Horse as Agent. My Photograph of a photograph of a horse, taken in Jesse Goldman's house. Jesse explained this horse helped heal its owner during a serious illness, and thus the photo, taken by the owner, was in honor of the horse. I offer this especially to Lisa Havelin, horse lover extraordinair.
Receiving Guidance
From experiences that are still undeniably the closest to my heart and that I am in service to, the drala principle is above all one of “receiving guidance” – of becoming receptive to receiving quidance. These words might seem theistic or indicative of giving away ones own intellegence, thus I continue to explore their true meaning, which can only come as a view of egolessness and co-dependent origination. The illusory sense of ourselves as a fundamentally separate and thus a fear-based entity is our false home ground, an habitual belief-perception that normally dominates our consciousness. The essence of meditation (on the cushion, in post-meditation or in any other from) is to familiarize ourselves with the background to this imputed sense of ego-self. Meditation is a kind of ground-background shift. This background is space, expressed in the three-court drala-principle; our true homeland, a place fundamentally and always free from hope and fear. And it seems the “inner” space of our heart is as vast as the “outer space” of the cosmos. What a home.
Istanbul.
The so-called relative world that is our life is filled with kleshas, expressed in our ties, attachments and aversions to each other; to our friends, wives, children, relatives and to strangers. Buddhism points out the endless affliction of our kleshas – passion aggression and ignorance – yet equally stresses the impossibility of becoming realized without others. “Be grateful to everyone” since everyone is else the source of perfecting the paramitas and opening our heart.
Buddhism describes our relative world as one of co-dependent origination or arising - that no foreground exists independent of the background and of "other" foregrounds - and that we suffer by holding on to the "other" that we have frozen in space as an object of attachment, aversion or ignorance. How does agency (a theme of the first Curriculum entry) fit into this? How can the others in our life became agents? What "choice" do we have in this matter?
Others - whether they are other human beings or dralas - always have messages for us, and even if the messages are confused, they have their wisdom. In the constant opening that the drala principle requires, receiving guidance is to seek communication with the larger fields, with all of our relations and what they have to say. Not so much taking a particular point of view in relationship to them, but asking, What are they saying? or What does the present moment (or hour, week, day, month of our life) require? Is curious how seldom we ask others for advice. We might direct them with leading questions, but asking for this kind of advice means giving someone else carte blanche to say whatever arises, but also requesting they respond from a place of depth, heart.
The dralas are sad that we neglect them, being obsessed by our own agendas and our human relationships, we forget to ask these agents of space what they think. The dralas have a perspective vaster than our own, or at least different (kind of like a Google map?). Collectively, our ignoring of the three court principle is so pervasive that asking the dralas for guidance is a taboo and we have an extremely hard time believing the possibility is even real.
Detail from Angels Serving Tea
to the Prophet.
Gertrude Stein said that in writing it is impossible not to have narrative. Perhaps because I am a writer I began the think of “narrative” as the apt term for our relative life, since we are always telling ourselves stories, telling others our story or listening to theirs.
Jack Niland relates a story about Lord Mukpo who was once, in the early days of arriving in North America, visiting with some physicists who were very interested in the tantric views of space and time. Mr. Mukpo told them, “Well, space is solid and forms are hollow,” which the scientists found quite intriguing.
“So space is solid,” one of them asked, “solid what?”
“Solid stories,” Mr. Mukpo replied.
The story of Istanbul, where I am now, might be described in a single sentence, one I read yesterday in the first few pages of the novel Snow, by Turkey’s Noble prize winning writer Orhan Pamuk. Here the novelist comments on the main characters impressions:
Returning to Istanbul after twelve years in Frankfurt, looking up old friends and revisiting the streets and shops and cinemas they’d shared as children, he found almost nothing he recognized: if they hadn’t been torn down they’d lost their souls.
It has been five years since I have been in Istanbul (though I arrive back with only the impressions of fourteen days from January 2005) and the changes I see are similar: more upscale shops, a greater distance between the shoe-shine men and the iPod listeners, concrete apartment building claiming even more of every horizon. Seeking romantic images here is desultory and futile, though the apocalyptic materialism is its own bracing site, astonishing and as hugely wakeful as it is demeaning or distracting.
Crowds on Ishticlal Cadeshi, Istanbul.
The image that has arisen for me here is the “central channel” a term from Vajrayana Buddhism – and especially the Kagyu lineage – that represents the essence of the “enlightened body” that all human beings possess but that is normally hidden and unfelt due to the “winds” of our busyness, like a melody obliterated by traffic noise or a homeland we are so busy looking for externally we can never recognize it - or like the line in the Quran that says God is closer than our jugular vein.
I’ve been thinking of the central channel in a universal sense, that the bow, or prostration, or circumambulation or kneeling in prayer or sitting meditation is based on returning to the central channel (and even as I write, the afternoon call to prayer has begun to blare from the city’s minarets; pre-recorded, amplified and each not quite in synch with the others). Arriving at the central channel (so to speak) is not necessarily an esoteric discovery, but it is a place of relative quiet where we can begin to hear the dralas or receive the agency of “their” thoughts. In this place, in meditation, we can begin to see the rational mind as simply the arising of thought-concept, we recognize when we hold to these concepts and we recognize when we let them go. This increased space of being allows us to discoverer another basis of companionship: we are alone, yet also alone with the alone.
