The Forget Zen blog is complete.

A new blog, The Amateur Spirit, takes up where Forget Zen left off.

Roger Miller's song King of the Road is one of the most memorable songs from my childhood.

So I haven't had much time to write lately, as I've been working on the next thing, the follow-on to Forget Zen. The follow-on is not only a blog (a new blog), but also a weekly group meeting - you know, a regular sitting group of some sort.

I wanted to get the first post of the new blog done before writing this last post of Forget Zen, but that first post hasn't happened yet. The logistics of the new sitting group has taken most of my time. The big question: where, exactly, are we going to meet?

Maybe I am too picky! I'm looking for a place that is pretty close to my house or my work, because I am the one that has to show up there every week. It also has to be reasonably priced - how much are people willing to pay to go to a sitting group? Not much, of course - I think the expectation there is: nothing.

Finally, it would be nice to find a place that would appreciate our presence, that we are compatible with. Wouldn't it be great to find a place that was looking for a sitting group like ours, that had people that wanted to attend it? Wow! So far the places I have looked at have not been places that would appreciate our presence. I've been rejected by the local recreation center, and by a local Christian church. The former most likely because we wouldn't bring in any revenue. The latter had space, but ruled against us due to (spiritual, I suppose) compatibility issues.

I also contacted the agent for a local shopping center that has at least four vacant spaces. The agent said he would take it to the owner, but I haven't heard back. My request for a two-hour-a-week rental is undoubtedly more trouble than it is worth, in their case.

Lately, though, you know, I have come to love the means over the end. The means is my my life; the means is an opportunity to connect with others; the means is transformation. And, given the transformation, who even knows what the end will be! The end changes, becomes refined, in the means. In this particular case, I am better seeing how our group is seen by the community, I am exploring the value of what we bring, and I am exploring how it is that we fit in to the community. As usual, the feedback is precious, of great value, and... a little painful.

My wife and I got together and brainstormed the other day. Here is what we came up with:

• Let's meet in the library. We can each grab a book off the shelf, open it, then all sit together around a table in front of our open books. We should probably change our pages once in awhile.
• Here is the best one - a true collaborative effort: we will meet and sit in the surgery waiting room over at Kaiser Zion. It is very nice - and so quiet - perhaps the perfect ambiance for meditation. And I doubt that anyone would dare bother us.

You can see that we are really making progress!

Of course, we used to just meet at our own house, but I have taken it as a precondition, you know, that the next sitting group would be a little more outward than that, at least for the weekly meeting. Sometimes, of course, meeting at the house will be right on - like when the garden needs work!

OK, so you get the picture, the lessons learned go on, and will go on and on. But it is truly time to wrap up Forget Zen, and move on. Now, I have a fondness for the Zen brand of spirituality, but it is time to let it go. During my explorations to find a place to sit, I had a long conversation with a Catholic woman who was quite interested in meditation, as I was describing it, and was interested in the goup I was planning. When I got done with my explanation, she looked at me - one of those a-little-too-long-to-be-comfortable looks - and said "Why do you call it Zen? You should drop that." I remember kind of nodding. Good advice.

The new blog is called The Amateur Spirit, and it is already set up, but empty:

http://theamateurspirit.posterous.com/

The first post is on its way - perhaps it will be there by the time you get there.

***

When I post a song on the blog, I enjoy researching the artist. Roger Miller has quite a story, but what struck me most was his struggle to figure out where he fit in. He started out in Nashville, trying to be a country artist, but the songs he wrote and sang just didn't come out right - in the sense that they were not like the country songs that others were coming out with. This really frustrated him. He couldn't get it right.

But then, one day, it hit him. It hit him that he was writing perfectly-good Roger Miller songs. What he was doing was just fine.

I'll see you soon over at The Amateur Spirit, and soon, I hope, in person.

 

Field report from Tahquitz Valley, overnight in the San Jacinto Wilderness...

It is 11:30 PM and my hands are buried in my two layers of down bags so that I can type this on my iPhone. About 5 minutes ago dreaming and waking states converged in one urgent message: I had to pee. That, of course, meant that I would be forced to open my tent and lose my small bubble of non-frozen air. I checked: yes, the bottle of water next to my bed was still not frozen.

