PREFACE

This book is first and foremost a book of poetry. By poetry I mean that play—that idiosyncratic dance—with what is fundamentally inexpressible, but which leaves us mysteriously revived and encouraged about the uncertain prospects for our existence here, for it gives air to the wild part of the soul, which is itself poetry, and which may be otherwise suffocating with the presumed literalness of our condition.

The book began as an evening presentation a few years ago, in which I gathered together several poems as the basis for a dharma talk. These grew into a small selection of poems entitled Not by Knowing, which in turn grew into this book. As I set out to write a commentary for each poem, I would sometimes find myself writing instead a commentary for a poem not yet in the collection. And so this book guided me in its growth, and it has been a pleasurable friendship.

The particular poems gathered here have been borrowed, or conscripted, from many periods of my writing, expressly to be offered as a sacrifice to the greater whole that this book is intended to be. Ultimately, it emerged for me as one long poem utilizing both prose and poetry. It is not interested in philosophy as such; but when it becomes philosophical, or even academic in places, it is only intended to be in service to the greater poem. This is a multi-course dinner. There is food here for the intellectual mind; there is food here for the poetic mind; there is food here for no mind. Thus, though some commentaries are dense and some are light, there is some dialogue and, I hope, fresh air blowing between them. No commentary stands entirely alone, just as one side of a paradox is deceptive if it stands alone. They are meant to carry weight for one another.

A poem is like one half of a torn treasure map, meant to be completed in the reader’s mind. There is no need to shortchange that relationship. I recommend that you approach the poems first and take some time to make their acquaintance on their own terms—or on your own terms. Then you will have something of your own authority, and your own space of mystery, to bring to the commentary, which, after all, is only the author’s half of the dialogue. When you do arrive at a commentary, I hope you will be able to experience it as an extension of that same jagged line, that mysterious half of the treasure map; one that adds new clues and new value to the complex (or deceptively simple) code that speaks through the poem. When you do return to the poem again—and I hope you will—it may echo that much more.

The poems and commentaries are deliberately sequenced, and so, as parts of a greater poem, they are intended, and may most profitably be read, in the presented order; especially since some of the later commentaries make references, or repeat ideas or phrases without explanation, in allusion to earlier commentaries. (That being said, I will not be surprised to see people turning to chapters randomly, by inclination, or even opening the book blindly in the fashion of an oracle.) The poems are ultimately proclamations of “good news.” As such, they are basically the same good news. The commentaries wish to be poetic extensions or play upon that same good news. And, as each commentary arose as the spontaneous response to its poem, the news frequently repeats and overlaps.

There is something wanting to be conveyed here. It is conveyed directly, in part, I hope, through the use of words spoken with some clarity. It is conveyed indirectly, in part, in the integrated whole or the overall impression made by the book. There is a repetitive theme running through all the poems and commentaries, and I hope they will each lend support to one another; although some may go down easy and some will take more work and slow digestion, your mind needn’t struggle too long with one that remains less approachable. Just as with a crossword puzzle, you only linger so long on one word until you allow other words to help fill in the gaps and make the earlier ideas more clear. Or, on the other hand, you might feel free to take the time to walk with me slowly up the twisting mountain trail of some of the steeper commentaries, and not be discouraged by the occasional thicket, the narrow rock ledge, the need to slow down and assess the landscape, one sentence at a time, as the author must have done, lingering or rerouting as needed, not glancing by but giving the terrain time to be assimilated, time to do its work on us. Either way, a whole may begin to assemble itself, perhaps even subliminally. I’d like that.

I first encountered zen at the age of sixteen and began a dedicated zen practice at eighteen. That was in 1965. So the language in this book largely reflects a lifetime engaged with Buddhism; and the book did, after all, sprout from an evening of Buddhist teaching. My own nature naturally tends to the subtlest teachings found in the Chinese zen and Tibetan dzogchen traditions. Given their depth and directness of insight, their precise and unadorned phenomenological languaging, their spontaneous embodiment, and their ability and willingness to point beyond themselves, it is easy for me to embrace these teachings as the most clear, true, and liberating articulation available of the nature of reality.

