Liturgies

Last week I had the good fortune of being able to get away for a retreat. On the retreat of the many stories that the teachers related one that stays with me is about the cartoon character HAGAR THE HORRIBLE. Remember when we had newspapers, or people used to buy them, HAGAR THE HORRIBLE was the faithful cartoon always toward the back of the paper. Its about a weigh challenged, stumbling fumbling Viking. In the cartoon described by the teacher HAGAR is in pursuit of enlightenment and the meaning of life and finds himself climbing to the highest peak in this mountain range. He was in pursuit of the wise awakened sage with the long white bead and flowing robes. On finding him and sitting at his feet he asked his question, ‘ How must I discover enlightenment’? After a few moments of silence, the wise sage responds “You must live simply, love selflessly, and RENOUCE all worldly pleasures. There is a profound silence as HAGAR  is thinking to himself of how fond he is of the odd worldly pleasure. Eventually HAGAR  replies, “Is there anyone else up here I could speak to”?

After some of the long and sometimes painful meditation sessions on the retreat I was asking myself “ Is there anyone else I could speak to about stilling the mind and moving to enlightenment?” I last week like HAGAR I was on the mountain top. The retreat was at Byron Bay set in stunning bushland overlooking the ocean. A simple creatively decorated retreat centre with simple cabins surrounded by lovely gardens and bushland. You could camp, use a van or caravan or whatever took your fanny or budget.  People came from all over Australia and beyond, but they could only accommodate 40 people, in the past they have attempted 120 but it was way too many.  Numerous people from various backgrounds and professions but a vast number of people were from the health professions with psychologists well and truly represented. There is an enormous wave of interest in the use and understanding of mindfulness practice and meditation for living and the managing of our lives. The mindfulness practice is easy to describe, but much harder to practice. Put simply, in the living of our lives our wonderful instrument, the mind, which can do amazing things, can get distracted from the everyday newness of the task, event, experience we are participating in. Our minds are wonderful storytellers, judgers. Solver of problems, imaginer of magnificent things, and often in the living of our lives we fail to really live them because our distracted mind takes us out of the experience and we miss the moment.

The ancient Buddhist Pali word for mindfulness is ‘Sati’ which can be translated “re-collection or “re-membering”.To remember or re-collect is to bring all the disparate parts of ourselves back to the here and now.

The task of a mindfulness retreat is to keep coming back to the present moment fully embodied, back to ourselves, to our breath, to the things we sense, see, touch, taste, smell and hear. On the retreat where we are invited to be totally silent we would start at 6am with an hour of Yoga, re-membering our bodies, then 45 minutes of sitting meditation; Breakfast, where at all the meals each is assigned a task of preparing and helping to put away, wash, clean up in a mindful way.  After Breakfast an hour of gardening practicing the mindfulness of gardening. My task was to rid this overgrown garden of this toxic weed called Maderia Vine. It was a real task of mindfulness to locate it, then follow it to its source without breaking it, and pull of dig it up gently with its bulbous root without dropping all its poisonous seeds onto the ground. Wow what a mindful task that was.

We returned to the meditation Hall for morning meditation instructions and teaching followed by either walking meditations or on day one and two small group meetings where we got to hear briefly how other people were going or not going so well. Another 45 minutes of meditation followed by walking meditation and then a beautiful vegetarian lunch. After lunch we were back for 45 minute sitting meditation and this sitting and walking meditation continued throughout the rest of the day. But a break from routine occurred at 3pm for an hour  where there was a time of Inquiry where anyone who wished could join the teacher up the front to ask a question or share something of the insights they were having about their lives. Because what happens when we sit and quiet our minds in meditation it is like the glass of muddy water the stillness allows the mind to fall to the bottom and we are allowed to see more clearly the issues, the mud, we are facing in our lives. Sometimes they are not so pleasant which is why many of us spend our lives distracting ourselves with either being too busy of over indulging in all sorts of things such as work, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, gambling, many forms of entertainment, etc., etc,…

So when we sit, walk, wash up, garden, in mindfulness, we focus our minds on one thing, our minds become full of this one thing. When we can do this we can seemingly still them in some ways allowing us to see more clearly the mud which settles to the bottom. Many people who got up to share, and the very act of getting up in front of everyone is a scary moment, some one described it as the walk of death because one has to leave ones ego behind. The many who did get up often were moved to tears as they were able to see more clearly, frequently with the help of the teacher, the pain and suffering they had been putting themselves through unnecessarily. Because seeing ‘the ‘I’ ‘the ‘me’ from the eyes of the detached observer and allowing the enormous font of compassion within themselves and the group gathered around them to heal and embrace them.

Some times in the mediation period a vision will appear through a process Karl Jung described as Active Imagination where something is revealed to you in  a dream-like way, and as in the dream when you are asleep, your not controlling it. It just happens.

One young man got up and shared such a vision where he was with his wife at this exclusive cocktail party where many famous and well know celebrities were present, as he was present at this event he became increasingly uncomfortable about being there and this discomfort decreased when he found himself slowly leave his body and drift above the crowd and he found himself looking down and a hugh bubble formed around the people and event and he found himself outside it. As he was looking down observing it all, a baby appeared beside him smiled at him and moved over to the hugh bubble and poked it with its finger and the bubble busted and the vision was over.

As the teacher inquired and asked him what he thought it meant. He said he felt the cocktail party represented that part of his life as an up and coming professional of someone striving to impress, to be in the right crowd, his clinging to his status and self-importance and along comes a baby which represents an entity free of a notion of a separate self, or inflated identity, which looks at the world without judgement or categorising and sees things as they are, filled with wonder and amazement. Many spiritual traditions refer to this state of mind, as ‘Beginner’s Mind’ or ‘No Mind’. As the young man shared he realised that part of himself, the baby self, pops the bubble helping him see the pointlessness of all his strivings and clinging to status. To see how all this world of striving and status is impermanent and unimportant which can burst and disappear in an instant. When it is gone the young man who shared felt an enormous weigh disappear from his life and a wonderful sense of letting go. Which could allow him to be truly present to the Now of his life, so he could truly live it and savour it. Life in all its fullness, as Jesus describes it, is what happens when we can do and see as this young man did. It is something we all must truly see if we are to authentically live our lives.

The invitation to see with the eyes of the child and to be the child is the invitation of Jesus in today’s gospel. To embrace life, where we are able to let go our identities, our status, our self-seeking and striving and when we do we are able to enter what Jesus describes as the KINGDOM OF GOD , the present moment, the NOW, which as Jesus exclaims is always close at hand. Our mind-ful-ness will be FULL of whatever is now for us however pleasant or unpleasant that may be. Without judgements or excessive thinking. Being with whatever is present and allowing it to be, is at the very heart of all spiritual practices.

Allow me to finish with the words of Eckhart Tolle from our second reading

“ As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind,( beginners mind) as it is sometimes called in the East, you realize the state of pure consciousness. In that state, you feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all emotions, your physical body, as well as the whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it. And yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond what you previously thought of as “your self”. That presence is essentially you and at the same time inconceivably greater than you.

What I am trying to convey here may sound paradoxical or even contradictory, but there is no other way that I can express it.”