The freezing had started 4 1/2 hours ago. At 7 PM I looked down in the metal pot lid that I had just washed and saw a strange jelly-like substance in it - "What is THAT?" Oh it is ICE - which means my water source will soon be freezing up. I quickly purified two liters and stashed them in my tent right next to my sleeping pads. Then I lay down next to them and promptly fell asleep. I had had a long day of hiking, plus there isn't a whole lot to do in the evening up here in the mountains, in the wilderness, in winter. The only appealing thing to do is to get inside those nested down bags, in the tent, and get warm.

And so now after 4 hours of sleep, I had to get up. I unzipped the tent and put on my boots that were sitting outside - my frozen boots. I had to pull a pine cone off the side of one of them, where it had frozen in place.

What a beautiful and strange sight. The landscape was clearly illuminated under a full moon, a starkly mottled landscape of bright patches of snow, and deep shadows. The shadows, cast by the trees, were deep, yet short. I looked down at my own shadow - it extended barely a foot away - nothing like the shadows I had seen here at noon when I had eaten lunch. Then the shadows were stretched out long, from the low winter sun.

I only stayed outside for a minute. I had to get back in the tent, before the water started to freeze.

Beethoven's Bundeslied. The words are from the poem of the same name by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

If you guys didn't think I was weird before, you will now! Just after finishing college, I was living in Valley Center and commuting daily to a class at Alvarado Hospital out near SDSU - long commute down the I-15. During the commute I used to sing Bundeslied, in German. I would sing along to a tape of the recording above, the exact same one. I've been waiting for a year for someone to put it out on YouTube!

In the recent post The Mind of Nuance I was talking about how we ourselves and the situations of our lives are complex beyond comprehension. At least from the standpoint of our processing power, the conditions that lead to any situation are infinite, the situation itself is infinite, and the potential repercussions of that situation in the future are infinite. The implication of this is that any story that we tell will be incomplete. Because every story that we tell is incomplete, every story that we tell is untrue.

When we tell a story we use some of the facts, and leave some of the facts out. Which facts do we use, and which do we leave out? I don't know about you, but my first inclination when telling a story is to include the facts that support some position of mine, and leave out the facts that don't support that position. I tell the story to serve a personal agenda of mine. Oh, and then I might spice it up with some speculation that also serves that agenda. Hey, as long as I label speculation as speculation, is there anything wrong with speculation? Hmmm. I've become wary. It is like when a lawyer goes in front of the jury and tells a story and the opposing attorney yells "Your honor, I object! Speculation!" Though the judge responds with "Sustained", the damage has already been done.

In doing the Forget Zen blog, I have had to learn to get beyond my first inclination when telling stories. There is an advantage of telling stories publicly, you know, as there are checks and balances. Everyone from all sides will be reading the stories, and if there are mis-statements, I hear about it! There haven't been many. I've learned a lot about how to tell enough of the facts such that all sides will feel that the facts are generally accurate. And I've learned how important it is to avoid speculation.

So my stories, though incomplete, seem generally true enough. But true enough does not make a good story, and if a story is not about my personal agenda, then what is it about? What reason is there to tell it?

I think that the answer comes down to the word at the heart of this discussion: true. The word true not only has the meaning factually correct, but also has the meanings genuine, and faithful. For a story to be true, it must be factually correct (though incomplete), but also genuine, and faithful. Genuine: told from the still inner voice. Faithful: told in a way that honors our interconnectedness. It is simple; simply tell the story from the heart.

Good stories are the ones that find the signal of transformation amongst the noise. The best stories are those that can't yet be told with inspiration, that are yet incomplete, that, in the attempt to tell, inspire further action.

There are a number of such stories here at Forget Zen that are not yet ready to be told. But the main storyline, of transition and transformation to a better style, to a better way of spiritual interaction, is almost complete. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end, and we are now very close to the end of the story Forget Zen. It looks like there might be just one more lesson-learned to cover.

Forget Zen has a negative cast that I am looking forward to leaving behind. Lets just forget it, already, and move on! Much of my energy has already moved on.

Linda Ronstadt singing The Eagles' Desperado. It was never very clear to me, was Linda Ronstadt one of The Eagles or not? It turns out (thank you Wikipedia) that the musicians that later became The Eagles first came together as Linda Ronstadt's backing band in 1971. By 1972 those musicians were off on their own as The Eagles, and, in 1973, members Glen Frey and Don Henley wrote Desperado.

As you all know by now, I don't much like the dichotomy of student vs. teacher. The last post was my alternative to "student", which I suppose you could sum up as "we are all fellow responsible adults".

