Trajectories of a human life seem to follow discrete patterns across fixed domains. After all, we are physical beings and cognitive beings and beings of self and personality. In any given moment, we could observe our body or our mind or our very self. For example we might think “my stubbed toe hurts” (body) or “I’m thinking too much about my toe” (mind) or “I’m too much of a worrier” (self).
Each observation seems factual and solid. But is it?
After all, the toe pain passes along with thoughts about it and self-judgments in relation to it. The point here is that most everything in the moment seems solid and permanent before it is whisked away in another moment or two. The bottom line is that our sense of a fixed reality might be more illusory than it seems. Decades ago, the esteemed Person-Centered Psychologist of his time noted that we are “a process not a product” and he called this process “becoming a person”. We are not product or static. We are not solid and separate from everything else. A beloved Tibetan Buddhist Nun put it succinctly: “nothing solid is happening”.
This reflection reflects the wisdom of anicca or impermanence. Nothing lasts; all is process whether me or the days of my life. On a good day we could appreciate the day’s fleeting goodness all the more and on a bad day, well, it’s nice to remember that (from the Sufi Poets) “this too shall pass”.
We are a process; we are becoming; nothing lasts. The child’s body and mind give way to the teen’s. Our young adult body and mind age into middle age, then old age. We are becoming, in this sense, to our last breath. And maybe beyond…
In the fourth Century, the Bishop of Nyssa embraced these principles of process, becoming and growth by invoking the concept of epektasis. From the Greek, it connotes a kind of stretching out and evolving; “never to stop growing toward what is better and never placing any limits on perfection”… “God is indeed in you” (Beatitudes VI).
If there is an afterlife and how we arrive there no one knows for sure. Death empties us of body and perhaps of the brain’s mind as well. Maybe we arrive with empty bags, no baggage, not a “me” anymore…and we somehow and immediately merge with the Godhead, the Buddha Nature on the spot. God is indeed in you!
But what if we arrive, as some believe, with bags full of the past: of childhood’s ego and egotisms as well as the identities and confusions developed from adolescence onward– a whole lot of ME at those Pearly Gates. It could be a messy afterlife. But perhaps, in that full suitcase case, we are in process too. In epektasis. We are becoming for eternity, we are less and less me (and my identity), and more and more the Essence (the Godhead) that has always resided in and around me.
In the first case, our beatific transition might be considered sudden and immediate; in the latter case, gradual and eternal. And one more thing. What if these are one and the same? What if eternity is timeless; a mere split second? Then temporal notions of sudden and gradual disappear into that fateful eternity. Either way, what a fate, Amor Fati!
A crying baby on a passenger plane creates stress for all-especially the baby. But otherwise infants are a beloved fascination for the astute adult. In truth, we might learn a few things from these blessed beings we all once were.
Notice, for example, how a baby in a crib reaches for and grabs a little light-blue rattle, then squeezes and shakes it in those delightfully random, repeated arcs, primary circular reactions. But then this little one spies a bright yellow and red caterpillar plush toy nearby: the sudden object of desire. Well, instead of rattle-release in favor of the plush toy, something quite strange happens. The more the child wants the caterpillar, the more they hold fast to the rattle in their grasp. Immense frustration follows, for there is no having the object of desire without releasing the object in hand.
Apoplectic cries and tears might follow. And maybe, a broad swipe with accidental grip-release, and the rattle flies; more tears, then eventual calming. Now, with the hand free to reach for that caterpillar, there is a squeeze (the toy makes a crinkle sound) and a baby’s sense of delight!
This lesson of when to hold on and when to let go is with us everyday of our lives.
Preschoolers are deeply concerned about pee and poop. And decisions on evacuation can stymie the best of them. When do I hold on? When do I let go? Mistakes have messy consequences and may invite the ire of big people. For all involved, these high stakes dances around the potty chair can lead to shame or to autonomy. After all, a good poop, holding on and then a proper letting go, is something to be proud of!
Young kids throwing a ball learn an optimal grip and release to achieve their target, and herald their competency. And life’s targets just keep on coming as teen and young adults continue to learn this lifelong lesson on enduring or giving up and in…and the pacing for each. Self-evident is the inarguable virtue of knowing when to pursue and when to let go of relationships, careers, poker hands and stocks in portfolios. Sometimes we must hold fast to what we have. But sometimes when we hold on to what we’ve got too hard and long, we are not so free to reach for something new. The Old Taoist Master said, “watch the timing”.
