Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

The Mind’s Haunted House

by

What monsters populate your Terror Within the Mind?

The other evening, just before sunset, I was walking down our street to meet my spouse, Kip, for dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. Coming towards me on the sidewalk was a man dressed in a black and white striped prison uniform cradling a large mallet with both hands. His face was painted white, fake blood dripped from the corners of his mouth.

The first thought that crossed my mind was how bizarre this would seem to someone from another culture who had no context for this scenario. As for us, we’re used to ghosts and ghouls wandering our neighborhood this time of year. We live near a historic prison, now a museum, and every fall as a fundraiser the Friends of Eastern State Penitentiary put on a haunted house inside the prison’s massive stone walls that loom like a fortress in the heart of our neighborhood. They hire actors to play the parts of gruesome prison guards, blood-thirsty convicts, and all manner of haunted and haunting characters.

People flock to Terror Behind the Walls from all over the region, many arriving on the Ghost Bus that shuttles them back and forth from outlying parking areas. As Halloween draws nearer they often stand in line for hours, their anticipation mounting as they get closer and closer to the smoke-breathing gargoyles lurking above the gateway to the prison.Continue Reading

One Christ Is Not Enough

by

It’s about time.

A few years ago, my spouse, Kip, and I signed up for a retreat in Estes Park, Colorado led by Thich Nhat Hanh. I have long admired this Vietnamese Buddhist master who, with his quiet, humble demeanor, teaches that mindfulness and peace can be cultivated in every moment and every act.

We arrived in the Denver airport and boarded the chartered bus to the YMCA of the Rockies. Once there, we settled into our room, then headed for the opening gathering, joining a thousand others who had traveled from far and wide. Finding a place on the floor of the large convocation hall, we sat, waiting expectantly for Thich Nhat Hanh to appear and give the opening talk.

After awhile, one of the brown-robed monks with shaven head approached the microphone and began reading a letter from Thay—as Thich Nhat Hanh is affectionately called. It was a beautiful, loving letter. But I was confused. Why was he communicating with us in writing rather than just addressing us in person? Was this customary in Buddhist retreats?

As the monk continued reading, it sank in. Thich Nhat Hanh would not be joining us. He was hospitalized in Boston, receiving treatment for a lung infection. His community—the nuns and monks from France and their sister monasteries in New York and California—would lead the retreat.

Even though I was concerned for Thay’s wellbeing, this was an immense disappointment. I’d been looking forward to this retreat for months. But I came to a reluctant acceptance. Perhaps this was the retreat’s first teaching: to release my attachment to something I had desired so much.

The nuns and monks did a beautiful job. They gave insightful and moving Dharma talks, and although they surely must have felt trepidation about having to fill Thay’s shoes, their sincerity, the depth of their presence, and the authenticity of their teaching was an inspiration. Over the course of our days together we coalesced into a supportive community, sharing our meals in silence, joining in our small group conversations, accepting the situation and one another with grace and humor. In the absence of the revered master, the community discovered its strength.

The experience made us all more aware of how we so often project onto a single leader the capacities that lie within each of us. Had we really come to see a Buddhist super star? Or had we gathered to become a community—practicing mindfulness, compassion and peace?

As though to express the collective shift we’d undergone, at our joyous closing celebration a spontaneous dance erupted as Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” played over the sound system. (“If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and then make a change.”) The energy in the room was extraordinary. Something powerful had been unleashed during that retreat, not despite Thay’s absence, but because of it.

The event became known as the miracle of the Rockies, a story of collective awakening when the master became embodied in the Sangha. The teaching was no longer the purview of one individual; it had become the gift of and to the collective.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the retreat had been billed: One Buddha Is Not Enough.

One of the most meaningful moments for me personally was when I was initiated into the Five Mindfulness Trainings—practices that give concrete expression to the Buddha’s teachings about right understanding and true love.

Sister Pine, the nun who facilitated our small group, assigned Dharma names to everyone in her group who had adopted the trainings. The morning she passed out the certificates she gestured me aside to quietly whisper something to me. She told me that the Dharma name she had heard for me was Living Christ of the Heart, but she didn’t know if I would be able to use it publicly, so on my certificate she wrote Joyful Gift of the Heart. When she told me, she emphasized the word Living, repeating it emphatically to convey to me that the name she’d heard didn’t refer to something or someone in the past, but to a present, living reality.