The "teacher" side gets more interesting. My alternative to "teacher" could be summed up as: "we all support each other". I think that sets the stage in the proper way, but misses the crux of the matter, which is how we support each other without arrogance.

***

Teaching and learning are fundamental to life, and I have been fortunate in my life to have experienced them in a most pure and natural way. I am speaking about my time as a rock climber.

It is the strangest thing. In a sport where the consequence of a teaching failure is very likely death, one would think that the teaching of rock climbing, and, in particular, lead climbing, would be extremely tightly regulated, and structured with a system of ranks and formal approvals. Yet, it is not - not at all - it is quite the opposite. Yes, there are a few professional organizations, such as the American Mountain Guides Association, but most climbers become climbers without any connection to them. Most climbers take a few classes, read a few books, learn a whole lot from their friends, and ultimately figure a whole lot of it out on their own.

Everyone who climbs knows this: though you usually have a partner in climbing, you face every climb on your own. Whether you are leading or following, you are facing the climb itself on your own. It is just in the nature of how climbing works. The rock, and your next move, are right in front of you, but your partner is at the other end of the rope, often out-of-sight, and sometimes even out of earshot.

In climbing, you simply must be self-reliant. With consequences severe, there is no question regarding responsibility, responsibility for training, responsibility for action, and responsibility for the choice of a partner. Blaming others has little value as consolation if you aren't around to partake in it.

Perhaps because of the required self-reliance, and the appreciation of consequences, I have found that, in general, there is a lot of mutual respect in the climing community, across all levels of ability.

I remember a day a Tahquitz Rock (up in Idyllwild) when my partner and I kept running into Peter Croft - I think we ran into him and spent time chatting with him, three times that day. We ran into him first at the base of Tahquitz, before our climb. I was there with my partner, rope, rack full of gear, REI outfit, and three liters of water. He was there by himself with a T-shirt, gym shorts, climbing shoes, and a chalk bag. I think he had a book-bag with a bottle of water stashed behind a rock somewhere. My partner and I were about to spend the day doing one easy climb. Peter was there to do all of the classic climbs - each much harder than the climb my partner and I were going to do - all free-solo (meaning by himself, without a rope). Now if there is anyone on the planet that can justifiably be arrogant, it is Peter Croft - he is an absolute master of climbing! Yet he was not arrogant. Talking to Peter Croft was just like talking to any of our other climbing buddies.

(We ran into Peter again on the back side of the rock, just after our climb. He was coming down off of the 5.9 classic climb Whodunit. We chatted a little, but then he was off down the trail ahead of us. A few minutes later, when we got a few hundred yards down the trail, we saw some people looking up. They were looking up at Peter who was now about halfway up the 5.9 classic Open Book. Interesting. Open Book is a wide jam crack, but Peter used stemming technique most of the way up.)

Learning in climbing is almost entirely demand driven. Climbers take responsibility for their training. I learned how to set protection during the Adventure-16 Climbing Skills Weekend class. We didn't get any certificates in the class - a few of us left the class with enough confidence to set up topropes on our own. I went off and improved my skills and confidence by myself until I felt I could set up topropes for others; then I started setting up topropes for the Alpinistas climbing club.

I had the good fortune to work with two people, brothers, who were excellent climbers. They were fellow computer programmers, and we would talk about climbing during our breaks. Now during my climbing heyday I was known as a good crack climber - I even taught a few people how to climb cracks. But my time with the climbing brothers was before that. Back then I had been struggling for two years to learn crack climbing. There was this crack at the Solid Rock Gym in Old Town, San Diego, that I simply could not climb. And so I would talk to the brothers at work about it. It must have been funny to watch us in our cubicles, demonstrating how to wedge our body parts into cracks. Finally, I seemed to have learned all of the techniques from them, yet I was still not able to climb that crack at the gym. I demonstrated for the brothers how I was attempting the climb. One of them then asked "Well, when you twist your foot in the crack, how much does it hurt?" I said that it really hurt. He listened to my response, looked me over, and said "It doesn't hurt enough - that is your problem." Bingo. He was right - the next time I went to the gym I twisted my foot into the crack to the point where it really really REALLY hurt - and then my foot stayed put - and so my career as a crack climber began.

After a few years of setting up topropes for the Alpinistas, I was ready to lead climb. I hired a guide in Yosemite to teach me lead climbing. We spent one day together and he said I was good to go.