This wisdom rings true from our first day to our last; from our first breath to our last breath. This will be our final lesson. Our well-lived lives will inform those last breaths. For at the end, these may be erratic breaths, shallow breaths-all natural of course and not generally painful. But if we have built the knack for it, there is surrender to respirations however they come. These are our fleeting and precious holdings on and lettings go- to the last agonal breath.
What happens next has been a cause of wonderment for living creatures since our ancestors packed graves with tools and supplies for the afterlife. What comes next is the crux of the mystery. The great 18th Century German polymath wrote that “the highest state man can attain is wonder.”
Whether man, woman or child; whether facing life or facing death, wonder is a pretty good way to go.
We talk a lot and occasionally to good ends. Perhaps we do not appreciate our communicating gifts, in part because speech is so pervasive. And listening so scarce!
Grasshoppers hum out to their fellows with rapid strokes of antennae or wings. Ants deposit a pheromone trail for safekeeping: to guide, to elude predators, and to pursue food sources. Pheromones you may have heard are also pretty good for attracting mates! Safety, food and sex are high stakes for tiny creatures and big ones too. One wonders why insects are so good at communicating even as humans can be pretty darn bad at it. Perhaps, unlike us, grasshoppers truly hear the sounds of their sidekicks.
When did talking rise to the pinnacle of our social experience? When did listening descend to a postscript? Our world of Talkers seems to louden after each Tech advance from telephones, to the internet, to social media. Such cacophony! Now most everyone has a platform, demanding influence, likes and listeners. But with everyone expressing, no one is left to be receptive, to receive; to bear witness.
The Psychotherapy Room occupies a sacred space in this communication paradigm. It’s blessed like a Priest’s Confessional or the Sacred Circle of a Shaman or like going alone to the teacher in Dokusan. Special communications join there and knowledges exchange. Listening is integral. Clients in psychotherapy enjoy, muddle through, and struggle with these exchanges. But there prevails a special overarching experience: to be heard, to be witnessed. Some clients realize that whether by family or by friends or by colleagues they have never or only rarely been heard. Think of it! And then ponder about how increasingly normalized this tragedy has become in our world of Talkers.
Ironically, the deep desire to be heard elevates loquacity. The more we want to be heard the more we seem to speak. And the more conversations take place in vitro (lab of the mind) and not in vivo. Inner monologues and dialogs are fine only if they do not displace communicating with another: I-I versus I-Thou. Picture a world of neurotics mistaking interior me-to-me conversations for the real thing.
This delusion has exploded today across social media mirages. Ours has become an asocial and lonely world. Legions have turned away from their human counterparts only to nuzzle with human illusions transmitted on smart-phones. Many more will look to artificial intelligence and chatbots to try to nourish social and belonging needs. But there is no there there. Tiny pockets of society are already collapsing because of it…youngsters are more vulnerable but all are at risk. We are starving for each other.
Sometimes, when things fall apart, opportunity arises for something new. Perhaps we now arrive at such place and such a time; a time to be still and listen deeply; to gaze into the eyes of the other; to pause and feel the miracle of that other human life before us; and to watch the otherness disappear into our shared humanity.
What it must have been like in our first days to encounter the gods above and all around us that delivered every possible comfort and nurturing. By breast and bottle we were fed; by blanket warmed and by lullaby entranced into sleep. As time went by, we did not notice the imperfections, the lapses. And later, even as we noticed, it was hard to accept that Mom and Dad were not quite the perfect deities we had imagined. There is disappointment. All parents fall from the supernatural grace bestowed on them by sensorimotor and preoperational intelligence and our wish for heaven on earth.
Some parents fall harder than others. And they are not the only ones.
Complications arise with this fall from pedestals, yet we seem to be hard wired to never give up on the search for the perfect friend, lover, teacher, and coach. And in this Age of Influence, screens manifest an almost infinite array of gods and goddesses we so want to believe in! Who does not want a perfect hero to emulate; to explain things; to guide us through troubled waters? Like those perfect parents…we never had.
Perhaps our problem comes in what we are looking for in our heroes. After all, there is within us something bigger and much deeper than a parent to be projected (more on that later).
