Living Into Love

I was recently talking with a friend who said he wished he could take his current insight, wisdom and experience back with him to apply to the difficulties of his past life. I told him that I wished that I could apply my current insight, wisdom and experiences to the difficulties of my present life.

While it can be enormously helpful to reflect on and understand our past, the only time we get to choose and act and make a difference is right now. (Though I have to give at least a nod in passing to the wonderful bumper sticker—It’s never too late to have a wonderful childhood—that points to the fact that the past might not be as fixed and permanent as we imagine it to be.) One of the great challenges of the spiritual life is to live the insight and wisdom we have touched.

The great Christian mystic and writer Thomas Merton put it this way: The first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it. I might paraphrase him and say: The first responsibility of a person of faith is to make their faith really part of their own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it. But you get the point.

It’s wonderful and important to talk about the Dharma and God and the path of awakening. But that’s not where the real work happens. Being able to discuss living in the present moment turns out to be not nearly as nourishing or as challenging as actually living in the present moment.

Many years ago I had a St. Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment when I had a life-changing experience of the oneness of the universe. I had the unshakable experience that we are never separate from God’s love—that the love and connection we seek is already here. Of course this experience came in the middle of a dark and confusing period in my life (college) when I felt utterly alone and cut off from myself, from others and from the world around me.

I was caught in my world of suffering and just wished I were someone and somewhere else. But in retrospect I see that it was precisely this darkness and struggle that gave energy or created the ground of openness or desperation for something else to come in. This experience of oneness was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me AND it also set me on a path of great suffering and great searching. Because after several months as the clarity of the mountaintop view began to wear off, what had been a visceral certainty became just a vivid story. Then even the vivid story began to fade as the necessities and distractions of everyday life exerted their inexorable pressure. I was bereft. Having found the certain treasure and the truth that set me free, I lost it again. Or I found I couldn’t hold onto it. I didn’t know what to do or where to go to get back to where I was.

My confusion and searching eventually led me to Zen Buddhism and the practices that I have been doing for the past forty-some years. At first Zen seemed to be a way to recreate that experience of oneness. Then I began to realize that my great urge to have a specific state of mind was not a particularly beneficial or realistic motivation.

Very slowly over the decades I have come to realize that my original vision of oneness and presence was actually true but that the point of life is not about achieving (and talking about) altered (and wondrous) states of mind, but about living ever more deeply into the truth and love that surrounds us.

This is the endless and joyous work we all get to do right now.

Dogen, the great Zen teacher of the 13^th century wrote about beginningless awakening and endless practice. The truth of our unshakable connection to love has always been here AND requires our continual practice to live the truth that has so generously touched and sustained us.