Closure and Aperture
Dear All,
Sadly, given the virus, we have to stop meeting in person for the time being. So here it is:
NO GROUP AT MY OFFICE
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!
Most of the readers of this email are far from Great Barrington in any case, so for them it will not be much of a change.
For all of us, the recommended "social distancing" of this difficult time gives us a chance to experience an "inner nearing" -- for regardless of physical distance, we are one world and intimately bound. Coronavirus infection requires some, if scant, outer contact. Positive spiritual infection requires only inner contact.
So as we close off one form of contact, we may open up to other possibilities. This is what always happens when friends move away, or die.
Fittingly, the next of the lojong slogans we'll address (and these Tibetan exercises that have seen even darker hours than ours in their long service to humanity) has to do with non-localization. It is just this:
#5 Rest in then nature of alaya, the essence.
Literally, alaya means no place. We have no fixed abode. Our real nature is the finder and creator of places, but has no place itself. "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." (Matthew 8:20). This placelessness is our home base, the source point from out of which we make all our locations, all our thoughts, judgments and perceptions. Our true home is unlocalizeable or even non-locality itself.
Rather than experience this as weird or alienating, we can simply return from our many mental adventures and realize there is a base in us from which we scurry out to them and to which we continually scurry back. And rather than rush away from it so often and rush back for such a brief stay, we can rest in the sense of an existential and epistemological home base, a kind of security. As Trungpa (or Judy Lief) explains, "You trust yourself already," and "It is a process of slowing down."
It is a practice of relaxing into that fundamental trust, a faith in ourselves and the world. This faith has no justification. Let's meet there!
All blessings to all,
Michael