Let’s start with this: All of us are flawed and some of us tragically so; hamartánein; flawed and downfallen. Think of the famed Buffalo Bills running back accused of uxoricide; the revered Labor Leader implicated in serial sex abuses; the alleged child rape perpetrators: a Prince; a Governor; a Movie Director. Even the persona, Miranda Sings, was alleged to have groomed and formed inappropriate relationships with underage fans. We seem to imbue some heroes with an imagined (Perfect Parent) greatness that obscures a deeply defective nature. All of these were heroes to some and ultimately grave and bitter disappointments.
So what about that something within us, bigger and much deeper than a Parental Projection? Almost there…
Seeking Superstars, we have lost track of what heroism is, of the everyday hero’s journey: our own lives of challenge, of triumph, of pain and unsatisfactoriness. We all brave it all, our very imperfect quest. And when you think about it that way, heroes abound!
We could be inspired and learn so much from the imperfect but heroic friend, lover, teacher, and coach. So we must not fall into a trap of our own making by projecting a Perfect Parent/Perfect Person across a very human figure. An impulsive firing of such an exemplar could be an unfortunate, unforced error. As inevitable shortcomings appear, our disappointment would lead to termination, and a serious job opening for the next would-be Superstar in our lives. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Yikes!
Our delusion resides in the very wish for the Perfect Parent- a test all parents fail, as do all subsequent potential occupants of that nonpareil-sized hole in our hearts. It takes courage to accept that there are no Perfect Parents and no Perfect Superstars to fill their shoes. There is just us. A little over eight billion of us (heroes abound), who can never ever fill that heart hole for the Perfect Parent…and should just stop trying.
Now let’s get to what is bigger and deeper, even than Mom and Dad!
There is an old Zen saying, “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”. The wise Buddhist Psychotherapist from Washington, DC, authored a book with that title and submitted that “if you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.” Beyond parents, we ought not project the inner hero, the Buddha nature within, onto anyone either. After all we are, each of us, the hero we have been searching for!
This is our remedy and what might fill our ailing heart. We could reclaim our own inner (imperfect) hero and begin to see the inner hero that resides in all human beings.
We live in some kind of mix of wonder and terror, with so many fed-up people swearing off the news… and becoming hooked on their smart phones. Evolutionary biologists have called ours an age of hyper-novelty, whereby our novelty attracted brains bounce from this to that in an ever-accelerating media world bent on attention capture. Minds captured by technologists who manipulate our deepest emotions, like fear and envy and anger. Yep, our mind, our very intelligence, is trapped by clever bells and whistles into repetitive phone searches and doom scrolling. And when you reflect upon it, you are not always sure just why you picked your phone up in the first place.
And it is about to get a lot worse.
Let’s start in the distant past for a chance to understand where we are now, and where we might be going. And by the way, no expertise in evolutionary science is claimed here, so the following is advanced from the perspective of just a sincere student.
Nearly two million years ago, Homo Habilis roamed this earth, Africa to be exact. He was so-called for his ability to use stone tools like large animal bones for butchering. The little fellow stood 3 ½ to 4 ½ feet tall, and his body was somewhat apelike.
This short-legged, long armed being is invoked here to exemplify one of the earlier members of the Homo genus, and an indirect ancestor to ourselves. We are Homo sapiens and hopefully we have learned a few things about tools over the past 300,000 years. Homo sapiens implies “wise man”. How wise human beings have been with the tools they create could occupy volumes of pros and cons. Think hammer and plow; printing press and steam engine, think machines of war. Yes, it’s a mixed bag.
Now, think computers and artificial intelligence, and feel the tilt of the room, if not the whole planet.
A central thesis in this little essay is that wisdom takes some time… and that we are behind schedule. This proposition is best explained by the esteemed Myrmecologist who argued that “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology”. What could possibly go wrong?
AI developers have been obsessed with developing the god-like tech of intelligence, AGI. Theoretically, artificial general intelligence will surpass human capacities in, well, everything. And then there is super intelligence that can, it is said, solve all problems. You have probably heard of the high-stakes race to develop this god-like technology. While it is sometimes represented as a panacea (there will be some of that), it is being created by people with Paleolithic emotions…a room full of Homo Habilis minded chief executives. Think job loss, cognitive decline, autonomous weapons. Nightmares will outnumber panaceas. By a lot.
Motivated by avarice and ego, developers race forward at breakneck speed with no brakes. They seem to wrongly believe that developing intelligence is merely a matter of evermore information and large language modeling. This dangerous race is like something out of middle school…Sam must beat Elon…Elon must beat Dario. But there is a point not considered or perhaps just suppressed because it will only slow these ambitions down.
