This new issue of Parabola called Alone and Together, with the smashing cover, forced me to ask a basic question: Am I alone or lonely? After some thought I decided it was sometimes one and sometimes the other.

Alone can be a very rich feeling, anywhere from “Thank God I’m finally alone” when the relatives and friends have left after some celebratory event, to “At last my murmuring mind has become quiet and I am alone with myself, poised in the depth of my Being.”

Loneliness, on the other hand, brings me to pick up the phone and call those same relatives or friends. To share my life’s events and my thoughts with them and to listen to theirs warms the heart and banishes the blues.

But what, you might ask, about the elders who have few friends left in the world? For them I recommend what I call Replay. We can always think back over the time of our life to replay the events we want to reconnect with or understand better. Every moment we can clearly recall is timeless. It is always there. When we forget, it isn’t gone, but latent. Like a photo or video we put away until the next time we open the album or slip it into the player.

That thought helps me to look at my relation to those I love after they die. My mother isn’t gone from me as long as she occupies a place in my heart. Perhaps no new facet of our relationship can develop, but I don’t even know that for sure. And there are a multitude of encounters between us that I haven’t sufficiently taken in and digested.

It’s the same with my husband. Although he’s dead, there are many knots that still tie us together, created by our life in common – some of which I need to untie. When I think of the many gentle moments of communion passed over so quickly in the hurly burly of our lives with three growing children, a familiar warmth begins to rise in my heart. If I choose to take the time to remember them, I can receive them anew, like the gentle touch of his hand. Many impressions from past years, moments of love, anger, joy and anguish, are quite snarled together, but beneath the tangled surface are many threads, their colors and textures still to be discovered.

Here's the most interesting part of the exercise: Like a film can be viewed again to help us see more of what the actors intended, we can  catch the moments when we were helplessly caught up in roles we didn’t quite know how to play. And then there are the corners and edges of the moving picture to be deciphered, as well as the background. What was going on there that didn’t catch my eye the first time round? Is this, perhaps, the duty of the elders among us: to replay the past and make more sense out of it?

Ahah! A ray of hope appears in this sadly fractured and confused world. If replaying the past to make more sense of it is the function of the elders of the tribe, that’s wonderful news. As the baby boom generation peoples the world with more elders than young lions, we may have a better chance of living with less global violence. Ojala!

In a certain sense, the question mark is the most important symbol we have. It's not a word;  and like other punctuation marks, it represents an action. Punctuation marks are interesting that way; not only does each one represent something that takes place when we speak—for example, a semicolon represents a pause of a kind—they can also represent an inner action. I think we may all agree we more or less know what an exclamation point feels like inside us—yet how often do we actually see that? I'm habituated to just reading punctuation and taking it for granted.

In Spanish, punctuation marks such as question marks come both before and after the statement. The action takes place before, during, and after the statement. It reminds me of how we are; there is something here to receive, an action takes place, and it is received. it's a whole process, not just a single thing. It has three parts.

One could argue that the entire process of writing, ever since man began to scratch symbols into stones more than thirty thousand years ago, has been a process of attempting to ask the question of who we are, and record a mark to serve as an indicator—a sign post, if you will. One might wonder why we need to externalize the process and place it on objects; we are the only creature that does this. Other animals use tools, have societies that pass on traditions, and display evidence of thinking intelligence of various kinds, but none of them use symbols or make art. Certainly, none of them write.

Yet all of this action of making symbols, taken in its entirety—from the beginning of the first scratches on stones all the way down to the billions of works of literature and trillions of words mankind has written—boils down to the action of this one symbol, the question mark. it seems to me to frame the essential dilemma that faces man, within his condition of sentient consciousness.

Who are we?

Consciousness is a definite thing that exists. It may be, as the Hindus and Buddhists propose, part of some inexpressible higher phenomenon that transcends existence itself, but we are hardly in a position to ascertain that conclusively from where we exist in the universe. For all practical purposes, consciousness, as we experience it, is real—whether it is the sweaty consciousness of an inebriated football fan, or the refined consciousness of a meditating master. And consciousness seems always to be in search of itself, always engaged in that inner action defined by "?"

The ? symbol is helpful, because it represents the action—not all the words we write about it. It can be carried around inside oneself perpetually, skirting the edges of all these thoughts, feelings, sensations, and definitions that provoke reactions in us. Even in the middle of ego—which is, like the rest of consciousness, also in search of itself—it acts. Ego itself would not be so defended and insecure if it didn't carry the same question as our other parts.

? encourages us to have some sympathy for ego; it's confused and looking for truth, like other parts, but doesn't know how to communicate very well. If it were more aware of ? in its own action—if ego itself were more self-aware, a proposition that may seem peculiar,especially in light of various doctrines that propose its extermination—it might soften enough to let some new and interesting aspects of experience in the door.

Things might change.

Consciousness and life are actions, not things. They encounter things, and this interaction between the inner action of consciousness and life and the outer action of things is the intersection where what we call meaning arises. Meaning itself is a function of ?, the inquiry. A fundamental sensation of Being may arise when we begin to remember that we are actions, not things.

