The Aspects of True Love

Anh yêu em ~ Em yêu anh ~ Em thực sự đã giữ tôi… v.v….

Since February 14th was Valentine’s Day, and we’re officially back mid-month and looking forward to some upcoming Spring offerings with John Ashbrook and others, we thought it’d be appropriate to post this Ashbrook archive article, discussing the most important of all topics — Love! It’s interesting to note that the number 14 is a number that speaks of romantic love with a possible Warning of ultimately being unfulfilled. Indeed, romantic love is born of exciting emotions that hopefully will give way to permanent feelings. Unfortunately and too often, people are afraid to feel permanent feelings and their true love does not develop. Instead, the promise of a steady, even-keeled, peaceful relationship becomes the heartbreak of an emotional roller coaster ride, with all its peaks of ecstasy and valleys of despair. Obviously not true love but sadly accepted as normal, this manifest a state of more unfulfilled love.

What then is True Love? True Love is like a glass-smooth lake. There is not a ripple in it. Remember, still waters run deep. True love is a feeling of permanent love and constant peace. True love contains emotion but is not controlled by emotion. Certainly there are peaks of passion and excitement but there is constant peace of mind like the surface of that glass smooth lake. The relationship never falls below the level of peace and tranquility. Therefore, it remains satisfying at all times. True love is a constant state of knowing trust, it is a permanent feeling. You know that your partner will respect your peace of mind and never knowingly provoke any fears or insecurities that you are still working through. You trust this will not happen. You are committed to an all-out effort to do the same. Two responsible people coming together to further enhance and expand what they already have separately. True love always adds to, it never detracts from. True love is both detached and united. It is a high state of spiritual development, and, of course, requires gigantic inner work to achieve.

So how does someone get to this exalted state of being capable of sustaining true love? It is a lifelong journey and as long as you and your partner both pursue the journey, you both move toward completion (i.e. True Love). True love knows no fear. So as individuals, you must search out, identify, work through and release all fear. Once you as individuals have identified your fears, you must then reveal them to your partner. This revealing of your vulnerabilities to each other is crucial because it fosters trust. You are saying to your your partner: “I trust you with my secrets. I real myself to you knowing that you will not use your knowledge of my fears to provoke or control me.” You and your partner will make mistakes in this area and friction will result, but these frictions must be discussed openly because they are the stepping stones to growth in the relationship. Do not fear mistakes and when they are made, do not condemn or judge harshly either yourself or your loved one. Forgive freely and move on. True Love forgives and forgets.

As you reveal your fears to each other, you will be surprised to find that many of your fears are mutual and become mirrors to each other. Your partner reveals a fear and in doing so they become a mirror by which you can look into your own soul. This activity of revealing yourselves to each other will become in itself very fulfilling and as you discover more about yourself, generating great excitement. You can’t wait to get home to share your inner discoveries with each other in an atmosphere of true harmony and trust. The more you discovery and reveal, the more you open yourself to infinite revelation and personal growth. You and your partner become calm and secure in your constant and ever-changing state of true love. This is the path to True Love and it is self-nourishing and ever-satisfying. It heals the past, sustains the present and guarantees the future.

A Special Kind of Nothing

Shinzen helps transform the former Michal Nathaniel Holt into the mighty Yüshin, He of ‘Heroic Authenticity’.

What have we here? Having not posted since a now distant 2019, taking our own time for retreat and rejuvenation, the annual pilgrimage West has almost come full circle, back to a Midwest February Winter. In-between, we walked the earth a bit and celebrated another annual Year-End Retreat with my teacher Shinzen Young. He’s the black-robed cat on the left above, in the Zendo or Meditation Hall where we sit in silence for minutes upon hours upon days. Here however I was happy to capture and honored to witness the activity that is Shinzen imparting a Dharma name to one of his students, the former Michael Nathaniel Holt being dubbed Yüshin, translated as Heroic Authenticity. Heyoka-style, I used to make fun of the dharma-named crew, thinking that while it may certainly work well for Choshin, the former Deborah Blackburn and Shin’s adept assistant, I had the No-shin I wasn’t too sure about all these other lotions, motions and potions. Having observed the sincere, heroic and authentic vibe of the Above Ceremony, I’m now a convert. I came to scoff, but remained to pray. 

 More on that a year or so away. For now, we’ll revisit one of Shinzen’s best and brilliant dharma talks from the twelve-day silent retreat. This talk, while not for the faint of heart and lengthier than a regular post in this space, was my wildly encouraging take-away, math rant aside. I’ve done my best to edit a bit for engagements sake, knowing reading is a different sort of listening than a live talk, but Shinzen’s artistic take on the consciousness of poetry of both the writer T.S. Eliot and Master Lin-Chi founder of Ch’an Buddhism is pretty standout for the science nerd he is. And it gave me a sense of pride to still be learning so much from my teacher, who is several Mega-parsecs up the road., after all these years. “We have a lot to look forward to,” to quote Shinzen. More stories from the other leg of our Winter travels and upcoming Spring Retreat Season also soon to come. 