You see, while intelligent, these very smart AI’s are not wise, nor will they ever be. This reflects the intelligent but unwise minds of those creators. AI creators seem not to understand that when wisdom does take hold, it is more than an expanding cranium. It is that larger brain but so much more: development across vast expanses of time with a visceral exertion to survive, and send our genes down the road for one more generation. That is what has grown whatever wisdom humans might take credit for across religions and philosophies and mythologies. Technologists can set in motion the ingredients but only time and (right) effort will bake the evolutionary cake. AGI will mimic Lao Tzu without the wisdom of the Old Master. Lao Tzu with hallucinations.
Perhaps this error in conceptualizing intelligence and wisdom relates to a prejudice most of us can understand. We all knew a smart kid growing up. Maybe we were that kid. And we have been swarmed with stereotypes about intelligent people and unintelligent people our whole lives. Status and accolades surround the intelligent; there is understandable pride and, quite often, the social trappings of success. AI creators occupy that space.
All this begs the question, what about the unintelligent? What about people with intellectual disability and what about people with dementia and other cognitive impairments? There has always been a societal tendency to stigmatize and shun persons with mental statuses like these. Our (false) belief system about these people promotes disrespect, indifference and abuse. Here we find ourselves facing square-on an under-discussed prejudice, intelligism–A bias against persons with cognitive limits or impairments, based on an over-valuing of intelligence itself.
Of course, it matters when impairments happen, the onset, be it at birth, midlife, or in later years. Congenital disorders seem to be part of Identity and are often embraced. Later onsets with accidents and illness may seem alien to Identity and are usually rejected. All of that is a story for another day. Here, we contend that truly seeing the personhood of an individual with a diminished mind is a great blessing to the person and to their beholder. To believe otherwise is to discount personhood and buy into the intelligism that inflates the merit of intelligence into a false god. The AI rush is a nightmare and a heresy.
After all, AGI will certainly surpass all of us intellectually- you, me, and everyone we know. In relation to AGI, we are all the impaired, the unintelligent masses. We will bristle against this late-onset condition and feel trapped in it and by it. For it was only yesterday that we were ok, and then suddenly, we find ourselves thrown from the top of the heap.
Will AI condemn us? Shall we condemn ourselves? Shall we forget the wisdom that will always distinguish us from an intellectually superior AGI. At our best, we have these hundreds of thousands of years of exertion and learning, yielding personhood’s wisdom, and we desperately need it now. Lao Tzu did not represent wisdom as a function of Large Language Models. In truth, he said The Way was ineffable.
So it is all about to get a lot worse. Unless we can be wise, put intelligence in perspective, and pause AI development before that nightmare takes hold.
Posted by Dr. Bob under Uncategorized Comments Off on Perennial
We bear witness to such division today. Disharmonies are everywhere: nation against nation, generation against generation, and neighbor against neighbor. Tried and true institutions and values seem to be falling apart. Some formerly life-sustaining scripture bends and breaks, broken in relation to that never-ending, never-settled scientific revolution.
Many of us feel a little broken too.
Abounding threats, large and tiny, catch us quite off guard. We search our phones for answers, but there is not much to be found there except more bad news: a war declared trending on X; a voicemail from a suddenly ill, dear friend; another texted sales pitch.
But there abounds good news too, if we learn where and how to look for it. And it is ever-present, and perennial to boot. Last Century, a Philosopher and a Mythologist seemed to arrive, from different directions, at a single and very auspicious perspective.
The Philosopher took refuge in the library at Trabuco and dug in: reading, contemplating, writing. What emerged was a philosophia perennis, an account across time and philosophies and religions of the “Highest Common Factor”. Composed through the ages by saints, sages, and prophets, this perennial philosophy was everywhere to behold. It was transcendent and immanent, cosmic space and divine ground. The Philosopher had discovered that beyond and within the many differences between wisdom traditions floated enduring pay dirt: tat tvam asi.
The Mythologist, at nearly the same time, recognized something quite universal from the perspective of journeys undertaken in myth, fairy tale, scripture, and dreams. A monomyth. It was the heroes’ journey with legendary protagonists ranging from bear cult worshippers, to witch doctors, to Olympian gods, and finally, to our very selves. Later, the Mythologist would write of the collapse of many myths and religions held literally. Science and Rationalism would dispel beliefs in a Flood, a Parted Sea, and an Exodus. So he urged the necessity to explore a new yet ancient myth: “the old everlasting perennial mythology” that eternally exists along side the scientific method, with each illuminating the other. A perennial mythology that he identified more than once as tat tvam asi…that thou art. But what exactly does it mean?
