Day by day we find ourselves in the dance of relationship, even if we live in solitude. Relationship to the broom handle as my hands curl along its length, not mechanically, but as living invitation to work together a while; even dance together. Relationship to the dust that is the occasion for our dance. I am in relationship to the known as it rises before me. I am also in relationship to the “dark”—and to the unknown parts of my own self—in ways that I cannot know. This dance—when I am awake to it—is just the conscious level of the dance of “interbeing,” as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. The relationship we acknowledge outwardly is the reflection of an even more profound relationship; an interpenetrating reality. Nothing and no one even exists by virtue of, or as, its own self, its own separate individuality. Every thing is an individualized expression or appearance of what is in truth not individual at all, but an interbeing; everything participates in what expresses as anything. In my unconsciousness of that, everything becomes the hidden side of my own being. Our impulse to prayer is also part of our dance of relationship—an instinctive recognition of our interdependency.
This poem must have been half of a dialogue I was having with myself at the time, living alone after six years of intensive Rinzai zen training. The poem addressed the side of me that may have still fancied “enlightenment” to be a heroic personal achievement, rather than the fruiting of a deepening relationship to existence. But now as I entered more into my own simple rhythms of living—what I described elsewhere at the time as “the miracle of self finding its harmony with the elements”—I could relax into a growing faith in reciprocity, and offer that simple prayer as an affirmation that the natural order of things as they are—not my “ability” to “penetrate” it—was the mysterious dharma and the great support of being.
It is very easy to develop a spiritual materialism of accomplishment or mastery—for the ego, ironically, to expect to take charge of its own dismantling as its final triumph; to master all the dark and emerge as light. Because we have so many practices and teachings we can call on, both to deepen and to expand awareness, and even to loosen and to melt the boundaries of the self, it is easy to attach to the notion that our practice and our enlightenment consist of learning to accomplish something, of mastering some kind of ultimate vision or ultimate skill. But our practice is simply our moment of availability to what is always unconditioned and unknown—our moment of availability to interbeing.
Though there are truly many yogic or psychic skills that one may master, and an infinite fund of gnostic information, neither skills nor information are the essential practice. And any realization or mastery that “I” accomplish must necessarily stay on the outside. A microscope can heighten our capacity to see into a cell, but we will still only know the cell from the outside. My mastery will always remain a mastery of outsides, of separateness, until the self is completely surrendered, along with the need to know or not know. Because that which knows is not “me.” The ego’s old paradigm of knowing is forever surrendered. Realization is not crime scene investigation, nor forensics; the need to shine a light in every last corner. It is a coming home. The eyes are now content with their own light. If we are at home, then our hidden wealth is just as much ours as the wealth that is revealed. It is all the real body of our being. And it may be expressed as simple prayer.
There is a dynamic and paradoxical balance at play between our wholeness and our partiality; between our authority and our dependency; between our capacity and our surrender. We may disastrously distort our true nature if we fixate on one side of that divine balance and exclude the other. The languaging of different spiritual systems may often seem to favor or emphasize one side of that equation. But if we look more carefully—and if it is a true and whole system—we will see the other side being fully acknowledged as well. The saint may swear her complete surrender to and dependence on God, and yet will show herself to be an individual of great personal authority, autonomy, and presence. The sage may recognize a self that is coequal and not less than all of creation, yet demonstrate an absolute humility and surrender in the face of all things.
Perhaps a more humanly functional definition of mastery would be the growing integration and grace with which we’re able to dance along that boundary line of our capacity and our surrender; of our understanding and our ignorance; and of the willingness to take responsibility and the understanding that we do nothing. Hence, if I were to see you disowning your own capacity, or somehow disowning or projecting your own divine nature far from yourself, I might lovingly call your attention to that. The same, on the other hand, if I were to see you identifying with a grandiose notion that separated you from the genuine gifts to be found in your own simplicity, interdependence, and emptiness. I would hope that I could do the same for myself; but I would just as likely need your help with that.
Our externalized popular religious tradition in the West, imagining the greatest distance between the self and the divine, has taught us that prayer is essential, even if carried on in the most rote and superficial sense; whereas meditation has become unknown to it, and even suspect. These days, because of the Eastern influence, meditation is better understood and has taken a considerable foothold in our culture among a generation that may understandably feel a bit confused, or even squeamish, about prayer. At the entry level, meditation and prayer may appear to be two different windows onto the unknown. It may appear that the many techniques of meditation speak to the development of our own capacity or wholeness, while prayer may be associated with dependency, or devotion—genuine or superficial—to something outside ourselves. But, at deeper levels of practice and absorption, the distinction is not so clear. True meditation requires true devotion and surrender, and true prayer requires true presence. And both together call on us to resume and embrace our true identity, neither childishly dependent or personal, nor adolescently independent or impersonal, but truly engaged and intimate.