Yet that itself can prove a Buddhist occupational hazard, or blind spot. For like any language, like any teaching, it too can plant a subtle or separative mythology or fixity in our minds, the very opposite of what is intended. Even its very subtleness or simplicity can be turned into a prejudicial structure of thought or point of view that suggests: This is how to speak of reality. While, in fact, no language has a corner on reality. A seemingly more relativistic, dualistic, or overtly mythic language may in fact have the same truth value or functional value when lived in its immediacy. The subtle teaching is to be had only in the living out of any language—and the living out beyond the language—whatever the tradition. Otherwise, we can miss the subtlety of truth to be found in any tradition or any language beyond our own.

So Buddhist teaching understands that language itself is not the truth. Precision itself is not the truth. Clarity itself is not the truth. Buddhism itself is not the truth. Precision and clarity must be tempered with paradox, poetry, imprecision, contradiction, and silence—if we are to make a complete offering of ourselves into the true Unknowing. I would dare say that all attempts throughout all spiritual traditions to portray or embody the undefinable truth, however lofty or subtle the language, inevitably add up to no more and no less than: Poetry. The distance between the unnamable Real and its expression as all that we experience is poetry; many poetries. As that truth has distributed itself through every possible poetry, the total Poetry of the world best adds up to that truth. And the living traditions—how we live our lives or practice our spirituality—are embodied poetry. Whatever our own acquired or innate poetic sense, there may still be another poetry needed to do full poetic justice to the way things are, or to complete our own spirit song. (I explore all this more fully in the commentary to the poem “When the Poet’s Eyes.”)

Each poetry may take us very deep indeed into its own integrity. And yet it may be, as my friend Albert LaChance has said, that “One cannot hope to be spiritually literate simply by knowing one of the languages of the Divine.” Every language—Chinese, Yiddish, Aramaic, Mayan, or !Kung—offers its own wisdom, has its own unique genius for interpreting and revealing the subtleties of experience (which is why the loss of any language is the loss of a great human resource gained over millennia). So our languages of the spirit also need one another if we are not to remain stuck within our own self-centered and presumptuous “wisdom-domains,” as if any other language could negate our own rather than enrich it. We needn’t fear to keep all our language windows open to that undefinable and unownable reality that Buddhists may refer to as prajnaparamita. Or, as Thich Nhat Hanh might say, my Buddhism is made up entirely of non-Buddhism. So this book is a bit of a spiritual mongrel, not concerned with pedigree, Buddhist or otherwise. No one poetry is meant to be deified. The more the book expanded, the more freely it reflected the cross-pollinating influences and contradictory poetries in my own life.

The most recent of the many gifts of cross-pollination have come to me through the teachings of Martín Prechtel, Mayan shaman, praise-singer, storyteller, world teacher, and plumed serpent of cultural deconstruction and renewal; whose delicious pollen, carrying the DNA of the most ancient of trees, slowly drifted northward along hazy moonlit paths until called out to by my own DNA, waiting to complete the spirit song in my own bones; and whose delicious and life-giving impact in my life settled over everything like dust after a volcanic explosion. In its wake, the ecstasy of being and the grief of the world have taken one step more into the living embrace that upholds all life.

As this book began sprouting soon after I had completed four years of study with Martín, that dust is evident in this writing, gradually seeping through the cracks or sometimes full-blown. At first inspection, the influence of my studies with Martín on the greater contents of this book are minimal, as the book arises from older and deeper auto-biographical, experiential, and intellectual bedrock. But their influence on the one writing the book was substantial. Though the meat of it has been simmering a long time, the final soup is differently flavored than it would have been five years earlier. And so, ironically and fittingly, this roughly “Buddhist” poem serves also as a marker in my life of this special period of cross-pollination.

Martín’s voice wells from the oceanic depth of indigenous understanding and practice, of which I can begin to appreciate only the surface currents, growing up as we all have within the machinery of a civilization that has been distancing itself from that voice for thousands of years. But it begins to add a resonant dimension to my own understanding (and hopefully to my life). Perhaps it is fairest to say that each new voice and point of view at least makes us more aware of what we routinely miss, and can no longer afford not to include. Thus I wish to clearly acknowledge my debt to Martín in this preface; and to briefly encapsulate here the growing synthesis in my awareness that allowed Martín’s profound indigenous perspective to imbue and enrich my (albeit already mongrel) Buddhist perspective. But at no point herein am I presuming to speak for Martín, who is a unique voice, and whose next word always deliciously pulls the rug out from under my own limited understanding. How it displays itself in the book is subject to all my own limitations, but I pray Martín won’t altogether reject the bastard.

