Finding Shambhala

Shambhala, I have a hard time with you. Again and again, my home, the West misinterprets, misappropriates, capitalizes on you, and this makes me uncomfortable. I do not understand you, dear Shambhala, though I have heard your story.

According to certain Buddhist teachings there is a mythical kingdom, an enlightened society called Shambhala somewhere near Tibet. In 1984, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa used the name Shambhala for a book: Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.

It's a secular book focusing more on the lifestyle of what Trungpa calls warriorship more than any spirituality, though it draws on many principles of meditation and spirituality from religious practices across the world.

I first came across this book a few years ago. I was at a Power of Hope camp, I think my first year as a full-staff volunteer. One of the youth had come across a copy in the small library of Tierra Learning Center, or someone let him borrow it, I don't know. I learned a story that says in a time of darkness in the world the Kingdom of Shambhala will walk the world. These Shambhala warriors essentially will be harbingers of peace and goodness stepping out and teaching that there is another path. It's an allegory because these "warriors" aren't some mythical people streaming out of a kingdom, but the angels, the ordinary people who walk among us awakening to their own potential.

At some point in the last few months I acquired a copy of this little book. I started carrying it with me, reading a page here, a paragraph there, even practicing some of the teachings.

The end of this quarter has made me feel haggard despite my preference for Wilson Library on campus. But then I have started to take steps back and examine my life through this lens of warriorship.

I would find myself asking, where are my thoughts right now? What am I feeling? And I've been learning to appreciate these thoughts for what they are: thoughts. Stress is not a bad thing or a good thing. It's a natural reaction to our environment and thoughts.

My life has been, is stressful. I spread myself pretty thin sometimes being involved and active in my commUnities on multiple levels. To some friends, it's exhausting even thinking about all the stuff I do, let alone actually doing it (and doing it well). Add on top of this the fact that I'd been pursuing a relationship with a gentleman of my acquaintance and grown rather fond of his company, but when we finally “talked” we agreed that we had to be friends first. Which is to say he told me it isn't going to happen like that and though I will admit I cried and I'm still somewhat disappointed and hurt, I respect him enough to recognize I will not change his mind by forcing him to like me. And so moving forward as friends first.

Leading two clubs, working on campus, classes, living on my own, boys, the laundry list never ends and I'm sure for some people it's longer and for others it's shorter but no less difficult. I bring this up not to compare, but to contextualize that for my circumstances I have every reason to feel stressed and often do, but the key here is that I'm learning to question whether or not such stress should stop me from being happy.

It's a lesson I've been learning for years, and I think we're all learning it every day.

And since I've started this practice of warriorship, I've noticed a kind of vulnerability in myself that has come with this learning. Having the luxury of time to myself the last few weeks, I've been working on my meditation and my heART work (a topic I will post about tomorrow) and I've found myself prone to both random fits of sadness and random fits of joy, often at the same time. A certain song will come on or I will read a sentence in my book and as I continue in what I am doing, I will notice I'm crying. I then take a moment to myself and I experience it.

I experience the hell out of those tears. What I've found is that yes, there's sadness. Right now especially there's a deep loneliness that has yet to find solace. But there's also joy; joy so brilliantly bright it hurts. Sometimes there's anger. Sometimes there's laughter so innocent and pure. It's overwhelming; in ways it's exhausting. It's beautiful.

And that's my gift to myself, because in letting myself experience this and in letting myself be overwhelmed, I'm accepting my strength. If that's what I can experience internally in just one short moment by myself, then imagine what kind of glory the world holds! I'm blessed to be here.

Though my language may sound preachy, my place is not necessarily to evangelize. Because as I've said before, I'm at your service. I'm sharing this experience of warriorship, of growth and learning just as much for my mental well-being in coping with this as I am to help foster similar growth within the people around me, regardless which path you take.

I think that's what Shambhala has come to mean to me. In all senses of the word it is in part practice. Practice at life. And to me at least, life is happiness.

Musicality

Music is namaste manifest, despite traditional and originary meanings, it has become accepted to represent a sentiment akin to the light in my heart recognizing and respecting the light in your heart.

Sing the song of your soul. March to the beat of your own drum. To exist and, more importantly, to create in this world is to let that musicality express itself.

Music culture is a reflection of soul culture. If a song resonates with you, you feel it. You dig it, and so feel it beneath the surface. Music is the sound that is noise with purpose with an added layer of rhythm.

And the beauty of it is that it has an organic quality. Good music flows, it comes naturally to us and good music that doesn't flow does so that it interrupts this process in such a way that that makes it natural to the process.

If we take noises to be the basic building blocks, the random nucleotides in this aural (and in many ways sub-aural) experience, then sounds are the individual genes that make the sequence and order of these noises relevant. Music then is the string of DNA that separates the sounds into the coherence necessary to make something complete and whole.

Music as the expression of the soul is not just song, but all creative acts. Emotions are the verses, chorus and refrain that make up the arias of the inner experience. To convey emotion through the arts -- whether it is contained in our traditional models of what is considered art or not -- is to unleash not only this light from within but also the self-same darkness embodied by and necessitated by that light.

But where does this light come from? What is the source of this music within us that compels us to dance and sing and write and paint and perform and sex?

In that we refer to these kind of cathartic releases as communion with God and that they were once used in the kind of ancient rites that connected us with the Earth, with the Forces of Life that we depended on for survival in a way not seen in the industrialized world of today, this light cannot be from the Self.

The Self is too preoccupied with the here, the now, the past, the future, the physicality of that eternal argument between mind and body. To react so instantly and so strongly requires the freedom of that which is unburdened by this kind of responsibility created by life.

In The Gift of Death, Derrida says that everyone "must assume their own death, that is to say, the one thing in the world that no one else can either giver or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility." Where a few pages earlier he stated that "It is from the perspective of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible."

So the Self as the projection of this mortality is responsible. And it is this selfsame mortal nature of the Self that makes its rejection a crucial step into nirvana.

While it is not able to Originate this light, in this capacity the "I" can however, help to shape the release. The creativity of the Self is in its ability to filter this expression of the Other. What the Self does is to translate the noise, give it purpose as sound and so music so it can be more readily recognized by the corresponding Self of Others. It frames it and packages it so it can be received, a different kind of Gift than the value of a Death.

There's something primal, something moving about music that occasionally catches us off guard. It reaches in when we aren't paying attention and pulls us almost into a trance-like state. It awakens us at the same time as it lulls us to sleep with its complete control over us.

Namaste.

And so we react; something internal responds and seeks to return that energy.

It's primal and messy, but powerful and beautiful and so completely natural in ways we cannot realize in our everyday lives. We dance, gyrating bodies caught in a maelstrom of sound, whipping us with all the force of a wind in the trees. We sing along, harmonizing, humming when we don’t' know the words, trapped in this Other that controls us.

This trembling seizes one at the moment of becoming a person, and the person can only become what it is in being paralyzed by the [transie], in its very singularity, by the gaze of God. Then the person sees itself seen by the gaze of another, "the absolute highest being in whose hands we are, not externally, but internally."
...
The secret of the mysterium tremendum takes over from a heterogeneous secrecy and at the same time breaks it. This rupture takes the form of either subordination by incorporation (one secret subjects or silences the other), or repression.

This reaction is the reception of that Gift as it is immutably translated to a form more readily accepted by our subconscious.

In this sense, I'm very much speaking of Music in the kind of terms one might describe more aptly as pure music. Music as the transcendental experience.

But music as we hear it is not always pure.

It is created by this Other, but reproduced and transmitted by the Self. As such, music becomes a matter of power, it becomes a tool in the duality known as power economy, the binary between those who do have authority and those who do not because it naturally comes from a place of significance.

The Last Temptation of Jack: Or comics, Buddhism and postmodern thought.

No, I'm not referring to our friend, the Hatter. This is an issue of The Invisibles, specifically Volume 1 Issue 23. Morrison never gets around to mentioning the term, but The Last Temptation of Jack is a story of a bodhisattva.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a bodhisattva is a being worthy of nirvana who forgoes the ultimate enlightenment in favor of spending their energy helping others attain enlightenment.

"‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep
To sleep, perchance to dream."

It is a sacrifice to give up nirvana, a sign of nobility and altruism not commonly seen in our culture. We admire the Buddha for his accomplishment, for achieving release from this mortal plane and the suffering that existence represents, but in the bodhisattva we find something perhaps more godly.

And if we take Derrida's view, that death is a gift only a mortal individual can be responsible for giving, then this sacrifice becomes all the more of a gift.

Nirvana: The realization of the non-existence of self, leading to cessation of all entanglement and attachment in life; the state of being released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth.

Nirvana then is the ultimate death within this frame of reference. It is a removal from everything that haunts our waking lives, every nightmare and pleasure, every sin, temptation and sordid little detail. It is release in that we let go and are detached, no longer tethered by this strangling umbilical. To give this up is to sacrifice our death, or rather control of our death and work for something bigger. It is the delay of our release of potential, like the bonds that hold together the nucleus of an atom we are far greater than our appearance.

It strikes me as being a lonely kind of existence because you stand so very singular as a bodhisattva. By nature of your continued existence, you are set apart and above from the throngs of bourgeoisie. Revered as godlike, caught between wanting to ascend and seeking the normalcy of a mundane existence, the bodhisattva is the human Superman.

It makes this existence a tragedy and a triumph, and I wonder (as I often do when confronted with these kinds of thoughts) what kind of strength it takes to live that life. It takes conviction and a strong will to choose this harder path and stick to it, for indeed it is the harder path because it is an exercise in self-torture. It is to take on the burden of the Fallen, to glimpse the beauty of heaven and turn away from the light.

The difference of course is that Lucifer in turning away gave up his responsibilities and his name, Light-bringer. To be bodhisattva then is to take up that shirked responsibility and act not for yourself but for the Others.

. . .

For a moment now I would like to return to that definition of nirvana. It describes this total enlightenment as a state of being wherein an individual experiences a realization of the non-existence of self. At first glance, this seems counter to much of the postmodern thought as I've come to understand it. Identity, the Other, and Being, what we call Heidegger's dasein, all call for and intuitively require a Self to compare and relate to.

In order to deconstruct and reduce these thoughts, to tear down and placate these impossible binaries of alterity, we must first admit that they exist. We come across a paradox of the chicken and the egg. To show a binary is false or at least created under false contexts, it must be accepted as existing, bot h states must hold true.

What I see happening in The Invisibles is a similar kind of balance. The lines are drawn but they're blurry. The binary that we see is just a simplification, it is a two dimensional illustration of a four dimensional hyperline. The realization of the non-existence of self that is nirvana then becomes not so simple. The non-existence is perhaps a simplification of the idea that the idea of self as a construct as a single necessity of existence is false. Self then is a multi-facet, multi-dimensional idea beyond what we see it as.

The self is the Self is the Other is non-existent is a byproduct of our attempts to understand and define our existence. Which sounds simple spelled out like this, but to actually put it in words would require more than just the alphabet at our disposal.

To be continued...