Introductory TM is a very simple method taught by TM centers throughout the world. Our little group went to the meetings together, and we “graduated” in a sunset ceremony where we offered fruit to the memory of the great TM masters of the past.
We were taught to sit comfortably in a quiet room, close our eyes, and to be very aware of our breathing while watching our thoughts as we might watch clouds coming and going in the sky. We were each given a mantra, a simple Sanskrit word to repeat in our mind to quiet our thinking. The purpose was to calm our active mind’s chatter and to de-stress. The deeper purpose was to tap into the inner silence of our being.
In the beginning classes, I felt foolish sitting there breathing and silently repeating the musical mantra. I was embarrassed by the blabber of my thinking since I expected some sort of sublime experience. But over the years I began to gently reap the rewards of this ancient practice. I have found the experience rich and peaceful and have occasionally been touched by insight. I no longer repeat my mantra, that lovely word, whose meaning I never knew.
Every meditation is different, but I usually begin by giving my entire attention to my heart area, the physical seat of love. More often than not, my heart responds with a feeling of radiant, loving energy that seems to open my mind to some degree of wholeness. I’m not sure I’ve ever touched the complete inner silence Nana spoke about. My sense of self is not yet willing to die into nothing (or everything) even for a few moments.
In Hawaii, it’s considered wise to have your home (or new office or new project) blessed in the ancient manner, so we asked Nana to bless our beach house. She came for dinner the evening before and stayed the night.
The next morning before dawn we followed as Nana sprinkled saltwater from a koa bowl with a long ti leaf and solemnly chanted the sacred sayings. As we entered a small upstairs bedroom, she stopped at the door and stared at an old rocking chair in the corner. She spoke to the chair in Hawaiian, listened a moment, and then laughed delightedly. Later she explained that she had seen our house ghost sitting in the rocker (just about everyone but me had seen this female ghost at one time or another). She had asked the ghost who she was and what she was doing there, and the ghost had replied with considerable attitude, “So what’s with you?”
As the sun rose outside Nana chanted to the dimming moon and to the sea and then to the rising sun, and we sensed that they all heard her and responded. Later Nana released the ghost back to the “place of learning,” and no one saw our incorporeal friend again.
Some months later Martin asked Nana to give him a Hawaiian name. Again she spent the night at our beach house. By morning the spirits had told her Martin’s name: Moanikealaonakoolau, which means “the gentle morning mist that carries the scent of the blossoms over the Koolau mountains.” Nana then cooked Martin a whole kumu (fish once eaten only by Hawaiian royalty) wrapped in a ti leaf and told him to eat every bit of flesh. When he finished, she rewrapped the head and bones in the ti leaf and flung the package into the sea on the crest of a small wave. If the wave took it back out to sea, it would mean the correct name had been chosen. The ti leaf and bones drifted away out of sight.
A year later I asked Nana what my Hawaiian name might be. She closed her eyes a moment, then said it was Nohea. And what does Nohea mean, I asked, hoping for something the poetic equal to Martin’s. “Handsome,” she said without ceremony. No fish, no ti leaf, no scented morning mist. I disguised my disappointment with smiling thanks. That evening my spirits lifted a bit when I looked up “handsome” and was reminded that along with “good looking” it also meant “generous.”
Once, early in our friendship, Nana invited me to breakfast with her at her favorite restaurant, Michelle’s. I was delighted to join her, but I had never been alone with her and I was quite nervous. I was in awe of Nana and found myself trying to be as bright and amusing and “deep” as possible. Every quiet moment in our conversation seemed scary (I felt I was somehow letting her down), so I chattered on like an endless TV commercial. Nana said less and less.
As I drove Nana to her home, she was thoughtful and silent. In her driveway I opened the car door for her. She stood up and faced me for a long moment with a look of seriousness touched with sadness and compassion. Then she softly said: “Just be.”
For people who have complicated their lives as determinedly as I had, this profoundly simple phrase is far more easily said than done. Nana’s words planted the seed, but it took me the better part of my lifetime to fully understand, and to occasionally experience the simple freedom of “just being.”
Nana died June 26, 1993. I gave (I’m sure with the help of her spirit) the following eulogy for her memorial service:
Nana means “Light” to me.
We are an immensely troubled species we humans
Creating an immensely troubled society on the magnificent earth.
The darkness of our ignorance sometimes seems overwhelming to me,
and probably to many of you.
But Nana could see the indwelling Spirit, the spark of Divinity,
the Light within each of us—within everyone she touched.
Nana was our friend and teacher.
Love and forgiveness were her themes.
Not the needy, possessive emotion we sometimes call love;
But the love with no strings, no conditions,
that is utterly free, whole, and healing,
the Love that is the very essence of the Great Spirit she called Grandfather.
Grandfather was Nana’s friend.
As she spoke to the sea and to the sky and to the sun,
and they answered her,
so she spoke to Grandfather
and was answered.
She taught us that Grandfather dwells in the inner sanctuary of our hearts,
that we can approach this inner Spirit through forgiveness and Love.
She called this holy place within us the Silence.
It is from this holy place that Nana was born.
It is this loving Silence beyond thought that she served
with all her being, all her life.