Objects on bed.
Sultanemet or "Blue Mosque" seen
through building site.
In the threefold why of a sorrowful interrogation we hear a kind of echo of the question asked (by the dralas): Have you yourself perished that you can ask whether the invisible Beloved had gone away, or whether he whose Name, whose secret you alone know, ever was?
As a kind of koan or densely lyrical line of verse, I cannot begin to say what this sentence means, except to say that it seems to break into the kind of language the dralas prefer or are called by: a sadness of heart, a complexity of dimension, an equivalency in which me must “think” as hard as they do; a poetic language that defies conventional logic and is closer to the infinite thoughts of a child, a language that asks passionate questions – as dohas do – of our heart and our most tender, profound aspirations. The answer to these questions can only be found by ourselves, alone with the Alone.
MIRROR NEURONS ADOPT ANOTHERS POINT OF VIEW
Is empathy (or compassion or love) simply an innate though less tangible part of ourselves, one that we habitually keep in the background through speed and stress? If so, could this be an essence of the drala principle? These questions were spurred by a short video Theresa told me about. After watching it, I was so enthused I asked Theresa to write an introduction for, which she graciously offered:
Bill Scheffel's right optic nerve.
Courtosy of my optomatrist.
Courtosy of my optomatrist.
The physician and neurobiologist V.S. Ramachandran explains that we humans are connected to other beings by a whole chain of neurons, dubbed mirror neurons, that enable our ability not only to empathize, but to, quite literally, feel another’s joy and pain. Our sense of separateness is, in fact, maintained merely by a specific set of touch and pain receptors that override the mirror neurons in most, but not all, cases. In Ramachadran’s words neuroscience has proven that there is “no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world and inspecting other human beings. You are, in fact, connected.” Theresa Lettenegger
Agency
Lisa Thompson wrote this beautiful piece in response to the theme of agency:
Every day I brush enough hair off of Snyder Brown to make a new cat. The waste can fills with downy orange fur and Snyder lies on his side loudly purring. At first he was suspicious of the brush and tried to bite it but now he knows that it feels good to expel the prickly old hair, the itchy dead hair. Santiago, the Puerto Rican building guy loves Snyder and calls him the jello cat, as in “oh I love the jellow cat!” and it’s a good description because Snyder is pliant and yielding like jello but has a certain nonviolent resistance that refuses to be consumed. The other cat, Angus, can melt into your arms like butter, if you are me, but if you are not he stays under the bed. I have transferred my kind of cautiousness to the cats or perhaps we just share a feline sense of space, an ownership of solitude and wariness of intimacy. These are my boys and they are just cats to some but to me they are more. We intuit a language. I know when Snyder rubs his head against “Shrubs of the Great Basin” that he is ready for the brush and Angus knows when I am sad and has often tried to cheer me up by pressing a toy into my listless hand, the squishy eyeball, for instance, which is my favorite though he prefers the jingly balls. If thoughts are the agents of the dralas, then Snyder and Angus are the agents of unconditional commitment. I give them food at the appointed time and medicate Angus twice a day to prevent his seizures and love them knowing that their feelings for me are complicated and inscrutable and have a lot to do with a twice daily portion of Fancy Feast Cod, Sole, and Shrimp Dinner.
In the dictionary, agency is defined as the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power. I come from a personal lineage of powerful actors, agents of change. My father, as chairman of the school board, presided over the creation of a new high school, and later, as chairman of the hospital board, built a new hospital in our small town. He was known for getting things done, but not for finesse, as he was prone to speak his mind and once told the editor of the newspaper that her mother was crazy and should be institutionalized. The editor retaliated by referring to him thereafter in print as “Doc” Thompson, as if his medical credentials came from selling moonshine from a wagon. My mother and siblings are equally adept at making things happen, for better or worse, with the attendant consequences, but I have always struggled with creating change in my life and environment. I’ve longed for an agent – a teacher, a shaman, a drala -- to nudge me out of my hesitation into my own ‘state of acting,’ my own power.
Viewing thoughts as the agents of the dralas, I see that “I love my jellow cat” leads me to that broken-hearted openness where there is appreciation for the beauty of his soft tender belly, and the trust that allows him to let me stroke it, and the knowing that we will both die, one before the other and that one of us will suffer the loss of remaining. And when I go farther I see that the love of the soft tender body could extend to my own vulnerable belly, my own careful grooming and feeding, which I too often neglect, biting the brush before I feel the release of my dead, prickly parts. So I see how following the appreciative thoughts, the thoughts of things I love can lead to something expansive based on gentleness instead of struggle. And that if I can slow down enough to see the connections, the agent is already here shining a light on the path.
I want to complain about my inability to affect change, though I know I enjoy inability too much. Failure takes me out of the competition, out of the fray. Perhaps I overemphasize the affecting and need to pay more attention to the effect, the thing that happens after the action, sane or insane, deep or frivolous. Receiving the feedback, being receptive to the consequences. It makes me tremble.
Marshal your strength, Shantideva says, take heart and be the master of yourself. I can be the master of the cats, their small-animal bodies, their vulnerable existence, dependent on the goodness of others but my own small-animal body wants a master too, an unconditionally kind and loving source of nourishment.
Bill Scheffel, Lisa Thompson, Bill Scheffel.
Washington D.C. August 2008.
