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Last night I went to a hockey game, The Red Deer Rebels vs. The Medicine Hat Tigers.
After the two teams took the ice and Medicine Hat was customarily booed and Red Deer was cheered, a voice boomed from the speakers…
“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for your national anthem.”
I love living in Canada and sincerely appreciate the opportunities and advantages that living in this country has afforded me. I would not want to live anywhere else. That said, I did not stand for the national anthem.
Why?
Not because I felt disrespectful.
I can feel respect sitting or standing, just the same.
Not because I’m rebellious.
I am rebellious, but this has nothing to do with that.
Not because I wanted to make a point to those around me.
I don’t think I was even noticed.
The reason I didn’t stand, even though I was surrounded by 10,000 singing patriots, was because it was so uncomfortable for me to sit.
Let me explain.
It is my mission in life, above ALL, to try to stay awake and see what is REALLY going on, moment to moment.
In the particular moment that I was asked to stand for the national anthem, I also noticed my automatic, knee-jerk impulse to stand. But I didn’t stand.
When I noticed everyone standing, I also noticed my discomfort in being the only one sitting. But I stayed sitting.
When I noticed my mind throwing up stories about being disrespectful and rebellious, my attention opened larger than stories, larger than respect and larger than rebellion.
As I sat there, I opened my attention and sunk into my heart, alive AS Life, breathing love for the 10,000 beautiful standers.
The reason I stayed sitting is this:
I have come to understand that in any moment of discomfort, there is probably an important lesson close by. That discomfort is asking for my attention, saying “look CLOSELY, there is something going on here that wants to be seen.”
If I am awake enough to feel that discomfort and move into it with openness and attention, rather than to fix, fight or forget it, I am likely to find a gift of understanding beneath that discomfort.
What did I learn by sitting in discomfort through the national anthem while surrounded by 10,000 beautiful singing standers?
I learned that even in the midst of discomfort, who and what I am is far beyond anything I can do, sitting, standing, singing or otherwise.
I learned that in any moment that I can remember to relax into the source of who and what I am, I am beyond respect, nationality, race, religion, or any other way we like to describe (limit) ourselves.
I am alive AS Life, and so are you.
***
For more on this kind of seeing, check out my new book:
Waking Up to Life!
If you have read my book, Waking Up to Life!, you may have noticed that, as much as possible, I avoided using the word, Spirituality, throughout the book. This is by design for two important reasons.
First, the word Spirituality has become such a catch-all term that it has ceased to mean much of anything at all.
Spiritual self
Spiritual healing
Spiritual power
Spiritual success
Spiritual guidance
Spiritual growth
Spiritual energy
Spiritual this
Spiritual that
If one were to take even a rudimentary look at what the word means as it is generally agreed upon by the World’s Wisdom Traditions, it becomes obvious that the meaning of Spirit is far different than how it is being used in its popular way today.
If I were to take a Spiritual stab at it, my definition would go: Spirit is that that is radically prior to, but not other than, personal identification. In other words, Spirit does not belong to you, rather ‘you’ are an expression of Spirit.
To provide an analogy, we do not say the sun belongs to the sunshine, but rather the sunshine is an expression of the sun. This shows an understanding of what is source and what is expression, keeping in mind they are not separate.
To reverse the order is a typical egoic error, with the idea that you are the source and Spirit is controlled and expressed by you.
The second and more telling reason I have avoided the use of the word Spirituality is a result of the first.
The word Spirituality has come to mean both so much and so little that the term is used by numerous well meaning but completely misguided groups. This means that to even use the word is to risk being lumped in with some very lovely but no less confused folks that I do not support.
Is Spirit really a quality to be used by ego, some power to be wielded or energy to be manipulated?
To even admit to being Spiritual today is to be suspected of maintaining irrational views and off the wall belief systems, accompanied by a strong urge to spread them.
To this I suggest that Spirituality is not ‘irrational’ but trans-rational in that it contains and goes beyond rationality to a place the thinking mind cannot attain.