I have held the Dharma name at arms length. There’s so much baggage associated with the term “Christ.” It can so easily be misconstrued—becoming a mine field for the ego. After all, how many mentally unstable people have claimed themselves to be the Christ, sometimes with catastrophic consequences?

And therein lies the problem: people believing themselves to be the Christ, as though there can only be one. In fact, the belief in one’s specialness—that one is somehow set apart from the rest of humanity—is an indication that the mind is still operating from an ego perspective, not a Christ perspective.

As I understand it at this point in my life, Christ isn’t a person but a state of being, a state of dwelling in the reality of one’s oneness with the All. Yes, it is a state of being Jesus inhabited, and one he wanted others to experience as well.

We have now reached a point where our collective survival may well depend on all of us awakening to our Christ nature, understanding that it the fullest expression of what it is to be human.

This, I believe, is Christianity’s new calling, metamorphosing into a religion that helps awaken the Christ capacity in us all, just as Thay wished to awaken the Buddha capacity in those of us who gathered on retreat.

While I was at the retreat that summer I bought a watch designed by Thich Nhat Hanh. In the center is the word “it’s” in Thay’s calligraphy, and in the four quadrants is written the word “now.” I’m sure he intended it to be a constant reminder to be in the moment, present to the eternal now.

And yet, against the backdrop of my experience at the retreat I hear it also as a proclamation that we all have the capacity to be Buddhas, that we are all the Christ we’ve been waiting for. The time for us to awaken to that truth is now.

Be 101

by

Who are your teachers of Being?

There is a soft rock radio station here in Philadelphia called B101. A few years ago, driving, I pulled up behind a bus at a stop light. On the back of the bus was an ad for B101—a picture of a bright bumble bee next to the call letters.

It occurred to me that it would make a great name for a course—one we could probably all benefit from.

Be 101.

Our culture specializes in doing. Most of us have the equivalent of an advanced degree in it, in fact. But being? Well, that’s just not something we’re taught.

So an introductory course in being might be just the ticket.  Unlike all those courses we took whose textbooks and notes—if we even still have them—are gathering dust in our attic, I imagine we would consult our notes from Be 101 quite often.  We could pull them out whenever we found ourselves in the throes of anxiety about our circumstances or despair about all the ways we are failing at life.

In fact, our Be 101 notebook might rest on our nightstand like a sacred text—pages dog-eared, favorite passages highlighted in yellow, margins full of scribbled comments.

In Be 101 we would learn that we are not our thoughts. We are not our accomplishments. We are not our looks. We are not our possessions. We are not our professions.

Come to think of it, in a culture as ego and achievement driven as ours—with an economy built upon the principle of dissatisfaction—Be 101 would be the most subversive course in the entire curriculum.

Turning to the Teachers

Who are the experts among us who could teach us about being?

I’m sure you have your own favorite teachers. As for myself, I look to the Trees.

Trees are amazing instructors in the art of being. They stay put, root themselves deeply in their own place in the world, and simply go about becoming more of what they already are. They stand. They breathe. They become.

Some trees have been breathing and becoming for hundreds of years, some for thousands.  In California there is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine that’s been alive for more than 48oo years. Think of it. That Bristlecone was already 2300 years old when the Buddha sat down under another tree and became enlightened.

Can you imagine standing in the same place for 4800 years with no place you had to go and nothing you had to do but be yourself?

Sometimes when I’m in the woods I’ll lean my body up against a tree trunk to take in its energy. Invariably it reconnects me with a quiet, centered place in me that has no agenda and no anxiety.  There, at the feet of these great ones, I am reminded of my intrinsic worth and my timeless essence.  There I am reminded that—despite all of our human activities, ambitions, and aspirations—there is really nothing more precious than Being itself.

Enough Already

by

Do you still think you’re inadequate?

If I had to characterize the dominant belief that orchestrates our society it would be: Not Enough Yet. If you think about it, this basic belief drives just about everything we do. In fact, it forms the foundation of our entire economy. Stock prices aren’t high enough yet. Profits haven’t been maximized enough yet. Jobs haven’t been outsourced enough yet. The Gross National Product isn’t high enough yet.

The belief shows up in our individual lives too. Our income isn’t big enough yet. Our house isn’t elegant enough yet. Our car isn’t sophisticated enough yet. Our clothes aren’t stylish enough yet. Our computer isn’t fast enough yet.