And it is this Silence of Perfect Love to which she has returned.
We will miss her. And weep for our loss.
And yet, if we enter the innermost regions of our hearts
through forgiveness and love,
there she will be: arms outstretched, laughing that irresistible laugh,
her eyes bright with the joy of our presence,
her heart bursting with love.
I think Nana was living proof that it is possible to live with an open heart, even when times are rough. If I’d ever asked her about this, I imagine she would say, “What’s the use of separating yourself from love, ever?”
And yet most of us do separate ourselves from love a good deal of the time—I know I do, and the process of abandoning my heart fascinates me.
I’ve noticed that when I’m judgmental, fearful, frustrated, depressed, angry, and so on, my heart feels closed. Yet when I give my full attention to any of these closed states, my heart opens and there is some degree of radiance again.
For instance, when I’m driving, or sitting in a public place like an airport watching people pass by, I sometimes find myself being absurdly judgmental—how sloppy, how ordinary, how noisy and thoughtless, and so on. At such moments I find my heart completely shut down. Then I remind myself that each of these people is an aspect of God. I drop my expectations and judgments and just see. And my heart opens, and I find myself acknowledging that this is a very hard place we’ve been born into and the least I can do is wish everyone well—just as they are—just as I am.
How do we know when our inner source of love is open or closed? Expressions like “openhearted” and “put your heart into it” and “have a heart” show our age-old association of the heart area of our bodies with deep feeling, honesty, and love. Ancient wisdom locates the energy of love in the center of the chest behind the sternum.
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bsp; There may be ways of sensing the opening and closing of the “heart” that have little to do with physical sensation, but I’ve discovered that it is possible and very useful to actually feel the energy of love awaken in my heart. For me it feels like a warm, spacious aliveness, a gentle tingle, a sensation of subtle radiance and well-being.
To discover these feelings it might be helpful to do the following experiment. Find a quiet place and a comfortable chair. Sit with relaxed, alert posture, close your eyes, and put one or both of your hands on the center of your chest. Breathe easily and give your heart area your entire attention.
When we think, we “feel” the thought process just behind our eyes in the center of our heads. When we love, there is a sensation of loving in our hearts. Your hand is placed on the very essence of your self, the home of your soul, the source of love. This indwelling divine vitality is your best and closest friend in the universe. It loves without conditions or judgment of any kind. It sees you exactly as you are, and it loves what it sees, no matter what. This center of love is yours, without interruptions, forever. It is present within you whether you’re aware of it or not. Your conscious awareness, however, opens love’s radiance to flow through you, transforming you and your world.
Personally I continue to be fascinated by my on-again, off-again relationship with love. I much prefer the on-again times and watch carefully to see what turns me off, or rather what circumstances I use to turn myself off and why. I wonder, can we learn to be as constant a friend of love as love is to us?
WHAT IS: THE DIVINITY OF NOW
I no longer think of God as a separate deity, but rather as the essential nature of all that is. God is all there is, there is nothing but God, and God is good. By good I don’t mean cozy niceness, but that the dynamic nature of spirit tends toward the wholeness of love and (despite appearances) away from harm.
Along with my thesis that there is nothing but the divine, it seems to me that there is nothing but the present moment. The past is gone and the future doesn’t yet exist. Obviously, the past leaves its effects on the present, but the past itself is gone. Just as obviously, the present moment affects the next moment, but the future never exists beyond the now, except in our imaginations.
Martin and I love houses. A wise friend and teacher of ours says we have house karma. Over the years we’ve created several wonderful homes, always remodeling existing structures. Our lifelong goal has been to design and build our dream house. We love living in Hawaii, and for nearly twenty years we’ve had our eyes on a particularly beautiful house site. About three years ago the lot became available, and to our surprise and delight the owner accepted our first offer. This all happened so easily that we assumed our project was blessed.
This home was to be our final stop and guarantee our future happiness. We hired an architect and created a serene and handsome design that took maximum advantage of the gorgeous setting. We even engaged a top-notch interior designer from the mainland and started thinking about furniture. We were on our way to a nirvana of sand, surf, and sunsets.
We sold our big house in Honolulu, put a lot of stuff in storage, and crammed ourselves and the rest of our possessions into our small beach house in the country to wait for building permits and for construction to begin.
Then, out of the blue, a series of bureaucratic hassles big and small began an endless series of delays and costly legal confrontations. I’ve lost track of how many times we all said with relief, “Well, that’s finally over, now we can begin!” only to be surprised and dismayed by yet another, sometimes whimsical, change in official policy. Permissions granted, permissions withdrawn. Our guarantee of happiness was turning into the prescription for a mix of smoldering rage and clinical depression.
Though we love the sweetness of the people here, over the years we’ve found the State of Hawaii bureaucrats to be self-important, arbitrary, and downright unfriendly. Our frustration with this latest lengthy fracas with officialdom led us to think seriously about selling the lot and leaving the islands for good. We both felt worn down, hugely disappointed, and unaccountably victimized.
So where is the Christ, where is the Buddha in this mess of frustrated dreams?