The Chandogya Upanishad, created long ago (7th century BCE), conveys a Truth both Philosopher and Mythologist identified as perennial to the core, all around and within everyone of us. The story, in brief, goes something like this: An overly cocky twelve year old (imagine that) named Svetaketu, inquired of his father, Uddalaka, about the Knowledge whereby “we can know what cannot be known”. His father gave the boy a humbling task, to bring back a fruit from the nyagrodha tree and discover the tree’s inception. An experiment ensued as father directed son to break the fruit open; then, to break open a seed held within the fruit. Svetaketu searched but could not see the origin of the tree in the broken fruit and tiny seed.
Similarly, the boy was instructed to put some salt in a cup of water. The next day father asked son about the salt and its whereabouts, but it had dissolved, and the boy could not see it. Now taste the water instructed Uddalaka. It was, of course, salty…still present but invisible salt. Father explained that the hidden salt remained in the water even as the imperceptible Atman (Essence, Spiritual Self) remained in all things, as invisible as it was perennial.
Lovingly, Uddalaka concluded, “you my dear Svetaketu are that Essence, that thou art”. Tat tvam asi.
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Einstein
Here, the wise physicist who proclaimed the “modest life” was channeling something gritty about mental perseverance. For example, you could persevere through the rest of this essay or maybe just pick up your smart phone and move to the next thing. This is our dilemma today, an utter intolerance for staying with problems, challenges, or really much of anything at all so: click, click, click.
Our irritation at inconvenience is more palpable than ever and instant gratification has never been quite so, well, instant. So instead of staying with a problem, we simply offload it; copy and paste it into ChatGPT or any of its brethren. Cognitive offloading. Instant answers. Everybody is doing it!
Now plenty has been written about the virtues of artificial intelligence for vacation planning, recipe making, foreign language learning and radiology interpreting. A properly programmed chat-bot tutor aids students with patience, precision and accessibility. There are trade-offs. Artificial intelligence directed at cancer cures is as inspiring as those technologies are terrifying when aimed at biological warfare. There is a potential to “solve” environmental problems even as AI Centers require godawful amounts of energy with negative environmental consequences. We will always have problems despite AI enthusiasts and their claims for utopia.
Let’s return to Einstein’s point and staying with problems: “Stay with it!” This is the encouragement from parent to child, teacher to student, and therapist to client. In all three domains growth often comes by staying with challenges and learning from that (sometimes) nettling process. Learning requires exertion and effort, qualities essential to knowledge acquisition honed over tens of thousands of years. Back to offloading. It forecloses opportunities for growth and learning in exchange for quick and easy answers that present a compelling illusion: that artificial intelligence is our own intelligence. We feel smart and competent. But ironically, emerging research shows diminished intellectual abilities with AI, particularly a loss of critical thinking…a world feeling smarter, even as it is getting dumber.
An added and unfortunate twist: cognitive surrender. Arguably more insidious than intentional offloading, we surrender without quite knowing it. We give up our intuitive and deliberative capacities as we adopt AI information. No questions asked. One research study found that people followed wrong AI answers 80% of the time. Unlike the decision to offload, surrender means giving up and giving in–not to our own brainpower but to that of a “machine”. Surrender, as in we lose.
There is something called the automation bias that applies here. We tend to believe machine-generated answers more than information from traditional sources like books or (wise) people. The EdTech revolution of the last four decades saturated classrooms with computers and tablets. And with smart phones on a desk, in a pocket, or a purse. Research shows that just the proximity of a smart phone reduces concentration! Many attribute student achievement declines to these technologies…and to social media (a story for another day). Artificial Intelligence is the latest and greatest tech-threat to our own intelligence. The disruptions to education are already immense. Students are using ChatGPT and similar technologies to write essays, term papers, and complete online exams. They are not learning course subject matter, so-called “learning objectives”, and they are (rapidly) forgetting how to think.