What you have to develop right away in climbing is a keen sense of judgement. You have to be able to assess a climb and its risks, and, most importantly, you have to be able to realistically assess your current ability... as though your life depends on it.

***

The spiritual path is about opening up. How do we support each other in opening up? A year ago, I would have said by being unconditional love. Now I would say something different.

It is hard for a human being to try to be unconditonal love without arrogance slipping in there. In case you haven't noticed, I don't talk about trying to be a Bodhisattva. I don't talk about trying to be a Bodhisattva because it is too easy for a sense of helping to slip in there. To quote the little poem hanging in our kitchen (we still don't know who wrote it): "When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; when you serve, you see life as whole."

The word serve is good, but my favorite word these days is support: peers engaged in mutual support.

How do we support each other in opening up? These days my answer is: by building trust, by earning trust. Why on earth would anybody open up to a person unless they trust that person? The opportunity to open up is a great gift, but giving that opportunity means proving trustworthiness.

Earning trust is something that is both straightforward and non-arrogant. I cannnot think of a way that earning trust can be twisted into arrogance. Earning trust neither places you superior to, nor inferior to, another. It begins with the honoring of the other. A good place to start.

We are each both consumers and producers of trust - we can look at it either way - and there is no mystery involved. I'll speak from the consumer side here:

1. I don't like to be manipulated or used.
2. I don't like to be lied to.
3. I don't like to be patronized.
4. I don't like it when people speak ill of me behind my back.
5. I don't like it when people judge me based on speculation.
6. I don't like it when people listen to their own opinions about me rather than actually listening to me.

Over the past year, I've become more and more aware of these as both a consumer and producer.

From the consumer side, I know a number of people are out there looking for a spiritual teacher: don't you think that 1-6 above would be a good guide for evaluating candidates? Are you going to be able to open up to someone who violates 1-6? As consumers, we need to demand better service!

But back to the producer side: support. We support each other by building trust. The foundation for trust is respect, and I think that refraining from 1-6 is a pretty good way to characterize respect, for those of us, like me, who like to have it all spelled out. When I look at the list I find it very interesting. Nothing on the list is a big challenge, yet these are the things that all of us do, over and over, poisoning our life. We just won't be satisfied with parity.

But when it comes to learning, parity is where it is at. It takes a long time to build trust, to earn trust, to demonstrate trust, especially the kind of trust that it takes to open up to another person at the most intimate, spiritual levels. Years. Years and years of persistent, careful, work.

Please. Please don't wait until it is too late.

Melissa Ferrick really puts it out there. This version of Everything I Need was probably caught by someone's iPhone. The video wobbles around, but the sound is good. It must have been a great concert.

In the last post I brought up my two questions for the year. Let's just dive right into them in this post, and talk about some more subtle lessons learned in subsequent posts.

Again, the quote about authority from J. Krishnamurti:

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

-- J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, p. 21

The depth of the truth of this quote is most clearly illustrated by the life and death (burned at the stake) of William Tyndale, and resistance to the ideas of Galileo (the Catholic Church finally issued regrets in 1992 over its handling of him). Authorities have interests, especially incuding their own survival, and will do what it takes to protect those interests.

That said, I don't see how humans can organize without authority structures. Authority structures are a necessity, but there must also be functioning checks and balances on those structures. And great care is needed to protect the fields of thought and understanding from the abuse of authority.

Over the past year, I've developed a view of spiritual practice that integrates Krishnamurti's sentiment:

1. We each must come to peace with our own inner self in our own way. Put another way, we each must make our own peace with God. The inner voice, the tightness in the chest: we must come to terms with them. God has more to do with ethics than with bliss.
2. We are each 100% responsible for our actions in the world. This responsibility cannot be abdicated - one cannot reassign it, for example, to a guru. Ignorance is no excuse - we must do what it takes to educate ourselves. Our past conditioning is no excuse - we must do what it takes to understand and work with our own conditioning such that our actions in the world are as clean and clear as possible.

Your voice and my voice, they are the voices of God in this world. There are no special voices outside of our voices.

My second question from a year ago was:

Can I work more effectively within the landscape of my life, my job, family, friends?

At the time I knew that I could not proceed forward without collaboration of some sort. What I didn't appreciate was what collaboration really meant...