One recent afternoon, feeling thoroughly bummed out by all this, I sat down in the living room of the beach house we’ve owned for twenty-six years and took a long look at the absurdity of letting the supposed source of our future bliss, our imagined tropical Shangri-la, cause us so much unhappiness and angst. I got very quiet and just looked at our situation as objectively as I could. Gazing out the windows, I noticed the sunny perfection of the day and heard the rhythmic rumble of the waves. The plumeria trees were blooming and scenting the breeze, the doves and mynah birds were gabbing. A lamb stew was simmering in the kitchen. Our much-loved dog was asleep at my feet. There wasn’t a hint of turmoil anywhere. If I was stressed out, the cause was nowhere in sight. The cause must be in my own head, in my thinking.
It was suddenly clear: I had attached my well-being to an imagined dream house and its easy manifestation. Ignoring past experience, I’d staked my happiness on cooperative, concerned officials and honest, thrifty, competent contractors (good luck!).
And I wondered why it’s so easy for me to forget that my sense of well-being is only now in the present. It cannot be dragged in from the past, which is gone, dead and buried, nor can it be found in the future, which doesn’t exist. Well-being is simply being well right now, living with as much integrity, clear awareness, and openheartedness as we can muster, with a willingness to examine whatever barriers we’re putting in the way of our innate if sometimes elusive wisdom. When I remember to quiet down and do this, the problems that pollute my thinking and vaporize my wa (inner harmony) become interesting challenges rather than subversive attachments—I’m free to “be well” and at the same time to vigorously deal with the difficulties at hand. I had been victimized only by my own thinking. I was painfully disappointed not by the officials who were just doing what they do for inscrutable reasons of their own, but by my unrealistic expectations.
It seems to me that the prime reason the potential magnificence of thought so often degrades and works against us is the fact that our thinking is so powerfully programmed and conditioned by the culture we grow up within. We innocently accept current local values, likes and dislikes, prejudices and fears, without much examination and questioning. If it’s good enough for Mom and Dad, and for the minister and my teacher and my pals on the playground, too, it’s good enough for me.
To bring some order, we have created various societies and, dare I say it, religions. To keep from being raped and pillaged, we get together and devise rules and mythologies—systems of rewards and punishments to achieve a civilized environment in which laws are obeyed, money has value, and in which there is some degree of personal safety and perhaps even freedom. To be effective, these rules and mythologies must be believed. Belief requires indoctrination, which occurs at all levels of civilized life: family traditions, schooling, political rhetoric, advertising, the arts, and the media.
My first memories of being indoctrinated come from very early childhood, when I learned from my parents that if I were a “good boy” (doing what they wanted me to) I would be loved, and when I was a “bad boy” (doing what I wanted to do) I would get icy stares, or worse. In short, love is earned by pleasing—which is, as often as not, manipulation at best, downright dishonesty at worst.
As a kid I loved to dance. Put on some music, and I’d be up imitating all the hoofers I’d seen in films. In her youth, the famed ballet dancer Maria Tallchief lived in a duplex apartment across the alley from our house. Tallchief, a Native American, later became one of George Balanchine’s favorite dancers at the New York City Ballet; in fact he married her, as he did, in succession, several other of his favorites.
One day, when some neighborhood pals and I were “alley hunting,” I found a worn pair of toe shoes and a tattered tutu in Tallchief’s trashcan. Imagine the glacial disappr
oval I received when I ran home, donned tutu and toe shoes, and delightedly danced Swan Lake all over the house. Dad, completely nonplussed, brandished his most lethal sneer. Mom seemed stricken and delivered a freezing version of that “look that kills.” And Bill just turned away in disgust. Their learned beliefs told them that a boy jumping around in a tutu was un-American, unholy, and probably illegal! The message was clear: I was a disgrace to the clan, and was summarily cast out, at least for a time. That ancient game of Reward and Punishment, of giving and withdrawing “love” to maintain control, worked like a charm once more. The offending tutu quickly found its way back into Tallchief’s trashcan. The message was carved in granite; I never tried that again.
A corollary to the “please and conform” syndrome was instilled in my early schooling: Without my peers’ approval I might as well be dead. We’ve all experienced the absolute tyranny of the current “ins” and “outs” of any clique of schoolchildren. Before jeans were de rigueur among the grammar school crowd, cords were the thing to wear. Then all at once cords were out, and Levis were mandatory. Cords were more comfortable; I kept wearing them until peer power laughed me off the playground. The tides of conformity are swift and compelling. The fear of being shunned is intense. I switched.
The one area in which I held firm, though it cost me dearly, was team sports, which I loathed and never joined (I think now to my detriment). I enjoyed, and was good at, most other childhood games, but the team gene was left out of my nature.
In the early grades of school I learned that boys must be all boy (rough-and-tumble, combative), girls must be all girl (frilly, domestic, artistic, compassionate, and hopefully not too bright), and any whiff of the androgynous is verboten. I was taught early that winning and being right are necessary in all circumstances; losing is, like peer disapproval, a kind of death. I learned that I must depend on others for love, approval, and validation in order to merit any degree of worth and happiness (a belief that, if you think about it, is a kind of slavery).
Shattered Love Page 14