About 'Being Human'
"The whole purpose of the practice is to become a real human being"
Zen Master Rinzai
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I think what Master Rinzai meant when he talked of "a real human being" was a person capable of living a life that is simple, direct and free. A life unburdened by all this self-consciousness, self-judgment, self story. It sounds kind of straightforward - and yet it's so radical.
How to live such a life? In the offerings I share here, I'm interested in how we might access our most still and unconditional nature and how we might celebrate our vivid and expressive life. So, not separating off 'spiritual life' from, well 'life'.
Within the boundlessness of awareness, it is possible to love, to have sex, to be silly, to fail. I'm interested in how cultivating a place of inner safety can help in the movement towards a courageous pushing at our own edges: what is reality beyond the stories I tell about myself, the world and others?
This quality that is awareness is always and already here and available. What can the power of awareness teach when it illuminates our tired and delighted bodies; the tides of our feelings, the circular mirror of our perceptions and the rich and messy field of relationship?
And this awareness is inherently healing. That which is seen, is transformed. Jung said that the human life is a constant striving for harmony between what is seen (conscious) and that which is unseen (unconscious). One of its highest goals is the “harmonious wholeness of personality…that cannot tolerate self-deceptions”
When we are no longer ‘blind’, automated, acting out of unconscious conditioned behaviour, this is insight, this is awareness. This is a conscious human life.
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To me, this path of 'being a human being' is an expression of five principles:
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Wholeness: meditation as a path of seeing through conditioning and the 'self-story' and taking genuine responsibility for our perceptual relationship with the world.
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Authenticity: seeking to see life as it is, in the moment it is lived, and living authentically from that place. Accepting that life is made from light and shadow. Just as in night and day, so too in the human soul, both the light and the darkness have their function. Awareness as a practice of bringing what has been unseen into the light.
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Not Knowing: a recognition that life and human relationship is fundamentally ambiguous. Not trying to cover over the vulnerability of this with impervious knowledge and self-righteousness. Accepting our fragility, partiality and unknowing and going forward in life with an open heart, willing to listen and to learn from life itself
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Embodiment: not exiting into the head, into concepts, into theories and ideologies. Grounding oneself in the tangible, dynamic, felt experience of the sensory, embodied world
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Immanence: letting go of the external gods (all the 'objects' and 'ideas' we worship). Not abandoning the ordinary in attempts at transcendence, but paying close attention in order to find the sacred immanence within the immediate aliveness of everyday life.
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