Evolution is a harsh hand. Critical to Darwin's ultimate understanding of the mechanism of evolution was his coming to understand that nature is a harsh environment, with individuals locked in a struggle for survival. The unbelievably sophisticated human species would never have come into being without the struggle of our ancestors, and ancestral species, over hundreds of milliions of years, against extreme challenges and constraints.

I now see that the evolution of a spiritual path is no different. To be meaningful in this life, a spiritual path must be of this life, and it must work with the constraints of this life. Constraints are to be embraced! Constraints are what will forge and refine a better way. Trial. Error. Feedback (often criticism). Over, and over.

Zen has only recently come to the United States from Japan. My first Zen teacher, Maezumi Roshi, was from Japan. My main teacher, Joko Beck, was his student. I am, what, third generation U.S. Zen? Look at our history over the past thirty or forty years. There have been issues. Only what is capable of evolution will be successful, will survive. Authoritarianism inhibits agility.

Duke Ellington's All of Me, with a solo by the incomparable Johnny Hodges.

I have a very busy life, what with full-time work, volunteer work, family, and a pet. Every now and then I find myself alone in the house with a chunk of time on a holiday - everyone having gone off to do something. Everyone, except the pet cat, that is.

After the old and needy cat has had her fill of petting, I find us just sitting there. And I feel no motivation to get up. The cars pass on the street. Once in awhile a train goes by in the canyon. There is a clock somewhere in the house - I can hear the ticking. My breathing goes in and out, slowly. And I feel my heart beating, slowly. Thoughts come through now and again, but there is no need to think. This is time off! Time off the agenda, and time off the map.

Then I think "I should sit." Then I laugh a little. Why ruin this with ambition?

***

We are just about at the end of another calendar year, and also at the four year mark of my going public. For me, this has traditionally been a time to look at my direction.

The past year has been a year of self-reflection for me. There have been a few public events, but my public side has mostly been limited to the blog. I did not lead a sitting group. Leading a sitting group again has been in the back of my mind, but I wanted to explore two questions first, and this year has been about those questions:

1. Can I function more freely and effectively without notions of hierarchy - in particular, notions of student and teacher?
2. Can I work more effectively within the landscape of my life, my job, family, friends (and pet)?

These are huge questions. Regarding the first, I come from a tradition, Zen, which tends to be strongly authoritarian. My own teacher used to say frequently "A Zen center is not a democracy!" Contrast this with the following statement from J. Krishnamurti:

 

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

-- J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, p. 21

 

Krishnamurti is in direct contradiction with traditional Zen. Which is correct? Consider this in the light of recent and ongoing scandals in authoritarian spiritual groups, incuding Zen groups.

Regarding the second question, my Zen teacher stated over and over that the measure of a spiritual practice is always, and only, your own life. This may be somewhat unique in Zen circles. From the beginning I found it, and continue to find it, dead on. My life is like a garden - if my spiritual practice is not right in there in the soil helping it to flourish, then what am I doing?

I've had a year now to explore these questions, and I feel I have come to some better place as a result. Also, I have come across some other surprising things along the way. I want to present these lessons learned in the next few posts, as a way to wrap up the year.

Let's get started. But where to start? You know, I have been debating that for the last couple of days, and I have decided that it is best to start with the mind of nuance.

Being a software engineer has really helped me with some insights related to spiritual practice. And one of these has to do with complexity and nuance.

What software engineers do, in one way or another, is to model some aspect of the world, in order to facilitate, or even automate, decisions and control in the world. As an example that I think everyone can relate to, there is software for the prediction of weather and climate. This is a good example, as the software for the prediction of future climate changes is probably some of the most complex software ever created.

So let me just ask: how good is that software? Take the weather case: how has the track record been for you? I can tell you for me, not so good! My last post was about a backcountry trip planned around a forcast of a 20% chance of precipitation. If you read that post, you see how well that went!

The factors that determine our weather are simply too complex to model accurately. In spite of all of our advances in technology, we simply don't have the computing power to do it.

With that as a starting point, now consider a human life, and all of the factors that go into creating the experience and direction in that life: the genetics, the past conditioning, the personality, the openness to a sensitivity within, and the myriad influences from the world pouring in moment-by-moment. And, with actions, there are considerations of the implications of those actions as they might unfold in the future. And all of this takes place within the limitations of the physical hardware of a brain, and the effects of disease and aging. And we think the weather is complex?

