Afterword

Meetings in the Field

Out beyond all our ideas of right and wrong there lies a field.

I’ll meet you there.

RUMI

WE’RE LIVING AT A TIME in which the practices of both the Buddha and Shiva are spreading across the planet in an unprecedented wave of influence. Buddhism has come to the West, and the practices of dance and yoga are proliferating around the globe to a degree that has never before occurred. For the first time in history music can be heard everywhere, and the music that’s being so widely broadcast around the world is most often music that makes your body want to move. Yoga studios are appearing in every major urban center. The young at heart often find themselves at gatherings where people dance together all through the night. Buddhist groups meet regularly, intensive long retreats are routinely offered, and the dharma is finding a whole new receptive audience, appreciative of its wisdom.

The practices of traditional Buddhism, with their emphasis on focused concentration and recalibration—observing a primary object and then bringing the mind back to the object when it’s wandered—are primarily supported through the rational perspective of the left hemisphere of the brain. The path of Shiva, with its emphasis on stimulating sensation and surrendering to the current of the life force, finds itself more effortlessly at home when playing in the amorphous feeling waters of the brain’s right hemisphere. Even so, the conditions of consciousness that each seeks to reveal do not contradict each other, and both approaches to that revelation can even be viewed as supporting the other’s path of inquiry. It’s high time (no pun or implication of endorsement intended) that both meet in the field out beyond their beliefs. Buddhists, listen to your Shaivite brothers and sisters. Don’t discredit them when they talk to you of the spiritual insights that have occurred through taking cannabis. Followers of Shiva, honor the decisions that your Buddhist brothers and sisters have made on their spiritual journey. Don’t condescend to what you might view as their limitations.

One of the most helpful insights that followers of Shiva can share with their Buddhist brothers and sisters is that the posture of sitting meditation need not be stiff and still, as though you’ve been poured into a mold of a meditating Buddha statue. Even though cannabis makes it difficult not to move, sitting in meditation without cannabis need not condemn you to be frozen in your posture, like a snowman in winter, holding yourself as still as possible. Listen to Shiva’s radical notion that body, not mind, is the arena in which spiritual evolution can most powerfully occur. You do not need cannabis to awaken sensations. You can move your awareness through your entire body, over and over again, and welcome sensations back into your felt awareness. What Shiva would say to the Buddha is that awakening the body—liberating breath, sensation, and movement—is the physical foundation that supports a calm and serene mind. And it would appear that Buddhists are listening, as more and more body-oriented approaches to the sitting practices are being taught and explored.

While I don’t encourage Buddhist students that are in no way attracted to cannabis to bring it into their lives and practices, I do encourage followers of Shiva to participate in intensive Buddhist retreats, letting go of celebratory use of cannabis for days, weeks, or months. In this way, Shiva followers can undergo the purifying effects of intensive practices without any intoxicating substances. The highest celebration requires preparatory periods of purification, and the entire purpose of the intensive purification of body and mind that can occur in Buddhist retreat is to lift our spirits and bring us ever closer to the Great Wide Open, where our awakened presence starts blending with the larger world of nature.

For a Buddhist, for whom presence is the highest bliss, there can be great ecstasy in serenity. For a follower of Shiva, the opening into ecstatic states leads directly to a mind empty of thought, filled instead by the wordless presence of the visual, auditory, and tactile fields. Ultimately, we function best when the right and left hemispheres of the brain become integrated, when serenity and the ecstatic come together as one.

Sacraments, both symbolic and actual, have long had an acknowledged place in religious and spiritual practices and observances. While cannabis is clearly the sacrament of choice to catalyze Shiva’s practices, the most effective sacrament for Buddhist practice might be green tea or matcha. Both contain caffeine that will make the mind sharper as it continues to probe the mind-body continuum through focusing on the breath, but they are also rich in L-theanine, an amino acid that has a calming effect on the body. The caffeine in coffee gives some people the java-jitters, but green tea—through its combination of caffeine and L-theanine—creates a light and pleasurable hum through the body.

