admitted when describing atomic physics in his The Nature of the Physical World, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
The implications of that statement on what we call reality are profound. What we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell defines the perspective of our human experience. Or, as Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix: “What is real? How do you define real? If you are talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
When we start down the rabbit hole journey of What is real? one of the first stumbling blocks is consciousness. In his 1995 article “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies), philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers offers: “Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target.”
Chalmers observes that while research can now explain much of the how of human experience, the why is perplexing: “Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”
As modern science expands beyond a strictly Newtonian-based, cause-and-effect mechanistic view, an image of our Universe as a living system appears. And once it does, the question of what is conscious becomes increasingly relevant. Slipping into a topic which both science and spirituality seek to explain, I wonder about my environment. How far am I willing to consider consciousness permeating the world around me? Clearly, my cats are conscious, as are the mice living in our crawlspace. What about the trees in our yard and the plants underneath them? Where does the line between animate and inanimate lie?
In his book Science and Spiritual Practices: Reconnecting through Direct Experience, controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake reflects on how spiritual practices can connect people with forms of consciousness beyond the human level—with “the more-than-human world.” He suggests that because many of us have replaced living nature with mental abstractions, we’ve lost a sense of connection with the world beyond us. Sheldrake points out, “If nature is alive, if the universe is more like an organism than a machine, then there must be self-organizing systems with minds at all levels, including the earth, solar system, and the galaxy—and ultimately the entire cosmos.” Many of us may be willing to go that far down the rabbit hole, but Sheldrake’s next stop might not be so easy: “The sun sustains all life on earth. If we take panpsychism** seriously, then new questions inevitably arise. Is the sun alive? Is it conscious?”
Granted, Sheldrake admits, “As soon as you ask if the sun is conscious, you realize that you are violating a scientific taboo, the purpose of which is to stop us taking seriously what our ancestors believed…. I cannot prove the sun is conscious; but a skeptic cannot prove that is it unconscious. From a non-dogmatic point of view, the consciousness of the sun is an open question.”
That sounds like a damn fine challenge, so let’s pivot into a scientifically rebellious practice: wondering about the sun.
HOW IT WORKS
1. Grab your morning coffee or tea. Breathe slowly as it cools to a drinkable temperature. Yawn and stretch.
2. Step outside where you can feel the sun. Find a place where you can sit comfortably. Settle in. (If you missed the day in science class where we were told looking directly at the sun can hurt your eyes, consider yourself now warned. Feel is the idea here, not look at.)
3. Consider the importance of the sun to your life:
• Devoid of the sun’s heat and light, our planet would be a dark, cold, ice-coated rock.
• Absent of the energy of the sun, the plants that sustain us would not exist.
• Without plants, there would be no oxygen for us to breathe.
• As the heart of our solar system, the sun’s gravity holds our universe together.
• Interactions between the sun and our earth cause our seasons, drive our ocean currents, and determine our weather.
• The sun has complex electromagnetic activ
ity, some of which gives us the daylight we see by.
4. Contemplate the following ideas:
• The human brain also engages in electromagnetic activity, as neurons communicate with each other through electrical changes at different speeds based on our activities.
• These changes can be measured, correlating brainwaves with thought, emotion, and behavior.
5. Ponder Sheldrake’s musings:
“Most scientists believe that the electromagnetic activity within our brains is the interface between body and mind. Likewise, the complex electromagnetic patterns of activity in and around the sun could be the interface between its body and mind.”
6. Reflect. How does this analogy land for you? Consider how this idea might influence your views about the beliefs of our sun-worshipping ancestors. What is your personal view of the relationship between science and spirituality? Where do you draw the line (or do you draw a line) around consciousness? Is there anything else you find yourself wondering about?
7. Note any meaningful reflections on a Reflections & Ahas page.
REBELLIOUS VARIATIONS
Moonlit meditation: For some, it is not the sun, but the moon that inspires. Activist, attorney, and Wiccan priestess Phyllis Curott reflects in her book Wicca Made Easy: Awaken the Divine Magic within You: “Even though I lived in the midst of one of the world’s greatest cities, I saw that the natural word embodied divinity. The Air was breath. Fire spirit, Water blood, and Earth body. Wiccan practices helped me attune myself—mind, body, and spirit—and come into harmony with Nature, with the elements, the seasonal cycles, and with the Moon.” While the moon’s wisdom and cycles are normally associated with women, Curott goes on to offer, “Regardless of gender, the lunar Goddesses also offer blessings to us all, which we can share and rejoice in together. And among these blessings is the magic of transformation, growth, and manifestation.” So, no, you don’t have to be female—or even Wiccan—to bask in the light of the moon. Its light is indeed available to all of us, regardless of gender or religion. Sit outside in the evening where you can see the moon. Gaze at it: Unlike the sun, this celestial body is safe to look at. Contemplate your relationship with it. Do its cycles affect your life? Or do you take it for granted? And if so, what other wonder-filled things might you be ignoring?