There is no computing power available that can come close to modeling a human life. And there is no biological computing power capable of that either. One person's mind cannot grasp the experience or direction of another. In computer terms, there are not enough bits available for the task. I'm saying this because it is important to know, to appreciate, that our lives, and the lives of others, are, and always will be, deeply rooted in mystery. It is important to know that there will always be nuance that we cannot fully understand.

I feel one needs to have a strong foundation in this mystery and nuance. There needs to be a stong sense of art in one's life. And this is ever more important.

It is ever more important, because, as our lives become increasingly complex, we are called upon more and more to judge and make decisions in haste. We must decide and decide, over and over, about things, and about people. And with each decision we must take trillions of bits of complexity and reduce them to one bit - to one binary bit. What will it be? Zero or one? Yes or no? Paper or plastic? Does this person have it or not? Do I go with that person or not?

We gather what we can from the grapevine, fill in the blanks with speculation, build a picture of some sort, and then we judge. Jury and judge, then zero or one.

You know, there is no solution here. We have to make choices, ever more choices. But I think something can be done to make the situation better. With an appreciation for mystery and nuance, perhaps we can avoid making the choices we don't need to make. When no decision is necessary, why judge? Why can't mystery remain mystery until necessity forces our hand? Why know until we have to know? Especially when it comes to people.

And then, when it comes to decisions, why can't they be made softly? Why can't they be made without undue justification? We had to pick a path, and so we picked it - nothing more.

We have our lives to live, but things don't need to be so harsh. I think when you look back on your life, you will want to see and know that there were many moments of kindness. Yes, kindness matters in the end. Kindness honors mystery.

I arrived at Saddle Junction Friday evening just after dark. The hike in, 2.5 miles and 1500 feet up, had gone well: the snow on the trail was packed down and easy to hike on without snowshoes or crampons.

Just past Saddle Junction, the conditions changed dramatically. Now exposed to the East, I was getting the brunt of this strange storm system born on the normally dry Santa Ana winds. Snow was blowing in the strong winds, and the only sign of the trail was the sense of where it should be: the clearest path through the trees, and a cut log here and there. It wasn't long before I was plunging up to my knees in the deepening snow.

Snow was getting in the tops of my boots. I found a log to prop my feet on in order to put on my gaiters to keep the snow out.

Things that are easy in the comfort of your living room are not nearly so easy at 8000 feet, in the dark, in a storm, standing in three feet of snow. I eventually managed to clear the snow out of the tops of my boots, and to get my gaiters on. However, in the process, I also managed to lose the feeling in the index finger and thumb of my right hand. Now, I had three layers of gloves, including a waterproof outer shell, but in order to do put on the gaiters, I had had to take most of these layers off.

With gloves back on, I tried to warm up my frozen finger and thumb. With no source of outer warmth, I would have to rely on motion and circulation. I gave it a few minutes, with no success. I thought about what it would be like to set up my tent. Then I turned around and went back down the trail to my car.

It would have been easier to have spent the night in the wilderness, because then I could have come back to my car during the day when the snow and ice would have melted. Coming down at night meant that I would now have to put chains on my car. There was going to be one more task for my frozen fingers that night: the tent or the chains. Neither good, but the chains seemed like the safest bet.

When you live in Southern California, you don't get a whole lot of practice putting on chains. It had been years for me, and it went very slowly lying next to the car on the snow in the falling snow. I had decided to stay signed in to San Bernardino dispatch just in case...

I got on the radio to San Bernardino sometime around 7:30 PM, after safely driving down out of Humber Park, with its steep icy roads. I went out of service, and explained to the dispatcher that I would not be spending the night, and that I was safely out of the wilderness. I was just turning to my next task, to find a lodge where I could spend the night, when the radio came back on. A friend and fellow ranger had been listening: "Do you need a place to spend the night?"

My friend had a good fire going in his wood stove when I got there.

***

It is time that we wrap up this little three part section on surrender.

You know, ostensibly, I am now working to find a way to lead a spirtual group again with some sort of teaching role. I've worked the last year or so to get beyond the confining notions of "teacher" and "student", and I think I've had some success. I feel I have found a more direct and honest voice.

That was the first and primary step. With that more or less done, I am now working on the next steps, which are: (a) to find a way to make it work within the broad context of the people in my life, and (b) to find a framework for teaching that is supportive for people just beginning practice.

This is where it is getting interesting, because of two other threads of practice in my life: a non-defensive approach to receiving feedback from others, and the growing sense that the end does not justify the means.