If we begin to understand this in a more specific way, life doesn't look the same any more.

Perfect At Every Moment

Last Sunday as the sunset over the Hudson River, a small group of us gathered at Yoga Shivaya Yoga Studio in Tarrytown, to meditate and explore the rich topic of suffering.  It was my evening to lead the meditation, and I thought it would be interesting to go back to the core insight of the Buddha—that life inevitably contains suffering or unease or dissatisfaction.  “Can this be true?” I asked.  I shared an experience of intense embarrassment I had recently—that feeling of flushing with heat, of being caught (between two stools, as Gurdjieff put it).  I described the feeling of things going terribly wrong—just not according to plan.  “When you get right down to it, nothing really unfolds exactly the way you plan.”  The others shared their own fresh examples of life not going to plan.  “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched,” said one man, quoting Mike Tyson.  Life can throw a hook. It was marvelous taking a single word—“suffering” —and really questioning it, drawing on the material of our own lives.  Here is Walt Whitman, in “Leaves of Grass”:

“Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the
spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you
are vacant of them.”

In the course of our exchange, I realized that turning back towards our own experience with curiosity has a way of opening up our experience, enlarging and stimulating heart and mind.  Questioning loosens identification.  Examining our experience, we become brighter (if not fully enlightened)—we are less likely to just pugnaciously side with ourselves.

And truth has a way of emerging in a group.  The conversation about suffering began to reveal the way out of suffering. One man wondered why suffering couldn’t just be transcended—couldn’t philosophy and strategy be applied?  A woman said that in her experience there was a kind of understanding that can only be earned by consciously being with suffering—without indulging or repressing it.  It has to be earned to be yours.  It can’t be found in a book or a thought.  I could tell she had lived this.  It struck as marvelous—to be in that sunset washed room hearing someone’s own realization.  Seeing—in the full sense of receiving and holding—is transforming.

When I was young, I dreamed of going to India on a spiritual quest.  I loved the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.  Now that I’m not quite so young, I realize that life itself is a teacher—if we can learn to turn and see ourselves.  Here is Siddhartha, after his long, strange journey.

“No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it… I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to live it and be glad to belong to it. “

What do think?  Does suffering contain freedom from suffering?  Does sin contain grace?  Can every moment be perfect?

I just heard it for the hundredth time. Someone said to me yesterday with a deep sigh, “people just don’t change.” Both sigh and statement were inspired by the usual reason. My friend had spent months trying to induce a new perspective, a new way of organizing her life, into the woman he had fallen in love with. And don’t we all get into that mode from time to time? “If only so—and—so could be different, we could have a real friendship. She/he just doesn’t understand…” And there’s a long list of corrections we’d be glad to supply that could rehabilitate him or her to our way of thinking or doing.

So why are we determined to change ourselves and each other? I confess I’ve spent a lot of the time of my life trying to redo myself and figure out how to help others change. But now I see it differently. So, when my intransigent friend stated it so baldly yesterday, three or four people who have changed remarkably immediately popped into my mind. They were people who cared to become more aware of what was driving their actions. Aha! Could that be a new attitude to change?

Let’s take it from the opposite pole. Even if we accept that it’s basically true that at least the basics in people don’t change, I’m pretty sure it’s not the aim of a relationship. Although spontaneous attraction is celebrated in story and song, surely relationships are made, not born. That means the question we need to resolve with friend or partner isn’t “how can I change you to think or feel or act the way I do?” but “how can I help you change into yourself?” In other words, what can we do together to build a relationship that nourishes us and brings out the best in us both?

Yes, we discover that we can’t change things. We can’t redo ourselves and other people. But we can grow. As we begin to see all the different aspects of ourselves, conscious and unconscious, both what we like and what we don’t like about ourselves and others, perhaps we can learn to live from a different place. That would make us part of a larger world in which we accept rather than judge. How about starting the journey to that larger world by celebrating our differences. For example, my husband, seemingly opposite to me in most ways, still shared the same interests, the same passions I did. Although living with him provided many a headache, life with him was never boring!

It took a lifetime, but now I realize that the moment you begin to accept yourself as you are and the other as he is marks the beginning of a real relationship.

Lush, green, dangerous, exciting, the most colorful place on earth. I lived in the rainforest of Peru on the Amazon River for several years. It was one of the highlights of my life, so I can attest to the extraordinary experience. But when you consider that the rainforests of the world represent 6% of the earth’s landmass and, in that small fraction, sustain over 50% of its biological diversity, you recognize that it's more than an extraordinary experience. It's a necessity for our planet!

Jerry Toth of the Third Millennium Alliance (www.3malliance.org) writes that their efforts to save the tiny slice of rain forest left in Ecuador (some 98% of it has been lost to the world in the last three generations) were met with a short-term offer. Their aim is to raise $27,520 to purchase 172 acres of rainforest adjacent to the Jama-Coaque Reserve. Any donation received during a 3-month period would be doubled. However they are already at the halfway-point of this 3-month window and thus far have raised only $800, which doubles to $1,600 with the matching funds. More is needed, folks. Can anyone help?