One widening of perspective I received from Martín is that Buddhist teaching, for all of its subtlety and universality, is also, on one level, an Indo-European medicine for a particularly Indo-European malaise: the sundering of being and non-being, is and isn’t, that is built into our very languaging. It is a poetry to cure a poetry. But there are also indigenous poetries in which the metaphors of language leave no stark dualities, but only multiple avenues of relationship and participation. The divine is neither a singularity nor a trinity, but a family. We are at home. And if we learn to live a “family life” in a cosmos in which everything is alive, and celebrate and honor the vertically and horizontally interconnected landscape and language of home, it is hardly a sign of a naive ontology, but of a deeply intact and integrative poetic relationship to the underlying truth.

Thus, in this understanding, our human existence, midst all the travails and traumas of worldly life, is a remembrance and celebration of origins; and a dance of mutuality in which all our human endeavors, our economics and our art, the very eloquence of our soul in its capacity for praise and for grief, are all seen as a continuous gift to the gods, who desire this eloquence of us even as they offer themselves to us in the form of every living thing arising in this world. The world, then, is the very embodiment of the gods, the multifarious conscious and creative energies of the divine. And our human activity is a remembrance and honoring of primary relationship. This mythically and ritually expressed relationship may be as sophisticated in its import as—and more embodied than—our rationally expressed metaphysics, theology, or quantum physics, which are equally myths of another, more objectified, level of languaging.

This mythic, or integrative, reality underlies the sacred everyday life of the human community in intact indigenous culture, Martín would argue. It is intact by virtue of the mutual dependence and mutual nurturance of that which is visible and that which is invisible, and by the mutual nourishment of moments of time—past, present, future, all expressed in our sustained relationship to the land. All human activity spirals back to the divine. In this sense there is no separate agenda, no private plan for seeking our own salvation or triumph, economic or psychological. Our individuality finds expression through our participation in the natural diversity of life, uniquely creating beauty—through our emotional, linguistic, artistic, and economic activity—as a gift to be offered back to the Invisible that sustains us (and that, ultimately, we are not other than).

Modern political/economic culture suffers the degenerative effect of the extreme opposite impulse: an alienation from our Source and from our Commonality so profound that we seek to privatize the living universe and the living earth, and even secure personal patents on God’s (!) creations just because we noticed them. At this extreme, nothing is done for the gods—the living energies of creation—for the planet or for our fellow human beings, but only for selfish aggrandizement and the most narrow definition of profit or progress. It is a spiritual depravity truly worthy of being called a “dark age,” and an apparent tragedy for the earth.

It is revealing to try to trace the source of this dysfunction historically or politically; yet, in the end, its spiritual roots go deeper. We find a most intimate metaphysical expression of intactness and its loss at the subtlest level of Buddhist thought and realization, such as in the Tibetan dzogchen teachings. Dzogchen is supremely nondualistic (we might say non-imperialistic) in that it does not call for manipulation or purification of the manifest world, but rather the recognition that it has never left its source. For all structures of consciousness, all phenomena, are not other than the clear, empty, infinite, and present “mother-ground” of being.

The identity of manifest forms and essential emptiness, or spaciousness, is the dance of mutuality and reciprocity at the most subtle and paradoxical level; and an ever-fluid expression of that which is unbounded and inexpressible, beyond the fixations of the mind. We exist as a fundamental openness, not as a fundamental closedness. To share in that realization is also the essential remembrance and celebration of our origins, and the abiding in that intactness in which the visible and the invisible, the “holy” and the “human,” also do not have separate agendas or realities, but continually nourish or mother each other so that that “third thing,” which we call life—the field of creativity and compassion—may flourish.