We are spiritually nourished by—and exist by virtue of—the mysterious dialectic of the personal and the impersonal, which together can embrace the richness of reality. To cling only to an image of personal separateness, and of the form, or otherness, of a God, is to withhold our true communion with, or our release into, the effulgent and infinite emptiness of Being, which is of conceptless dimension. Equally, to adhere to a notion of reality as impersonal and empty is to amputate, or to deny ourselves surrender into, the rich dimension of the Personal, of the communion of awake, loving intelligence with awake, loving intelligence, which is also beyond concept or limiting idea. Yes, I am saying that the personal is a dimension of consciousness itself, whose significance deepens as consciousness deepens. Just as consciousness is not an artifact of the brain, personalness is not an artifact of being human. It is, along with the impersonal, part of the unfolding intimacy of Being.
In one of the best known texts of mystical Christianity, The Cloud of Unknowing, the author states that the highest form of prayer is what he calls “naked intent upon God.” This means that we come before the unknown naked of all agenda, naked of all projections, and naked of all thought and imagery, and make ourselves—our souls—simply open and available to that which our mind cannot possibly wrap around. At this point all formalistic prayer, and even all formalistic meditation, come together and release in a profound state of surrendered openness, empty of all distinction and separation. All prayerful images or ideas of God are dropped, so it becomes a prayer of emptiness. But in our absolute availability, all presumption of a separate sufficiency, impersonalness, or independence is also dropped. So it becomes a meditation of absolute relationship or reciprocity. The little heart and the big heart, the little mind and the big mind, achieve not “knowing” but congruence. The fragrant plant that arises from the heart is allowed—without being named—to take root in its true soil.
Life is reciprocity by nature. Divinity is reciprocity by nature. God is not an island of absoluteness. When there is one, there is two. When there is lover, there is beloved. Form and emptiness never exist singly. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost co-arise. This is the very model of intimacy and reciprocity. In Tibetan Buddhism it is said that the Mother Light of Original Being awakens within the individual practitioner as the Child Light, which now recognizes its mother and is one with her. True prayer, then, might be said to be a surrender to reciprocity, to the reciprocal aspect of our own divine nature. It is a conscious and heartfelt willingness to open reciprocity between the visible and the invisible world; or, we might even say, between the visible and the invisible sides of the self. Here the self is understood, as in the Taoist understanding, not as a solid separate reality, but as the reified image of the meeting place of the in-breath and the out-breath—the wind of the spirit—formative and ever transforming, the very essence and expression of reciprocity, which is the Tao in manifestation. Because this reciprocity is fundamentally true, there is no mastery, whether intellectual, yogic, or physical, apart from reciprocity. Reciprocity is the context for our own mastery. No matter how much mastery I gain, if I’ve not learned the principle of reciprocity, I’m out on a limb.
When I wrote this poem many years ago, its images were literal. I was living in my little cabin and I was indeed dependent on the water I carried every day. For my warmth I was dependent daily on the graciousness of fire. Fire sparks. We can say it is the masculine, the yang activity of the universe. Water yields and flows. We can say it is the feminine, or the yin activity. This balance of yin and yang is the natural expression of the Tao, the Way of the house being in order because it is true to its own nature. This dance of reciprocity is engaged throughout the creative play of nature, and from here all the way up to the highest angelic orders. “Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” asks Rilke. For that matter, will fire hear me? Will water hear me? Only if I address them directly and truly from a mind of true reciprocity. Offer jade to She who dwells as water. Offer chocolate to Old Man Fire. The rational mind balks. But why not? Everything is an offering and a blessing. Everything is a request and a prayer. Here the poet surrenders the illusion of mastery, the obligation of mastery, and simply re-engages the natural reciprocity of things; the true prayer. The true home.
The prayer spoken in this poem is not the deep, contemplative prayer of naked intention that we referred to above. It is just an everyday prayer or invocation. But its spirit is one of simplicity and trust. Of relinquishment. It is the nature of the mind to “master all the dark.” It is the nature of the heart to trust in the natural reciprocity of being.