The harm this belief causes is obvious. In our frantic efforts to reach that elusive state of enoughness, we raze more forests to build new tracts of bigger houses, displace more workers to maximize corporate profits, lead more stressed out lives trying to keep up with the bills and the Joneses.

Imagine what would happen if we all stopped buying into the myth of Not Enough Yet. We would only buy clothes when we actually needed them. We would be content with a simple home. We would no longer demand that the corporations we hold stock in exploit workers and the environment in order to give us a slightly higher return. We would enjoy the local fruits of the season rather than going to the grocery store expecting to find fresh asparagus in November shipped in from Chile. We, and the Earth, would be far healthier and happier.

This belief in Not Enough Yet is something that spiritual teachers have been trying to help people get beyond for a very long time. The Tao te Ching teaches, “If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.” Jesus said, “Don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

I think we’re missing the point, though, if we think all of this is about believing we don’t have enough yet. I think the real issue is that we believe we aren’t enough yet. Our drive to acquire more is often a coverup for our desire to be more. We haven’t yet accepted that the sheer miracle of our existence is enough in itself.

Let me put the question to you: How do you think you aren’t enough? Do you think you aren’t successful enough? Not popular enough? Not confident enough? Not smart enough? Not strong enough? Not talented enough? Not pretty enough? Not happy enough?

Or how about this: Not spiritual enough? Not enlightened enough? Not evolved enough yet?

Pause for just a moment, if you would, and really think about how you would complete the sentence, “I believe I’m not _______________ enough yet.”

Now, let’s set that aside for one moment while I ask you a few more questions.

Has it ever occurred to you that the cells in your body, yes, the cells in your optic nerves that are sending the images of these words to your brain, are made of material that originated in stars that went supernova and spewed their matter out into the cosmos billions of years ago?

Has it ever occurred to you that the water in your body—which makes up most of your material form—has been traveling the world for eons? It has flowed countless times through the Amazon jungle, fallen as snow on the Himalayas, been breathed out by redwoods on the California coast, poured down as rain on the Great Plains, drifted across the sky as thunderclouds, descended into the oceans’ deep?

Just for this moment, consider the places, experiences, substances, beings that the matter in your body has seen and been.

Or how about the DNA that right now is replicating itself in your cells, carrying information that is the creative masterpiece of millions of years of evolution?

And that’s just your physical body. We haven’t even gotten started on the miracle of your consciousness and that this physical matter that was generated in the stars can think and create and love and weep and laugh.

Do you understand that you are nothing less than the miracle of rivers and stars and eons of years now taking on human form that can breathe, dance, write poetry, cook a meal, read a blog?

The miraculous nature of our being was on my mind a few years ago when I was taking a day trip on a gorgeous spring day to Cape May, New Jersey. Come noontime I stopped at a restaurant to get some lunch and sat down on the sunny patio. When the waitress walked up I saw her in her essence—a child of the Universe in every way—and when she began reciting the specials for the day it was all I could do not to bust out laughing.

There was something so wonderfully comical about the moment, that this being in front of me who was living, walking, talking star dust was telling me about the Reuben sandwich and the soup du jour, completely unaware of the fact that she was the Universe in microcosm, a miracle beyond comprehension.

The same goes for you, of course. You are an expression of this Life, this Universe, this Reality that has been expanding and evolving for billions of years. There is no part of you that is not part of that most amazing whole. The sheer fact that you are is beyond amazing.

So. Tell me again. How is it that you’re not enough yet?

The Silent Tomb

by

All I heard was silence.

Last week, in observance of Good Friday, I posted a blog titled The Cross Speaks, listening to the story of the tree that was destroyed in order to make a cross. This week, in observance of Easter, I considered writing one titled The Tomb Speaks. I found myself wondering what the empty tomb in the Christian resurrection story might have to say to us.

So I allowed myself to go there. In my imagination I entered a dark, empty chamber hewn out of the side of a hill. It was cool. I was alone. I sat down on the ground to listen for the words that the tomb might want to speak, but all I heard was silence. The silence was deep, and it was filled with wisdom that was beyond words. It’s wisdom was of a mystery, of an unfathomable transformation. It was not a chamber of endings, as we usually believe it to be, but a container for profound metamorphosis.

I realized then how hard we try to ward off the tomb’s silence with our trumpet voluntaries and fill its emptiness with our certainties and dogmas. But Mystery cannot be defined, its nature cannot be grasped.