Receiving feedback non-defensively allows you to see yourself through the eyes of others. If you want to know how much of your world is a conceptual framework: try this! It can be shattering. But it does allow you to move forward with a bigger, more inclusive context. Knowing, acknowledging, respecting, and embracing the positions of others is nothing to be afraid of. By embracing I don't mean agreeing with. Your decisions are always your own.

If you want a life of ease and connection, is there any other way? How can you be at peace if you have pushed anybody or anything aside?

With everyone and everything held in your heart, how can the next step not be a joyous one? Is there any end worth the sacrifice of this?

And so it is that I keep losing my way. Lost again! But oh well. If I were to die in this next minute, there would be no goal left unaccomplished.

Before Jewel became famous, she used to sing in a small coffee shop in San Diego. She grew up in Homer, Alaska.

Sometimes I think the only honest way forward is just to sit down and cry. No "working with" anything will do any good. There is just pain to be felt, and the only way forward is straight into that pain. That is the way it was for me last weekend.

The week before had been one of the toughest I can remember. I was in the process of connecting to a couple/few Zen teachers, and in the process of trying to reconnect with a couple of estranged friends of mine, when I received the honor of being on the oral presentation team for a government proposal for a computer system. With regards to the term honor, the presentation team leader described it with this quote from Abe Lincoln:

According to General Horatio C. King, a group of friends from Illinois called on Lincoln in the White House. Toward the end of the visit, one of the men asked Lincoln if he liked being president. Lincoln smiled and replied: "You have heard the story haven't you, about the man as he was ridden out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered, somebody asked him how he liked it, and his reply was if it was not for the honor of the thing, he would much rather walk."

People complain a lot about our federal government, but some things that they do are quite brilliant. Rather than trying to gauge the competence of the organizations on a proposal short list through large documents full of tedious boiler-plate propaganda, why not, instead, invite the key players to come in and present their proposal in person. Better yet, why not:

• Bring the key players into a room with no electronic devices, no access to the outside world, and no notes whatsoever.
• Give the players a test computer system problem to solve, similar but not exactly the same as the request-for-proposal.
• Give the players some markers, some blank flip-chart paper, and a couple of hours to come up with a solution for the test problem.
• Then give the players ninety minutes to present their solution with the aid of their flip charts.

And the seven key players (of which I was one) - you have to understand - we were all, except for our leader, software developers. We are kind-of introverted. We kind-of don't like to get up in front of people and talk. So this was kind-of our collective worst nightmare.

Now the people that run our proposal center are pretty sharp, and they knew what they were dealing with, and so they came up with a plan: day after day after day of practice. Stand, deliver, be critiqued. Over and over. And the team critiquing us would become larger and larger. At first it was just our trainer. The second day, she attached life-size head shots to about seven chairs to give us the sense of a larger audience. That second day was the worst. The head shots were of a proposal team down the hall, where things were not going well, and those guys did not look happy. The third day, our audience was what they call the red team - a room packed with our managers and the most critical people that could be found on site.

And all the while, there was this background of emails coming to me regarding my reconnecting to my estranged friends and my connecting to Zen teachers. Critiques upon critiques, and no time to process any of it.

Our team worked through most of the weekend, but at some point I finally got some time to myself. Then it hit me: the only honest thing to do was to simply cry - to feel the pain of it. You know, that was a damn good choice. Of everything going on, it was the estranged friends that were really the issue. Very soon I found that my heart which had been somewhat closed to my friends opened up. I could feel the pain of that closed heart, the pain I had caused, and then I could feel the pain that they must be feeling in their situation. And I recaptured my love.

In the midst of all of this, with everything I do, write, and say being picked over and examined, I've been wondering, what is my spiritual practice really about for me? Where do I need to stand firm in my way forward, and say THIS is what is important? THIS is what is fundamental, true, pure, and not subject to debate.

And, interestingly, an answer came up. And, thank God, it is very simple, and I think, easy to relate to! It is simply this: my spiritual practice has been about finding guidance in my life. It has been about finding, and protecting, that genuine loving place inside from which to take the next step. That place feels small and vulnerable. It is easily lost in the noise and the criticism, and it is sometimes hard to find my way back to it. Mediation has helped greatly to recapture what is just myself. And a spiritual practice has helped me learn to defend that place without resorting to some sort of violence, whether verbal or physical. And, from that place, whatever the next step will be in my life, it will be the right step.