The fundamental “neurosis” that appears to drive our personal lives—as it drives history—is the illusion of separateness from the essential and indigenous ground of our own being. As Buddhist psychology expresses it, the manas principle, or ego-mind, arises out of the continuous field of being, and, under delusion of separateness, “reflects back” and encircles and identifies with a portion of the field, saying “this is me alone.” This is the primal ignorance that drives us—that, never having left our source, our motherground, we nevertheless imagine ourselves as threatened, isolated selves to be defended and expanded. This is the primal tribalism or nationalism, we might say, first at the level of the psyche, born of uprootedness from the living field, the living ground of our being. This psychic impulse is largely addressed and modified by the deep psychologies of myth and ritual in intact indigenous cultures. But it is mirrored and played out by a culture in which that mature intactness has been uprooted. When that spiritual or cultural uprootedness prevails, we no longer exist to bless and feed reality (hence the earth), the indigenous ground of being in which we all participate; but rather we exist to exploit and mine reality (hence the earth) of its blessings—in an imperial project of self-aggrandizement born of spiritual poverty—the poverty of not knowing who we are.

This is the imperial drama we see being played out across the globe at this time, as it has always been played out—now only in its latest incarnation. This is the impulse that compulsively mines and despoils the earth, and that freely exploits other humans and all life forms, driving our corporate, political, and commercial culture with a voracious fear, greed, and ignorance. It is the impulse that endlessly fascinates us with the most material standards and ambitions for human technological cleverness, dominance, indulgence, and immortality. As Martín has taught, the mounting debt accrued by our imperial hubris—our refusal and inability to feed the holy while taking for ourselves—combined with the suppressed and “un-metabolized” grief of one historical tragedy after another, leaving us in flight from our real experience and uprooted from the earth—leads to a vast depression, a vast hole that we seek to fill with still more addictive exploitation of others and mining of the natural world. (I explore this a bit differently in the commentary on the poem There Is No Woman.) Thus, culturally as well as personally, our spiritual healing will also be a healing of our relationship to the earth.

My study with Martín, which revealed infinite epiphanies of interconnectedness, has helped me to more fully appreciate the immensity and the spiritual depth and coherence to be found in the fertile indigenous root life of this planet and its deep human history and culture—the recollection of which dispels the childish elitism and myopic forgetfulness of the modern world. It has also helped me to notice my own subtle “Buddhist” attachment to “no-story”; whereas the vast, infinitely expressive life of this planet, its beings and its peoples, its seed and water cycles, is itself a completely intimate and congruent expression of that transcendental and embodied wisdom that is ever willing to be expressed as story. (I discuss this further in the commentary on If He Is True.)

Stories are our thread of connectedness that sew together our human experience of time and place. Just as we must remember our starry selves, our timeless and placeless selves, so too, as time and place beings, we must honor the stories that foster our indigenous humanity, preserving our time and place lives on the land in a way that allows us to recognize and serve the integrity of our organic cycles with the earth.

At the heart of the Buddhist articulation of reality is that playful paradox that, at its exquisite and most nuanced peak of understanding, outshines fixation with any possible outlook, mental structure, or story. This transcendence of fixation is not a transcendence of our engagement with phenomena, of our appreciation of everything “as it is,” nor even of our appreciation of the realm of Story. It is simply a seeing-through of the mind’s tendency to give priority to the reified and fixed meanings it attaches to the data of its experience, while it overlooks the unconditioned nature of its own bright, generous, and spontaneous intelligence—what might be called its Buddha nature. That intelligence, when not circumscribed, leaves us always open to life as it reveals itself. And stories themselves (and the earth itself) are the rich play of life; a rich source of teaching. And so any story, any languaging, any poetry may arise—as it is said of Guanyin, the goddess of compassion—taking whatever form is of service to our well-being and to our unfolding awareness.

Traditionally there are stories that carry organizing truths that give cultural support to a people’s affirmative engagement with life, with the land, with the holy, and with their origins; as well as stories that carry truths about the psyche. There is also a dimension of profound and innocent seeing in which all stories are dropped, or superseded. Story and no-story address two levels of the mind’s capacity for integration with reality. When the mind is able to develop its mature flexibility of function, our engagement with story, or myth, is able to admit a genuine and innocent intimacy with no-story, with the simple or naked present; even if this encounter is incorporated back into the story. Conversely, our engagement with no-story is able to appreciate and affirm the sacred container of story in our lives; even if that story is seen in the light of no-story.

