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Authors: Micahel Powers
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Once we’ve garnered the courage to see the problem, it’s not yet time to act. Jackie suggests that first we be . This is the hardest part: going to that solitary place that I’d begun to discover in the deepest part of the woods beyond the 12 × 12. Some people call this place God, but others call it intuition, or the “still small voice,” or grace, or simply presence. The name doesn’t matter. It is merely a signpost for an experience we either understand directly or barely atall. For example, imagine you’d never tasted honey. I could describe “honey” for days and you still would have no real comprehension of it, but one taste would bring instant understanding. When we find a way — be it through meditation, music, prayer, your child’s eyes, a shooting star, anything — to become present, we can look at problems fearlessly and with clarity.
Jackie’s final step — do — is then as natural as drawing breath. You hand the homeless woman a sandwich; forgive no matter how you’ve been injured; join a peace study group to confront the nuclear issue with others in your community. Or take one of a thousand other actions.
As fascinating as all of this was, I resisted Jackie’s message. “But you’re a doer ,” I said. “While doctoring for thirty years, you’ve also regularly completed the Selma-Montgomery march, done the School of Americas protest in Georgia, and so much more. And soon you’ll be marching across Nevada in a protest against nuclear weapons. You’re not about sitting around contemplating.”
After a slight pause Jackie said, “Both Einstein and Jung said the same thing in different ways: the world’s problems can’t be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created.” She added that do-gooding, however outwardly noble, tends to bring the do-gooder into the blight: the same level of consciousness that creates problems like the global ecological crisis. Hence, the archetypes of the burnt-out aid or social worker, the jaded inner-city teacher, and the compromised activist. “There is someplace absolutely essential beneath the doing,” she said, “and it’s the most important part.”
“How do I find that place?” I asked.
She replied: “Have you asked the creek?”
THE WOODS ARCHED above No Name Creek, their color wrung out, browns against a pale sky. I sat, listening to the creek gurgle and murmur on its stones. An hour passed, then two. Three. The sun hadpeaked and dipped westward when I began to put something together. In twenty years of meditation and spiritual search I’ve noticed that the people who really “get it” in the sense of beautifully blending inner peace with loving action have something in common. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, or born-again pagan. They have what might be called “warrior presence.” In other words, they face larger problems just as they face their personal problems — as Einstein and Jung suggest we do — on a different level of consciousness than the one at which the problems were created. Instead of allowing the negative forces of a flattening world to flatten them , those with warrior presence maintain beauty and control in their interior space, through being fully present in the moment.
Was this what Jackie was suggesting? I’d been by the creek for four hours now, maybe five, and I felt more alone than ever. But, remarkably, I did not feel lonely. Whereas loneliness is clingy and needy, solitude — I increasingly sensed — is expansive and luminous. You can feel lonely in a 5K race with hundreds of others or even at your own surprise birthday party. This is because inside each of us is a place of absolutely no connection to others. That place is like a bottomless open well. We try to shine floodlights into the well, fill it with toxic rubbish, or board it over with activity and routine. But if we don’t befriend the well — if we’re not
Once we’ve garnered the courage to see the problem, it’s not yet time to act. Jackie suggests that first we be . This is the hardest part: going to that solitary place that I’d begun to discover in the deepest part of the woods beyond the 12 × 12. Some people call this place God, but others call it intuition, or the “still small voice,” or grace, or simply presence. The name doesn’t matter. It is merely a signpost for an experience we either understand directly or barely atall. For example, imagine you’d never tasted honey. I could describe “honey” for days and you still would have no real comprehension of it, but one taste would bring instant understanding. When we find a way — be it through meditation, music, prayer, your child’s eyes, a shooting star, anything — to become present, we can look at problems fearlessly and with clarity.
Jackie’s final step — do — is then as natural as drawing breath. You hand the homeless woman a sandwich; forgive no matter how you’ve been injured; join a peace study group to confront the nuclear issue with others in your community. Or take one of a thousand other actions.
As fascinating as all of this was, I resisted Jackie’s message. “But you’re a doer ,” I said. “While doctoring for thirty years, you’ve also regularly completed the Selma-Montgomery march, done the School of Americas protest in Georgia, and so much more. And soon you’ll be marching across Nevada in a protest against nuclear weapons. You’re not about sitting around contemplating.”
After a slight pause Jackie said, “Both Einstein and Jung said the same thing in different ways: the world’s problems can’t be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created.” She added that do-gooding, however outwardly noble, tends to bring the do-gooder into the blight: the same level of consciousness that creates problems like the global ecological crisis. Hence, the archetypes of the burnt-out aid or social worker, the jaded inner-city teacher, and the compromised activist. “There is someplace absolutely essential beneath the doing,” she said, “and it’s the most important part.”
“How do I find that place?” I asked.
She replied: “Have you asked the creek?”
THE WOODS ARCHED above No Name Creek, their color wrung out, browns against a pale sky. I sat, listening to the creek gurgle and murmur on its stones. An hour passed, then two. Three. The sun hadpeaked and dipped westward when I began to put something together. In twenty years of meditation and spiritual search I’ve noticed that the people who really “get it” in the sense of beautifully blending inner peace with loving action have something in common. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, or born-again pagan. They have what might be called “warrior presence.” In other words, they face larger problems just as they face their personal problems — as Einstein and Jung suggest we do — on a different level of consciousness than the one at which the problems were created. Instead of allowing the negative forces of a flattening world to flatten them , those with warrior presence maintain beauty and control in their interior space, through being fully present in the moment.
Was this what Jackie was suggesting? I’d been by the creek for four hours now, maybe five, and I felt more alone than ever. But, remarkably, I did not feel lonely. Whereas loneliness is clingy and needy, solitude — I increasingly sensed — is expansive and luminous. You can feel lonely in a 5K race with hundreds of others or even at your own surprise birthday party. This is because inside each of us is a place of absolutely no connection to others. That place is like a bottomless open well. We try to shine floodlights into the well, fill it with toxic rubbish, or board it over with activity and routine. But if we don’t befriend the well — if we’re not
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