This past Easter Sunday, I was taking an afternoon walk in the woods with some friends along Ridley Creek outside of Philadelphia, and towards the end of our walk I stopped for a moment, standing next to the creek as the brilliant late-day sunlight slanted through the trees. I soon found myself opening to that state of Oneness in which there is no barrier between myself and the All, between the “living” and the “dead”. I felt the presence of dear ones who have left this world — the familiar energy signatures of their love — and felt myself one with the trees, the creek, the birds, the sunlight reflecting off the water. The beauty of it moved me to tears.

It was a moment in which I perceived the mysterious truth that the empty tomb in its silence taught. In resurrection it isn’t death that is vanquished, for death is the natural culmination of life, but rather it is our fear of death, our misunderstanding of death that is overcome. This, I believe, is what the early Christians meant when they said that death had lost its sting.

May that incomprehensible Mystery that is beyond the reach of all our words hold you in its gentle, beautiful, silent truth.

The Cross Speaks

by

 

Not long ago I was thriving on a hill in Galilee. My roots reached deep into the rocky soil.  Sunlight shone upon my leaves, the wind danced though my branches.  In the winter, rain fell cool upon my body, seeping into the soil of my thirsty roots. I drank gladly of that living water.

I witnessed the dawn of each day. At night I reached up to the Moon in her silent cycles, and the slow swirling of stars.

My body shuddered when the thunder cracked. I stood naked in the raging storm—bending with the tempest so as not to break—and when it passed I held the birds, singing in my branches.

I knew the breath of life.

But then they came for me.  Not with swords, but axes, and I was silent, like a lamb led to the slaughter.

Half of my body is still there on that distant hill, decaying in the soil of Galilee.  The other half they dragged here for their tortuous display.

The emperor isn’t satisfied with what he already has. He wants more land, more wealth, more power. Lives have to be sacrificed.

Golgotha they call it. Place of the skull. As if it were only humans whose broken bodies hang here.

Entire forests of my kin are destroyed because humans are never content with what they have, with what they are.  You would call it genocide if the victims looked like you.

I have a question for you.  Why are you dissatisfied?  Why is nothing ever enough for you?  Why are you always striving for more?

Can you not stop for once in your anxious striving and just let yourselves be still? Can you not feel yourselves rooted in the Earth? Can you not let the miracle of the sunlight, the rain, the soil, the song of the birds and the dance of the wind be enough for you?

Do you not understand that your task on this Earth is to witness its magnificence, to delight in the wonder of existence, to be the I Am-ness—the awake presence that marvels at the unfolding of life?

You are living in a falsehood, believing your destiny is separate from my own life.  I am the other one sacrificed on this windswept hill, and I suppose that has never even occurred to you.

You seem to believe you can destroy us and not destroy yourselves as well. But consider this: the man’s blood that even now is seeping into my grain carries the oxygen once breathed out by my leaves.  Are you so blind?

The one you call Jesus tried to show you what power truly is—not domination and violence, but healing, acceptance, compassion, Life.  He wanted you to see that you don’t need riches because you are already enough.  The way the birds of the air are enough and the lilies of the field are enough.

But you remained asleep in your dream of separateness and striving, and now the Earth is hanging on the cross of your empires and your egos.

We are weary, so weary.  We cannot endure your illusion much longer. It is right that you have sung “Hosanna,” for it means “save us.”

I implore you to sing it again from your heart. Sing it for yourselves. Sing it for all of us.

Sing it for me.

The Inner Climate Change

by

The butterfly emerges out of an experience of dissolution.

A few nights ago I had a dream that has lingered with me. I didn’t remember the whole dream, but in the part that I did remember I was looking through a window at a row of enormous butterfly bushes that were teeming with hundreds of butterflies large and small. Some had blue wings, some orange and black, others yellow and black, and several of them had markings I had never seen before. Somehow in the dream I knew that the cause of this explosive outbreak of butterflies was global warming.

Global warming has certainly been on my mind since, like much of the nation, we’ve been having a heat wave in Philadelphia. The daffodils and forsythia bloomed more than a month early, the azaleas are already opening and many of the flowering trees, including the magnolias, peaked before winter had even officially ended.

I know I’m not alone in my concern about the situation and what it forebodes about what’s to come. Shawn Lawrence Otto wrote in his March 19th Huffington Post article “Cherry Blossoms, Ice Boxes, BMWs and Climate Change” that this heat wave is “one of the most extreme meteorological events in US history.” Temperatures across much of the nation have been running 20 to 40 degrees above normal, and at the time when the article was released 2000 U.S. temperature records had already been broken this year.