Spirituality also has little to do with beliefs of any type but rather involves numerous experiments that are designed to take place in the inner lab of consciousness with awareness and attention.
If you do the experiments, your results are worth sharing. If you refuse to do the experiments, your opinion is worthless, the same as any other type of science. To believe it’s raining outside while refusing to look, makes your belief invalid. To look is to know, which does not require belief.
Believe it, or not.
At the core of all well-founded belief,
lies belief that is unfounded.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
I, probably like you, enjoy points of view that uproot my faulty assumptions. For example, many years ago I was exposed to the views that age does not equal maturity, and life is not necessarily fair or kind.
I also like to read about understandings that dis-illusion me and reshape my world. For example the sun doesn’t rise OR set, but instead the earth turns, creating an illusion of rising and setting.
I like reading small dose’s of hard to swallow perspectives that are followed by suggestions as to how those perspectives can be attained. For example, we do not exist at all as we imagine. Imagination happens in the mind, but the mind is not the right tool to determine what we are as living beings.
Using the mind to understand what you are is like using a yardstick to measure the quality of a book, a movie or bottle of wine. It doesn’t translate. To see this is so, I suggest you begin to train your attention to become strong, stable and silent.
Then, look closely.
Looking closely does NOT mean thinking about. When you look closely without thought you will see that life is deeply profound. Shockingly profound.
When you live life on the surface, you miss the deeply profound in favor of the thin veneers of thought. Living deeply does NOT demand thought.
Some people say to me: “Aaron, why do you gotta make it soooo complicated?”
When I hear that question, I know that one of us have missed the mark. Either I have not been clear, or they have mis-interpreted or are not ready to understand. If someone thinks I make it complicated, then the gulf between what I am trying to share and what they are understanding my be too vast to continue.
That is because what I attempt to do is make this understanding RADICALLY simple and UTTERLY obvious.
My deepest offering is to help others to relax into the utter simplicity of what they ALREADY are, free of story, drama or thought.
I am asking you, “Who are YOU, without thought, without a ’self concept’, free of the past and future, free of memory and imagination, free of drama and story, naked and alive as the throbbing actuality of Life, this moment now?”
Who are you before you think about it?
If your mind goes silent in a wordless understanding of your magnificence and enormity …
Welcome home.
Man is a god clothed in rags, he is a master of the universe
going about begging a crust of bread. He is a king prostrated
before his own servants, a prisoner walled in by his own
ignorance. He could be free. He has only to walk out of his
self-constructed prison, for none holds him there but himself.
~ Paul Twitchell
If you like to be exposed to views that challenge your assumptions, expose faulty beliefs and disillusion you, then grab one of the last 3 spaces for my Red Deer Seminar.
Tell me what you pay attention to
and I will tell you who you are.
~ Jose Ortega y Gasset
I wanted to ponder with you for a moment…
What if… right beneath our noses was a different kind of Life. I am not talking about fixing our circumstances or ‘Life situation’. I’m not talking about self improvement.
I am talking about the way we see things. I am talking about where our attention is and how that determines the world we live in, who we ‘are’ and the Life we live.
The quality of one’s life depends on the quality of attention.
~ Deepak Chopra
I am talking about what it really means to be happy. Insightful. Wise. Relaxed. Creative. Energetic. Free. Awake. All of these qualities stem from UNDERSTANDING.
“Understanding what?” you ask?
Understanding that when we lose interest in mental chatter and allow attention to relax into its source, then everything changes, without changing anything at all.
For lack of attention a thousand forms of
loveliness elude us every day.
~ Evelyn Underhill
What happens when we develop an unconditional openness toward every moment of Life as it appears?
What happens when we get out of the way and allow Life to unfold and we fall in love with the process of Life’s bloom and we watch and realize that we ARE Life in the deepest and truest way?
Attention is the most basic form of Love.
~ John Tarrant
What happens when we realize that Life is what we ARE, and to BE Life, we need do nothing at all?