***

On Monday, our team of seven gathered at 0615 before proceeding to the customer's site. I looked over at one of my comrads and said "I didn't sleep well last night." He said "Oh! I woke up at 1, then 2, then 3, then I couldn't get back to sleep!" Everyone had a similar story. It was obvious, we were all amped on adrenaline, as we had been all week.

The hardest part was the part, at the beginning, when we each had to stand and spend a minute introducing ourselves and our qualifications - there were no flip charts to fall back on in case we got lost. But nobody got lost, and we moved smoothly into our presentations. I got to do most of the first segment. I hadn't done nearly as much during our practice sessions, but I had read a lot over the weekend, I had absorbed a lot of information from my teammates, and my teammates had helped me with my flip charts. It went well - I had stories to tell - stories tell a lot about what you really know - the evaluators would be looking for stories. My teammates presentations went just as well, and they referred back to my charts and to each other's. And they had stories to tell as well. It hit me towards the end - my God - we had really become a team! I had to shift around to keep from getting teary-eyed. Our leader did a great job with his summary - and then we were done. We had been given 90 minutes to do our presentation, and we had finished with just two minutes to spare.

***

Alright guys, I'm off to the wilderness this weekend, starting tomorrow, to camp in the snow. Talk to you later.

John Coltrane's Welcome - one of my all-time favorite songs.

I'm sitting here thinking, or, rather trying to sense, what it is that is different after all of these years of Zen practice. After all of the daily sittings, sesshins (retreats), seeing teachers, religious experiences, whatever - after all of that drama - what is different right now? Do things look different? Not really. Do I have a sense that I have no self? No, I feel like I have a regular old personal self probably just like you do.

But there is a difference. The difference is in how connected I feel to my life and to everything in it. It is as though everything in my life is woven right into me.

Now that might sound pretty cool, but before you go hankering after it, you have to realize the implications. If I am inseparable from other things, it means that I cannot go against them. Inseparable implies unconditional love. I cannot hate other people or things, blame them, speak ill of them behind their backs, get defensive, or do any myriad of other things that my personal self (which I just said is still hanging around) would like to do. Perhaps the only fundamental difference between my current life, and life as it was when I first started sitting (meditating) is that the cost of choosing separation is much more obvious. And so I choose it less often.

Oh, I forgot, there is another implication. The active one. Connection implies commitment and responsibility. Hmmm. Must be a reason why I forgot that one... Yeah. The actions I take come out of, or are guided by, connection. And that sort of action is not necessarily in the interests of my personal self. And so connection is dragging my personal self along for the ride, and that might very well be right into a collision course with its own stuff, its own conditioning.

Is any of this sounding familiar? I have to think that whether you are a guy just starting out on the spiritual path, or the most enlightened Zen Master on the planet, you face the same fundamental choice. What will it be? Connection, the will of the heart, Thy will? Or the will of the personal self, my will.

In my early years of practice, the two choices weren't so obvious. How am I supposed to know what is my will vs. Thy will? How can I be sure that I am not fooling myself? Well, you know, spiritual practice is a skill that takes time to learn.

Much of my early meditation was like prayer - asking for guidance. I would try to find that still small voice inside and listen and ask "what are you saying?" I would feel into my body, my bodily tensions, and ask "what are you trying to tell me?" And insights would pop out. I would try to keep my mind focused on questioning, not on trying to figure anything out. (These days, when my personal self is really getting dragged along, I still return to this type of practice for guidance.)

But how would I know if what I found out wasn't just another voice of my personal self? I found that my body was the best guide - the body doesn't lie. When a tension in my body would shift or release, and an insight would pop out, I could trust it. There are always also friends and teachers to help. This could get dicey though, because the still small voice is still and small, and the voice of authoritrianism is loud.

In the early days, finding the voice of Thy will wasn't easy. But that practice, combined with looking at my personal identities, was very powerful. Finding and following Thy will would conflict with my will. And where did my will come from? My identities. My will is that will of the personal self for survival and aggrandizement - not a problem when it came to survival of my body - but yes a problem when it came to holding on to the stories that I wanted to believe about myself.

This practice became easier and easier over time, until it became rather regular. Thy will. Thy will. Again Thy will. Now if you are someone out there who wants to know your True Self intimately, how better could you prepare yourself? What is it that might be getting in the way of your finding that True Self?