The Power of Coincidence (26 page)

7. The greek word for sin is
hamartia
which literally means “missing the target.” Our collective human target is love, wisdom, and healing. We each show these in our own ways. Sin is a deliberate choice not to employ those three powers. It is any act that overrides our spiritual instinct for wholeness and thus makes us miss the target of collective and individual destiny. Write an inventory of how have you hurt, betrayed, or abandoned yourself or others in choices you have made or in habits you have maintained. Look for compassion for yourself, not blame. Look for compassion for others, not disregard. Make amends to yourself and others by admitting your wrongs, asking pardon, making specific amends for the losses and/or pain you have caused, and resolving to change your life so that you do not continue in the old way. The sight of you showing contrition, amendment, and resolution may disarm the other and free him/her to forgive you, that is, let go of blaming or hating you.

Here is a model that may help in designing your inventory:

How have I been an afflicting force in the lives of others? I may have been offensive in words said or neglected to be said, or in actions, both done and left undone. Some of these transgressions are known only to me and some are felt by and known to others.

What deliberate choices have I made that have been abusive, led to hurt, or caused a loss?

What agreements have I broken?

How have I acted (or failed to act)
because
of fear and thereby lost access to my courage?

How have I acted with an arrogant or entitled ego?

Apply this same model to yourself. How have you hurt yourself or let others hurt you?

What is the best chance love can have to work in your life from now on?

Use each of the points in the above model now in reverse: How have I been an assisting force in others’ lives?

H
OW TO
S
TAY AND
S
EE

Stand stable here

And silent be . . .

Here at the small field’s ending, pause . . .

—W. H. A
UDEN, FROM
“On This Island”

In this section, we pull together some of the more salient ideas of the book and show how they can work for us.

We are aware of our psychological needs: attention, acceptance, affection, appreciation, and allowing. Some of our spiritual needs have become evident in the course of these pages: opening to intuitions and synchronicities that point to or confirm a path for us, initiatory experiences that may lead to a letting go of ego, finding wisdom, and showing compassion.

As the fulfillment of psychological needs results in a coherent sense of identity, the fulfillment of spiritual needs results in a grateful sense of wholeness. Identity is something we work for; wholeness is who and what we always and already are. Spiritual needs lead to a realization and manifestation of wholeness not to the creation of it. Psychological work takes effort and willpower. Spiritual practice takes responsiveness to grace (forces that assist us in transcending our limited will and intellectual powers) and willingness to pronounce the unconditional Yes to that which is.

Psychological work begins with acknowledging the issue that faces us. We then can address, process, and resolve it. What is the spiritual way of handling what comes up in our lives? It may begin with looking for ground in the artistic sense of that word. In the
Mona Lisa,
the woman is figure and the background (landscape with the river, etc.) is ground. As long as I focus on the figure, I miss the ground. An issue or conflict that faces me in life is the figure. What is the ground? It must be something unnoticed, perhaps invisible.

In fact, behind all appearances is a reality that is invisible to the eye. Wordsworth refers to the sudden, synchronous “flash of the mystery of the invisible world.” The whole of a reality is figure
and
ground. So wholeness is what we miss when we see in our habitually narrow ways. We see even less when we are obsessed by any one person or thing. This is the real danger in fear and grasping.

To stay
is to stay with what is, responsive to its rhythms rather than imposing our own. To stay in this way means staying without controlling, desiring, fearing, expecting, or judging.
To see
is to release ourselves from obsession with our predicament, to enter the space behind the appearances, the ground behind the figure. To stay and see is the synchronicity of mindfulness because we are aligned to reality without the usual screens of ego in the way.

I do not see the whole picture when I focus on one thing, that is, when I am caught up in a compelling drama or a rigid interpretation of it. How can I contact the ground, the greater perspective? I need more than focused attention if I am to see fully. A diffuse attention is necessary, the attentiveness and presence that happen in mindfulness. The Sanskrit word for mindfulness actually comes from two words meaning “attend” and “stay.” Simply to sit in the space around our reality is mindfulness in it. This is meditation on our present moment rather than control of it.

A spiritual approach to our conflicts begins with a
breather
for dropping out of the drama, a recess from the struggle, a release from its grip. Instead of continually focusing on the conflict, we take a break. We let our drama fade from view for the moment and concentrate instead on the space around it. This is the pause we have been referring to throughout this book. It is the rest in music, unheard but essential for its pleasing flow.

As long as I am caught up in dramatic storylines of fear or desire, I fail to hear the rich spiritual rhythms in my life. Mindfulness opens me to a wider context in my story beyond the content of it. The content is psychological (figure); the context is spiritual (ground). My work will always be in both areas. Then I do not “miss the many-splendored thing,” as the poet Francis Thompson says.

Here are some further examples of the two perspectives.

Every psychological crisis is a loss of something we were holding onto. Around and within this loss is its ground, its space. This space is the power to let go. In fact, what can be lost needed to be let go of anyway. What is real cannot be lost at all: unconditional love, wisdom, the power to do our work on ourselves and to bring healing into the world. Only the ego’s goods can be lost, not the powers of the Self. Since spiritual practice is required for the letting go of ego grasping, spirituality is the ground of our psychological work. This is how we can see that psychology and spirituality are integrated. It also explains why spirituality is not disembodied from our story but the fuller dimension of it.

Space, or ground, is what makes something more than what it appears to be, more than I fear it is limited to be. I am more than meets the eye and so is everything. I and everything are therefore whole: figure and ground, visible and invisible, psychological and spiritual. This is another way of accounting for the unity of all beings, all equally arising from the deathless, pure, open ground of existence, the void over which the Spirit brooded on the day of creation.

This space is also referred to in Zen as
shunyata.
It may be feared by the frantic ego as a sterile void or a black hole. Actually, it is a fecund void because it offers us the wider and widening dimensions of any reality. Such a spacious void is the ground that underlies wholeness, a limitless openness. It grants us, finally, what nothing else can, room to move. Is this what we ultimately fear, the room to move on? Is this why we keep heaven closed till after death? “I saw Heaven open,” says Revelation 19:11
. Dare we glimpse it now?
That heaven is the space in our hearts that lets love through “and makes one little room an everywhere,” as John Donne says.

Space happens between two planes. A pause occurs between two actions. Celtic spirituality has a fascination with the sacred realm of the
between:
the place or moment when the veils between the physical and spiritual worlds are so thin that we easily cross over. The space we have been contemplating is the between. It is the threshold as a beach is a threshold between the land and the ocean or adolescence is a threshold between childhood and adulthood. This mysterious between-world has appeared in every chapter of this book: soul is between ego and Self; synchronicity happens between cause and chance; mirroring happens between I and Thou; dreamwork occurs between unconscious and conscious; poetry arises between prose words and wordless communication; destiny opens between effort and grace; love thrives between letting go and going on. This same between is in the transcendent function of the psyche that produces the healing third when we hold two opposites. By synchronicity, every moment stands on the threshold between time and eternity—and lets us stand there too. In fact, since any moment offers the possibility of awakening, every moment is synchronicity.

It is by coincidence that I have discovered the enlightenment spirit inside me.

—S
HANTIDEVA

W
ORKING IN
S
PACE

1. King Bimbisara gave the Buddha a bamboo grove near Rajagriha to be used as a retreat. Picture it as you imagine it to be and go there now in your heart. The human heart is, after all, the bamboo grove, the spacious retreat in which you can pause and be silent and unseen for awhile and from which you emerge to be articulate and eminently visible, when the time for that comes.

2. How do we work in the ground-space of our story? The first and most powerful way is mindfulness, a technique we can use daily. Here is another exercise: