Colin Dodgson
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Hi Glen, I appreciate your idea of threads of lineage combining into a rope. That hadn’t occurred to me – that lineage ins’t just about our individual lines of connection, but what happens collectively when many of our threads form something greater together. I like image of the strength of rope. Perhaps also the intricate patterns of webs, lace, or tapestries? Thank you for the inspiration!
Clif, what an interesting, wonderful collection of threads in your lineage! I particularly appreciate your point about claiming lineage being a conscious decision, often with risk and so requiring courage. That seems to me to align with seeing and accepting things as they are, including yourself, and embracing the whole of yourself with loving kindness. Thank you!
Hi Ankur, I think your pearl string analogy is wonderful – it captures the idea of being held in an unseen series of connections so well. This image is very memorable, thank you.
Hi Melanie, your inclusion of a picture of your childhood self is a wonderful idea. It seems like a great way to connect with the wide open heart you still have – a lovely way to develop loving kindness toward yourself.
Hi Mary, I love the idea of celebrating your grandmother with a statue, and even better with pie – that says so much. Now I picture my garden adorned with statues of my favorite people…
I heard Susan’s suggestion for sources of lineage a few years ago: to seek the blessings of those who have inspired, led, or taught me, or have trodden some part of my path before me.
I include my ancestors, teachers whose influence shaped me, then the writers, creators, growers, and others whose examples I try to follow. The ancestor and teacher threads overlap quite a bit, as so many of my extended family were teachers – my dad, aunts and uncles, grandparents and forebears beyond.
Somewhere along the way, I also absorbed the idea of a special category of respect for spiritual teachers. Susan talked about respect and gratitude expressed as wishes for the well-being of one’s own teachers. That felt very appropriate to me, so I made it part of my practice too.
However, somehow it never clicked for me until this discussion came up in the course, that behind Susan’s teaching is this unbroken chain of transmission from teacher to student reaching all the way back to Buddha. Now I begin to realize the significance of that connection, and it arrives with a weight I did not expect.
It feels like I have been given a jewel, and just began to understand its value – what it represents. Now I sense lineage both as a gift of connection and authenticity, and as a responsibility to become ready to pass the jewel along in turn.
Hi Rosie, I really enjoyed reading your essay – nodding my head throughout. Your labyrinth metaphor feels very apt for this journey, very well expressed. It never seems clear where you are or where you will be next until you are there. The burning bush comment reminded me of the Gandhi quote along the lines of: if you can’t see God in the next person you meet, you will not find him anywhere. Also, I appreciate your comment that “dead is dead” didn’t mean “nothing matters” for you. I felt the same way when I was closer to a nihilistic view, and I still don’t see meaning and morality as inherent only in eternalist views. I feel we are capable of realizing them whatever we think about continuity. Thank you!
Hi Stina, I smile picturing your young self asking those difficult questions. I think the skeptic’s mind is one of the strongest tools a truth-seeker has. Keep it sharp!
Hi Natalie, I can appreciate what you say about fear and confusion without a solid religious framework. I think that gets to the difficulty around atheist versus agnostic positions. How can you be sure those cultural messages around the afterlife are wrong? How can you know there really is no God? Agnosticism seems like the only position that’s reasonable until your own experience gives you the answers you need – definitely an intriguing adventure!
Like many others, I accepted the christian beliefs of those around me without question as a small child. I felt following the “rules” was how to be a good person, which would lead to a good afterlife, and the approval of my church community was part of feeling on the right track.
Around age 11, something changed in my perception, quite suddenly. I lost any sense of connection to God as an invisible, all-powerful personage who was concerned with individual wants.
Occasionally, the question “Do you believe in God?” would come up. For a short time in my early teens I would answer “No.” I may have been closer to nihilistic thinking then than at any other time, but I didn’t really accept the binary choice, never thought everything is meaningless. I always felt nothing spiritual was disprovable any more than it was provable, and I couldn’t discount so many other people’s spiritual experiences even if I didn’t see the same things.
I came to think of God as more of an underlying force animating some aspect of physical reality that we identify as spiritual, and my answer evolved to, “Yes I do believe in God, but my conception of what God is may be a little different.”
Eventually my thinking embraced a lot of possibility and nuance, but always looked for the underlying foundation: Whatever is true for humans has to be true for all beings; it has to be the common thread underlying all human belief systems; it has to accommodate what is plainly observable, that is, scientific and empirical evidence.
I found my own personal pre-buddhist “middle way” of sorts, arriving at a place between the eternalist and nihilist poles, but distinct from both. Feeling that whatever is true about aspects of ourselves that persist after death must have a mechanism to support it, just as there is for every other thing that happens. Things appear as magical, mystical, woowoo, when we don’t understand the mechanism, or have no way to perceive their workings. But if a thing happens outside the realm of imagination, there has to be a mechanism. If there’s a mechanism, it’s there whether I perceive it or not.
Now I’m finding the name “middle way” may be misleading, at least to me: the way doesn’t appear to just illuminate a position between or above the two poles, allowing their presence without following either, but instead seems to lead to a place (a state?) beyond conceptualization, where all ideas are contained, but their meanings are of no significance.
And the journey continues, with more questions; my ideas form themselves clumsily, I struggle with articulating them.
May I come to see more clearly what is true than I do now, and put what I learn to good use.
Hi Virginia,
I came across the saying “Letting go is freedom” recently, and find it fits in both material and spiritual senses. Very helpful as I contemplate aging, as you suggest. I also appreciate your point about comfort. I think the promises of eternalist traditions offer a great deal of comfort for people who follow the “rules,” but often seem to require abandoning any questioning of those rules. My early path was quite similar to yours, and once I found my questions had no answers that made sense to me, the comfort evaporated.
Thank you!
Hi Mike, and Vy,
Your point about humor feels very important, and an easy thing to lose when we are uncomfortable. Allowing ourselves to not know everything also feels essential. That was a barrier for me even considering the teaching path in the past. After all, I barely know anything at all! But now I see I may know just enough, and knowing everything is not the goal. Thank you.
Hi Octavio,
I appreciate the way you have expressed your tools of discovery, and a few prompt me to think of self-awareness as an important ingredient for us: The ability to reflect and recognize when our own backgrounds and approaches might influence us, and we need to allow our students more space for their own discovery.
Virginia, I think your point about asking questions is very important. Perhaps as teachers we can use our questions to guide understanding – knowing which questions to ask to prompt reflection. Thanks for making me think about that!
The thing we’re pursuing is like buried treasure. It’s an innate part of ourselves, this capacity to be fully awake; it’s “in there” as certainly as our pulses and our personalities.
Helping someone else to discover this aspect of themselves might begin with invitation. Something like showing that a map to the buried treasure is available to them, as it is to everyone. Of course, it cannot be a physical map with an ‘x’ marking the place to dig. Rather we can provide them with a way to start in the right direction, with the instruction, which offers a container; the boundaries of the path.
We can offer landmarks, making clear what certain aspects of the journey might look and feel like, or signs to be aware of, like the misconceptions that can lead them astray.
We can give them guidance to see for themselves when they may be straying from the path, with the assurance that they can always return to it. Being sensitive to where they are requires listening intently to what they ask and have to say about their experience. Respecting that each person’s journey may be different calls for hearing what they mean, rather than what we expect to hear, or know ourselves.
Also, we can encourage them along their journey. Not by cheerleading, but by living example, and by helping them recognize glimpses of the inner nature we’re working toward revealing. We can show that even though their progress and discovery is their own, we are on the journey together.