“Having given you a bit of a preamble on the historical and cultural background of Zen Master Lin Chi and now I wanted to read this quote - one of my favorite from him – as I translate from Chinese in real time for you. The reason I like this passage is that it describes, at first very logically and then very poetically, riding the Ox home (note this is a reference to Shinzen’s former talk on a series of short poems and accompanying drawings used in the Zen tradition to describe the stages of a practitioner’s progress toward enlightenment). It’s also very relevant to a particular issue that comes up over and over again in practice. I’m often asked by people who are going through… weird stuff… it’s a long list – confusion, perceptual disorientation, mental turmoil and so forth  - but often associated with going particularly deep. You’ve all heard me say this a gazillion times before, that if someone comes to me alarmed and says: ”I went really deep to where I’d never gone before and”, then 80% of the time I know what they’re going to say next, “And then I became frightened.” Fear then can come up, and as mentioned perceptual disorientation, often associated with different flavors of disorientation. Or breaking up. There’s even a term from Southeast Asia – Bhanga – which literally means to break up or fragmentation. Going deep then, you have these different flavors of disillusion, and disorientation, and fear arises. I think the main reassurance people want to know, especially since it’s often a new thing, is where is all this leading?

Lin-Chi’s Description -  sometimes called the Four Fold analysis - poetically describes where this leads.   Although initially disorientating, unnerving, and fear producing - you might have the initial sensation that your belly button has been ripped away, the rug is pulled out from under you, there’s no firm purchase - you are scattered to the wind, the boundaries are no longer defensible, and so it seems like a process of disorder. But if you keep equanimity it evolves into a sense of perfect order, a sense of extraordinary order.   In Zen,  they use poetry to make us exercise our intuitive muscles in order to understand. So the sense that you’re falling backwards off a cliff forever or on eternal TILT, we could interpret this initially as a problem. Or we could hold this as the beginning of becoming intimate with the forces of contraction. The sense of being scattered to the winds we could interpret it as a problem, or we could relate to it as an initial contact with the universal forces of expansion. If we interpret it as a problem, then we have the standard paradigm for meditation – basically that we control the scattered and find a center. And that’s o.k., that’s an o.k. way of looking at things. But there’s another way. There’s a saying in Zen that a good doctor can cure your illness but only an extraordinary doctor can show you how you were never sick.

These early experiences then, that one is scattered or dismembered psychologically and can’t find a center, if you don’t take them personally, it will show you, eventually, the dance of space. This seeming disorder leads to an ordering principle so primordial, it can never be disordered. In the West this impermanence in the Buddhist tradition was equated with Fire, from very early times, starting with Heraclitus, who talked about this eternal living flame that comes down the line through the romantic poets — the living flame of love, la llama del amor — and very much present in Elliott. What at first looks like death — perhaps because it’s the peristalsis of the formless womb that moment by moment gives birth to the self and scene, the inner and outer worlds — is the flame of love that unites the inner and outer scene, the inner and outer See Hear and Feel. In the beginning, there’s the sense that there’s a self here and a world back there, but they aren’t separate at all, there’s just simultaneous expansion and contraction and in between is the steam or foam of form, the technical term I’d use being exceedingly subtle vibratory flow. If that flow coagulates, then we get a perception there’s a thing, a self, inside here separate from the outside. But if those scintillating shimmering champagne bubbles don’t freeze, then there’s no longer anything keeping them from merging into the absolute rest of the Source (++ edit of Shinzen’s mini math rant on the history of the evolution of Zero and going beyond the concept of affirmation and negation++).

Remember — the style of Eliott is to have thee extended metaphors. On one hand, he’s describing the German bombing of England. The bombs they dropped were ironically called Taube, the German word for Dove, the Christian symbol for the Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit that descends, the Pentecostal Fire from the view of Christian mysticism, a force that burns up the sinfulness, but you must be willing to give yourself over to that. You must give yourself over to this thing that seemingly will destroy you, but its breaking up and softening the substance of your soul by burning up all of that which separates. A good thing to remember when the bombs drop… because they will.

“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire.”

Chuc Mung Nam Moi! Happy New Year 2020!

Our sun-dappled Michigan December felt like one long, happy, Holiday celebration, beginning with a standout Workshop at Yoga Life in St. Joseph, Michigan. We then enjoyed our Annual Aho ho ho Down and Open House as well as a Ceremonial Winter Solstice Circle. That’s our crew up above (ate), lit up from behind as well as the inside. For some, the Winter Solstice is simply the shortest day of the year and longest night, a harbinger of the coming cold, dark months ahead. But for many ancient civilizations and indigenous people around the world, the Winter Solstice marks an important milestone. Some cultures referred to this time as Yule, a celebration of the Goddess (Moon) energy and birth of the sun as well as the spiritual sun within us, a powerful force for regeneration, renewal and self-reflection. We also welcome The Year of The Rat later this month, a period representing the beginning of a new day (Hokahey!) as well as critters that are clever, successful and content with living a quiet and peaceful life.

 Enjoying a balmy 50-degree, colorful, Christmas day, Winter’s brutal majesty and the serene season is right around the icy corner. We’ll be taking our annual January Winter break, but back the first weekend in February with our monthly Ceremonial Gathering, our first Winter Silent Retreat Weekend February 19th-21st, and a regular monthly Meditation and Mindfulness 101 class beginning Saturday February 29th, all to assist you in leaping into the New Year 2.0. See you soon!