Buddhists, drink green tea for whenever you need to focus your mind. Followers of Shiva, take cannabis, if you like, not just for dance and yoga, but for any activity where you engage your physical body: giving and receiving bodywork; going on aerobic walks or runs (Let your run not be about how fast or far you can go, but how loose and resilient you can be in your body, how free and surrendered you can be in your breath. Let your thoughts fall away as you open into a merged awareness of sounds, vision, and body.); skiing, snowboarding, and surfing (How many young skiiers, snowboarders, and surfers don’t use cannabis?); Pilates; or whenever you’re engaging in any physical activity for the pure joy of it. Welcome cannabis for when you’re opening your voice or improvising on a musical instrument. It’s difficult to play classical music while high on cannabis, so classical musicians should stick with green tea or coffee.

One of the legitimate criticisms that Buddhists might make about the use of cannabis is that if you’re not exercising mindful awareness then it becomes all too easy to get stuck in your thoughts. But by continually remembering to let the feeling presence in every area of your body come forward and remain felt, you minimize the tendency of cannabis to lock you further inside the thinking mind. Getting high while not exploring any of the practices that have been presented in this book may help you understand yourself better; it may help you heal yourself emotionally and physically; it may make you feel far more creative and comfortable in your skin; it may help you communicate to your closest ones. Or it can lead to the kinds of blind alleys and dead ends that any addictive behavior can foster, so you need to be your own honest judge and jury about this. However, the fact that cannabis works badly for some people should not be cause to prohibit those of us for whom it works well from honoring it as a spiritual sacrament. Getting high and actively exploring the spiritual practices that cannabis can so powerfully support helps you break free from your imprisonment inside the thinking mind by helping you melt the primal contraction at the very center of your body and mind, liberate yourself from its holding pattern, and get in touch with a deeper sense of felt presence.

Where the Buddha and Shiva meet and intermingle most freely is on the playing field of embodied mindfulness. On this field Buddhists embrace the feeling presence of their body as well as the mechanisms of their mind. On this field followers of Shiva ground their ecstasy.

The mindfulness practices that have become so popular in the West direct our attention to whatever we can perceive in our sensory fields in this present moment. Sometimes, mindfulness includes awareness of the breath in addition to focusing on the passing show of sounds and sights. More rarely does it promote the awakening of feeling presence throughout the entire body. We can remain mindful of vision, sound, and body, but if we remain aware only of a body that is out of touch with its feeling life and tied up in tensions that keep us from being able to feel it, we inevitably stay stuck and compressed in the internal monologue of the mind where we’re subject to its whims, pronouncements, and beliefs. Without an awareness of the awakened body, our vision of how reality is constructed will remain skewed and incomplete.

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, the son of a printer, and I still have early memories of my father taking me down to his company on Saturday mornings when no one was there. I was free to wander among all the many machines (Look, don’t touch!) and take it all in. I remember that what always fascinated me the most about my father’s profession was the process of four-color offset printing, which was state-of-the-art back then for mass producing color images that looked convincingly “real.” Did you know that you can take any color image and separate its rich range of colors down into tiny little dots of just four colors: cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and black? Printers make four separate metal plates, one for each color, and then pass the paper consecutively through four presses, one for each plate. This is still the process that high-circulation glossy magazines like Time use to print color images.

It would be a great deal of fun to look at the paper after it had only gone through the first press. I’d look at it and see an interesting, abstract shape of color, but I couldn’t recognize it even remotely as looking anything like “reality.” Pass the paper through the second press, and hmmm . . . , that’s a little better. Pass it through the third, and while it would still look a bit dizzyingly strange, you could see how it was starting to resemble “reality.” Add the last press, and bingo! out popped a really convincing color image.

I’ve often thought back to this early childhood experience when it comes to mindfulness practice. Our four major sensory fields are vision, sound, sensation, and mind (taste and smell being, arguably, less important senses in our understanding of how reality is constructed than the other four). While we’re reasonably adept at looking and hearing and making some sense of it all with our mind, most of us, most of the time, are largely oblivious to the full range of sensations that fill our bodies from head to toe. It’s as though we rely almost solely on vision, sound, and mentation to create our understanding of how reality is constructed.