Of course, that means that schools themselves must be at the forefront of caution and regulation, right? Nope. Ohio State University will require an entire course and numerous workshops on the use of AI for its students. California State University has contracted with Open-AI for something ominously called ChatGPT Edu…an oxymoron of sorts. This provides over 450,000 students and 63,000 staffers with a premium version of the platform. For those of us who can remember the aforementioned EdTech Revolution, Apple computer school discounts and giveaways in the 1980’s, this is true déjà vu…the nightmarish kind. Not to be outdone, California Community Colleges will support “human-centered AI grounded in equity, accountability, and student success with faculty, staff, administrators, students, and partners to expand access”. How do we reconcile these lofty sentiments with the deep darkside of offloading and surrender? Cynics ponder how this industry, with billions invested, seems to exert such influence over our colleges and universities.
Some argue for a moratorium on these regressive steps by school administrations. In the style of best practice research, there should be a review of the scientific literature that has already exposed scores of problems and flaws with this technology in educational settings. There should be open and honest meetings with stakeholders-more researchers and especially students and teachers; fewer administrators and industry “experts”.
All of education should pause. No more AI implementation. We need to stay with this problem a little longer.
Waking up to the miseries of the world and our essential predicament alarms us; overwhelms us.
So, refuge in literal sleep, daydreaming or even a good nap seems like a smart idea. But prepare, the focus hereafter will depart from lessons in sleep hygiene and embrace the symbolic nature of wakefulness and sleep.
The spiritual aspirant, intent on waking up, encounters the sparkles of dew on a spider-woven web, the rising western sun, and the shrieks of playful abandon from a nearby playground (our joy for their joy). Add to that, front-page war horrors, political disruption, and the insidious upset of neighborhood gossip. Life is a mixed bag.
Besides literal sleep, we might seek refuge in consumption. We swallow the wrong food and drink, and too much of both. We resort to Black Friday pastimes year round, with a consumerism that is normalized, but is really just another way to doze off into materiality. Of course, the dopamine rush of these departures from the spirit yield only temporary relief, and soon we are chewing again on addictive Nabisco concoctions, and credit-carding on Amazon. These are the sacraments of modernity, our communions and our confirmations; our body-blood and our identity.
Perhaps the most complicated of these forces are the technologies that bring us blog posts (like this one), our favorite Kindle Anthology, online gambling and a deluge of social media. Technologies are a mixed bag too.
Technologists smarter than us have surpassed even the Nabisco food chemists as purveyors of addiction. Algorithms tease and trap our brains and fingers into doom scrolls as we chase the highs of our passion and the lows of our fear and outrage. Scientists explain that this unwitting social experiment alters (not for the better) brain functioning, especially in children, teens and young adults. Disturbingly, we are sacrificing our youth without much protest from their elders who are too busy on their own smart phones. And, in a story for another day, the misuse of artificial intelligence is poised to propel this unwholesome enterprise fast forward.
Some blessed folks are waking up to our dilemma, clutching what basic goodness they can, and taking action to lessen the suffering. But awakening to a nightmare is not easy, and even they might forget about those webs of dew and childhood enchantments. Even they might be led onto the tempting exits described herein.
So where is the Refuge that refreshes the quest to live an inspired life and help out others along the way? We might seek out books and teachers and podcasts and influencers of all sorts-there are plenty to choose from! Or we may decide to think about our path a little differently. Instead of looking out there, we might consider looking inside. Myth and legend tell compelling stories of those with the courage to look within; past all the baggage and self-deception. We could go all the way in through sight, and sound, and what is felt like pressures and temperatures and movement…all the way in, to this very breath, and the next and the next.
These are the breaths that support us all; that support both writer and reader in this exact instant of a shared idea. And within and all around our simple respirations, we can discover the present moment. Now.
We are delivered to our body through awareness of breath, and begin to discover that it is this very body; these very senses that are the path to our present moment. We watch carefully. The present moment at once is a millisecond… and all eternity. Disorienting! There is awe, sometimes tinged with tiny frights, as we encounter bare attention. Crutches and barriers we once hung tight to start to dissolve, somehow unneeded.
Consciousness expands in the present moment. At once, we are the vast ocean, and a tumbling wave, and the gentlest sea-bubbles upon the sand all whispering, “pop”.
At once, as we breathe in, we become our very first breath, that unremembered newborn cough cry of glad-to-be-here, now. At once, we are the outbreath, the last breath we will ever expel, still glad and still present. In and out. Feeling fully the whiff and waft, we come to understand the mantra: life, death, life, death, life…
This is our eternal present moment and the only Refuge we shall ever need.
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