With extreme weather becoming the new norm it’s becoming harder and harder to live in the illusion that climate change isn’t upon us. Those of us who have recognized for years that our policies and behaviors must change are probably not surprised by the disturbing way 2012 has begun, but even so it is unsettling to witness the predictions coming true. I suppose many of us are wondering if it’s already too late, if our species has dawdled so long, refusing out of greed or laziness or lack of imagination to make the radical changes necessary, that we have already passed Earth’s tipping point and life as we have known it is over.

One would think this heat wave, as well as the other climate catastrophes that we’ve been witnessing in recent years — droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires — would be a wake up call to our leaders, but sadly the political conversation in this election year has, if anything, turned even more toward rhetoric bolstering the status quo of our fossil fuel economy. This fact is sad, though not surprising since, as we are well aware, the political process is fueled by corporate interests. More and more, the government has no stake in leading us toward a viable future, but rather in simply amassing wealth for the wealthy. (A situation, I might add, which could be rectified if The People demand the passage of the Constitutional Amendment that has recently been introduced which states that corporations are not people.)

So if things are so dire, why in the world did my dream depict an explosion of butterflies resulting from global warming?

Over the last twenty years I have worked with my dreams and I have found them to be an extraordinary source of wisdom. They have often, in fact, provided me with information that has changed my life. Dreams, like mythology, use the language of symbol, and if we want to understand what they are trying to say to us we have to step out of our literalistic mindset. This dream that I had was not saying that there will be a literal explosion of butterflies upon the planet due to global warming. (In fact, it is far more likely that butterfly populations will plummet.) But the Butterfly as an archetypal symbol is one of the most potent symbols imaginable for radical transformation.

David Korten, in his book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, refers to the work of biologist Elisabet Sahtouris who explored the metamorphosis that the monarch caterpillar undergoes in becoming a butterfly. Korten writes:

The caterpillar is a voracious consumer that devotes its life to gorging itself on nature’s bounty. When it has had its fill, it fastens itself to a convenient twig and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Once snug inside, it undergoes a crisis as the structures of its cellular tissue begin to dissolve into an organic soup.

Yet guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, initially independent multicellular structures that begin to give form to the organs of a new creature. Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillars’ still intact immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders.

The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a cooperative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibilities, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on Earth, serves the regeneration of life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine. [p. 74-75]

I believe this is what the dream was wanting to convey: that global warming is bringing a transformation upon the planet just as radical as that of the caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. The prevailing ego paradigm (Caterpillar) that currently governs the human world and which asserts a distorted understanding of “self-interest” is dissolving, and a new consciousness of oneness, of unity with the Earth, with all of Life (Butterfly) is emerging. It can be no other way, because once eco-systems begin to collapse the illusion that any of us are distinct individuals separate from the rest of the web of life collapses as well.

The way I see it though, once this new consciousness emerges, possibilities will present themselves that we are, at this point, unable to imagine. I believe that, like the caterpillar, we have encoded into us a destiny quite extraordinary that will only come into being when the old self dies.

As extreme as the climate change happening on the planet may be, there is an equally extreme shift happening within the climate of the human mind and the consciousness through which we perceive ourselves and the world. The two climate changes are not distinct from one another. They are intricately intertwined, and one of the most potent ways each of us can contribute to the transformation on Earth is to attend to the transformation within, surrendering our ego attachments, releasing our us/them ways of thinking, and trusting that there are far greater forces at work here than just the human will, forces which are helping to birth a new reality on this planet.

 

Crossing the Sea

by

Which shore do you see yourself on?

Several years ago an artist friend of mine was looking across a field and suddenly the field appeared to him as a red sea. Bo sensed the vision was intended for me, so he painted a water color wash of what he had seen and gave it to me.

When I contemplated the painting, the sea looked like an enormous, unsurmountable obstacle, as the Red Sea must have appeared to the Hebrews in the mythic story of the Exodus. Fleeing Pharaoh’s army, horses and chariots bearing down on them, the Hebrews’ situation appeared absolutely hopeless.

One day as I meditated on the painting, something extraordinary happened. I saw the sea as something that was behind me. I was on the other side of it, looking back. I had left behind the life of bondage. I was in the land of freedom.

What I experienced in that moment was a quantum leap of perception, and I realized how, when one’s perception changes, so does one’s inner reality.Continue Reading