Not surprisingly, our exclusion of the feeling presence of the body skews our understanding of “reality” every bit as much as the exclusion of any one of the colors in the process of four-color offset printing results in an unsatisfactory image that doesn’t look like what we know “reality” looks like. But unlike a paper that has been exposed to only three of the colors and which we clearly identify as “unreal” in appearance, we accept the “reality” that appears to us when we exclude the feeling presence of the body. Through such an exclusion we naturally withdraw into our mind and enter into what Rumi calls the consciousness of separation: the notion that who I am is an entity named “I” that exists completely separate from everything outside of my physical body.

Ah, but if we can stimulate the feeling awareness of our entire body, and if we can then include and merge that feeling awareness with what we see and hear, then our mind (and our sense of an individual, separate self) has no choice but to start dissolving and disappearing into what Rumi calls the consciousness of union: this extraordinary yet altogether natural sense of feeling intimately merged with everything that you can perceive. Buddhists refer to this awakened condition as our fundamental nature, our natural state, or as our wide-open dimension of being, and they stress that it’s here, and here alone, that we come to peace with ourselves because it’s here, and here alone, that we contact reality as it truly exists.

By broadening your awareness to include the entire roughly elliptical field of vision, the entire field of sound (whose sources emanate from both inside and outside the body), and the feeling awareness of every cell in your body, your mind moves beyond separation and slides effortlessly into union. This going beyond the conventional (and highly claustrophobic) sense of separation is cause for great celebration, or as the Buddhists say of someone who’s taken that leap into acceptance: “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. What ecstasy! Hallelujah!”

This same practice of embodied mindfulness is as important for the Shiva yogi as for students of Buddhist dharma. If you primarily use cannabis as a sacrament to catalyze your spiritual and creative practices, there will be much of the day when you are not high and not so stimulated with sensation and movement. During those times, let the practice of embodied mindfulness ground you in the clear perception of the present moment. Because embodied mindfulness encourages as full an awareness of the awakened body and liberated breath as of the fields of vision and sound, it functions as a seamless support to your more formal practices of dance and yoga.

Embodied Mindfulness^*11

Awaken the fullness of feeling presence

that runs through your entire body.

Let yourself hear everything that’s here to be heard,

sounds both near and far.

Let yourself see everything that’s here to be seen,

in this very moment,

in your roughly elliptical visual field.

See the whole of the visual field as a unified field.

Listen to every voice in your symphony of sound.

Feel the whole of the body as a unified field of vibratory sensation.

Let yourself breathe,

and be aware of your breath.

Let your breath open

through your entire feeling body,

breath after breath.

With every breath

that you can soften your body to receive,

thought can be felt to dissolve.

Now merge your awareness of these distinct fields—

sensation, sound, and vision—

into a unified sensory experience.

Let your continued surrender to breath be the glue

that binds the fields together,

and watch what happens to your sense of self.

When your awakened awareness

of vision, sound, and relaxed body

come together as one,

riding upon the awakened breath,

thought shuts down.

The sensory fields are your allies

in the practice of embodied mindfulness

because they ground you in the present moment.

When you become simultaneously aware

of the whole of sensation,

the whole of the visual field,

the whole of the field of sounds,

a doorway opens

through the sensory world

into an awareness of expansive presence:

the Great Wide Open.

When you become aware

that you have once again

become lost in thought,

take inventory of your three major sensory fields.

Where have you lost awareness?

Have you dulled the vibratory presence of your body?

Have you blocked out sound?

Are your eyes open

but not consciously registering

what’s directly in front of you?

Has your breath become once again more constricted?

Body, vision, sound, and mind.

If you lose awareness of body, vision, or sound,

mind gets lost in thought.

If body, vision, and sound

are equally present

in their fullness,

mind becomes like a simple mirror

that reflects what’s set before it

without interpreting or projecting.

In this mirrorlike awareness,

riding on the wave of breath,

your conventional sense of “you”

disappears,

and you settle back down

into your natural state.

Whether you’re a Buddhist or a follower of Shiva, the message is the same: do your practices. The transformation you seek doesn’t occur through wishful thinking. You need to do intentional practices that melt the barriers that hold back the natural force of your personal evolution, and you need to do them regularly, as part of your daily life. Humans are capable of the greatest expressions of love and freedom as well as the worst expressions of hatred and torture. Do your practices. They shed light where there was only darkness and despair. They promote love and connection over hatred and tribalism.