Musings on the Path

\”Where you stumble, there is your treasure.\”
— Joseph Campbell

\”Fate is the trouble you cannot avoid.\”
— Michael Meade

\”… an Orpheus Mission\”
— Michael Meade

\”The Devil is in your business.\”
— African-American saying

\”Just because you\’re in the storm, doesn\’t mean you are on the wrong path.\”
— Rev. Raymond Bryant

“Resistance is directly proportional to love. If you’re feeling massive Resistance, the good news is, it means there’s tremendous love there too. If you didn’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.”
— Steven Pressfield

\”I did not wish to attract the Devil\’s attention. But I could not avoid it.\”
— me

The Buddha was tempted by Mara (Unhealthy Emotion) on the night of his enlightenment. Jesus was tempted by Satan (Adversary) in the wilderness before beginning his ministry.

If you are lying, cheating, and messing around, it\’s little surprise if your life\’s a mess. And the lives of saints also are filled with trials and troubles. But the lives of ordinary folk in between these extremes generally only have ordinary troubles.

My wife\’s and my troubles lately are creeping out of the ordinary. My laptop just died. No smoke, no noise, no flickering, no warning. Replacement parts are hard to find, Lenovo will not sell replacement parts to third party repair shops. The Windows 7 installation on my wife\’s laptop messed on itself, requiring reinstallation of the operating system, the programs we use, and restoration of the data from backup. The windshield of her car cracked and had to be replaced. The list goes on. Not life-threatening, but very distracting.

Either someone/something is trying to get our attention. Or we have attracted the attention of someone/something unwanted. Or both.  My wife\’s take is that this kind of attention also comes in times of discernment.  When we are at the crossroads, where the choices facing us are not ordinary.

Maybe this is the trouble we cannot avoid. We are stumbling. We are in the storm and the way back is not visible. What to do? The world\’s wisdom traditions say button up your coat, pull the rain hat down to protect you from the worse, but not block your vision, and walk directly into the storm. That may be the best compass you\’ll have—ask which direction am I most resistant to going, and head that way.

Various spiritual practices instructions I\’ve tried to follow over the years on first encountering them are or at least sound descriptive, \”sit with your spinal vertical, as if you were being pulled upward by the hair on your head.\”  My experience is that this partially true, but more powerfully, are descriptive.  When I\’m sitting or even walking to the grocery store mindfully, my spine straightens, my posture is correct and it is going well.  When my mind wanders, I slump.

Famously, Zen monasteries have a senior monk with a big stick to whack you when you slump.  Done properly, this is compassionate feedback so you can correct a possibly unnoticed decline in the quality of your practice.

This post marks a shift in direction for this blog. My journey through life has had varying amount of spirituality, both in and outside of churches. Lately it has been gathering energy and time.  Given my age (Boomer), this is not surprising.  Even the direction is not too unusual for a Boomer, Christian and Buddhist.  I read \”Zen Christianity\” decades ago and \”The Ground We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian\” by Robert Aitken and David Steindl-Rast several years ago.  There is plenty of common ground between Christian monastics and mystics, and Buddhist practitioners.

Paul of Tarsus probably encountered the teachings of the Buddha in his travels.  Buddhist missionaries were known to have reached Egypt during his lifetime.  There is plenty of speculation, but little firm evidence, that Jesus of Nazareth knew of the Buddha\’s teachings.  Their stories, language, and metaphors  are very different on the surface but the kenotic Christ and the non-self of the Buddha have a lot of overlap.

And much is different.  Certainly the images they paint of the afterlife have little in common.  But there is much one can learn from both, even if the respective organizations will have nothing to do with each other.  But that\’s about power and prestige, not advancing on the Way (the early followers of Jesus after his death., before being thrown out of Judaism, were called Followers of the Way).

Quoting Steven Pressfield, quoting Jackson Browne, \”I write to find out what I think.\”