The pain in my distended belly was getting worse, close to unbearable.
As you know if you’ve read my book Waking Up to Life!, the mind of a nurse can be like a paranoid know-it-all. The mind of a nurse always imagines worst case scenario’s and catastrophe’s for the body of the same nurse.
According to my mind, my body’s stomach ache had to be a symptom of one of BIG C’s.
Crohn’s, or … gulp, cancer.
How was I going to tell my gal? My family? I’m too young, too healthy, too strong to be this sick. Aren’t I?
As I headed toward the hospital, I dreaded the long wait ahead of me. I shouldn’t even bother. When the pain doubled me over and I started sweating, I gave in, shut the car off and creeped to the emergency room doors. The place was full and I knew I was in for a long wait.
After giving my personal info, the nursing attendant asked me to “please take a seat in the waiting room”.
Now, with a severe stomach ache and surrounded by suffering people of all types, I took a seat, as was suggested. I didn’t take just any kind of seat though.
I took ‘the one seat’.
What is ‘the one seat’, you ask?
Why don’t I let the wonderful American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, tell you so beautifully:
“Spiritual transformation is a profound process that doesn’t happen by accident. We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing. To mature on the spiritual path we need to commit ourselves in a systematic way. My teacher Achaan Chah described this commitment as ‘taking the one seat.” He said, “Just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the one seat in the center of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.” (Jack Kornfield ~ A Path With Heart)
As I took the ‘one seat’ in the Emergency Room, I simply sat and watched Life in its varied display of color, craziness, cruelty and compassion.
When I was finally called for an exam, I took my ‘one seat’ with me.
As the intern poked and prodded, I held my ‘one seat’.
When the Dr. returned to tell me the bad news, I stayed in my ‘one seat’.
As the stretcher rolled me toward the operating room, I laid in my ‘one seat’.
As I was being put under, I fell asleep in my ‘one seat’.
When I awoke the excruciating pain only briefly pulled me from my ‘one seat’, but I held fast.
The process of having an appendix removed while sitting in the ‘one seat’ is far different than the mind’s story about it.
Life lived from the ‘one seat’ is far different than a life lived in the mind. The former is real and true, the latter, a dreamworld of stories and dramas.
Attention Training that leads to Awakened Attention is an investment in your own portable ‘one seat’.
Language is the organized system of speech used by human beings as a means of communication among themselves. This organized system was created by our ancestors and propagated through various institutions such as media, education and family. Languages must be agreed upon by a society for it to work, and each society will use different symbols, letters and words to represent the various concepts and experiences they see fit.
Systems of language are one example of how amazingly diverse, intricate and creative we as human beings are. We can actually create systems of sound shapes, generated by moving throat, tongue and lips. Each sound shape represents an agreed upon meaning, and from those meaningful sound shapes we can weave elaborate meaning and interpretation systems that point to realities beyond the sound shapes themselves, thereby communicating (as we, you and I, are doing at this moment).
From the systems of language humans have created masterworks of great literature, poetry and song. We have recorded our collective information and knowledge for future generations, as well as our histories greatest accomplishments and our most ignoble acts of atrocity. We have made compendiums of legal, ethical and moral codes of conduct (The Malleus Maleficarum was written by the same ‘hand’ that wrote the Bible and the Tao Te Ching).
The problem comes not in language but in how language can distract us from the deeper truths by distorting and diffusing the realities they are supposed to represent. A good example would be the words ‘kill’, ’slaughter’ and ‘euthanize’, which all mean to take Life but with vastly different tones, tastes and implications.
We as human beings are wearing layer after layer after layer of lenses such as language, most so close and so old they are deeply ingrained into who we are. We forget we are looking through a particular lens, and we forget that we ever learned to look through that lens. Then we forget we forgot. Brainwashed, memorized, confused, hypnotized, we eventually live a Life where we are looking through so many lenses that we can no longer see reality without them.