Unless this mutually flexible and mature capacity exists—which derives from the inclusive spaciousness of wisdom and love—then either our engagement with story or our engagement with no-story can become fundamentalist—and a potential instrument of domination or violence. This occurs when our stories become traumatically and fundamentally stuck on themselves, and thus become exclusive and controlling rather than life-giving. Or when no-story itself becomes unwittingly a subtle story, which hence becomes antagonistic or suppressive of other stories.

I was deeply impressed long ago by an experience recorded by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who lived among the BaMbuti of the Ituri forest in the Congo. The BaMbuti experienced the forest as their all-protective mother; and if misfortune occurred, they assumed it was because the mother was sleeping. So on these occasions they would play upon the sacred molima, a didgeridoo-type instrument that was meant to awaken the forest. This was the province of the men. The molima was kept in hiding and was taboo to women and children, who had to stay in their huts while it was being played. Turnbull faithfully noted all of this down.

But one morning he was awakened by the sound of the molima all through the village, along with the raucous cries and laughter of women and children. He looked outside and found them dancing playfully with the molima, making sweet music to the forest. This story had not been stuck on itself. The taboo had been part of a play. The relationship to mother-being, to the affirmation of life, was freely in the hands of the feminine and of the child after all.

It is, however, easy for our human minds to be seduced, and for our human hearts to be traumatized, out of the realm of our original and vital affirmation of life and into the realm of beliefs, doctrines, and identities; out of our native fluidity and permeability to life, and into fixation with concepts. This births the gap in our being that ultimately leads to and maintains violence, even if by neglect or default. But beyond our attachment to story or no-story, beyond our attachment to duality or nonduality, there is a natural and spontaneous way in which life simply expresses and affirms itself in us, as in a baby, which has nothing to do with the structures of belief. And it calls us back to itself whether we are sitting alone in a cave or dancing the sacred molima in the heart of the village.

I believe it is this aware innocence and spontaneity, naturally inclusive and compassionate without fixation, that is also the essential and functional teaching of Buddhism. It allows us to experience ourselves in wholeness as no other than the wholeness of what already and simply is. And this aware innocence lies not only in a detached knowing, but also in our acts of participation, prayer, and offerings that honor the mystery of the holy that feeds our lives, and in all our beautiful engagement with form. Thus, what I would call from the Buddhist standpoint “the fourth turning of the wheel”—a turning that, like the others, does not reject the earlier turnings, but that both includes and is implied in them—simply brings us back to “life” itself: that theater of love, of appearance and disappearance, that arises eternally and ignorantly from the flapping of the paired visible and invisible wings of the butterfly; an aspect of what Mayan spirituality, as I understand it from Martín, might call “the butterfly house.”

The butterfly house is a big house. As big as the heart and the lungs, and as big as prajnaparamita itself. Hence there is in these writings a deliberate shifting and weaving of language that allows many voices to be heard and to invoke an interpenetrating resonance: the nontheistic and the theistic, the poly and the mono, the masculine and the feminine, the infinite and the foreground, the personal and the impersonal, the quasi-dual and the quasi-nondual (quasi because there’s no such thing as either one), embodying each language wholeheartedly in the moment, but ultimately pointing to, and inviting surrender into, the simple awakeness, the living poetry and the delicious truth beyond the play and fixation of language and concepts. The Buddha, the gods, the Goddess, the Tao, Freud, quantum reality, the Green Man, the Holy Trinity, and the Fab Four are on good speaking terms with one another. All are the resonant bell of prajnaparamita. Reality is not precious. It welcomes contradiction. The absolute has nothing to fear from any relative engagement or expression. And the ordinary has nothing to fear from its own permeability to the Unknown. This is the interpenetrating dharma of freedom.

Dharma is a Sanskrit word with many meanings and shades of meanings. In Buddhism it is best known as referring to the essential truth of things, as expounded in the Buddhist teachings. So Buddha preached the dharma; but, it is said, so do rocks and stones, rivers and trees, skunks and dragonflies. I had several decades of poems waiting to be published, but somehow this book (this poem) happened instead. I can only say that everything written herein is an expression of my own personal practice and direct experience. It is my dharma song to you, distilled from my presently sixty-five years. It took me by surprise. It fed me on the way out. I hope that it will feed you.

JANUARY 2012