Here You Are... Wondering... Until Suddenly... You Remember... Amnesia and Reincarnation

We forget where we came from - where we were before conception - and where we will return to after death. This forgetting - or even remembering, if it happens during our lifetime - has a reason and a purpose that eludes us, much like some forms of Amnesia. Amnesia both protects us from, and also urges us on, due to our fundamental longing for the truth. There is a gift in forgetting, and a gift in remembering.

"Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters."

Bernard of Clairvaux

Trees and stones - and our children.

Here You Are... Wondering... Where do I go?... Libera "Going Home"

We go home, of course. Our life is just a short flash of time in eternity. We return to where we come from - there is no other possibility. It is totally familiar and known to us.

Yoda Wisdom

The powerful nine-year-old Jedi who lives in our house and controls what we watch on TV several nights a week, has moved on from Planet Earth and the Science Channel to Star Wars. "Here comes your favorite, Mom" is how he announces every scene with Master Yoda in it to make sure I stay and watch all the episodes.

"I am not afraid"
"Good. You will be! You will be!




"Ready? Are You? A Jedi must have the deepest commitment. The most serious mind."
"This one, a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away to the future.
Never his mind on where he was, what he was doing. Hmph...Adventure,
Hmph...Excitement, Hmph...a Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless!"
"Will he finish what he begins?"




"My ally is the force and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it and makes is grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the force around you. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes."
"You ask he impossible. I don't, I don't believe it."
"That is why you fail!"
"You must unlearn what you have learned."
"Try not! Do! Or do not! There is no try!"
"Concentrate! Feel the force flow. Through the force you will see other places, the future, the past, old friends long gone."
"Difficult to see. Always in motion the future is."



"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering!"



"Careful you must be...
The fear of loss is a path to the dark side.
Death is a natural part of life.
Rejoice for those around you who transform into the force.
Warn them do not.
Miss them do not.
Attachment leads to jealousy.
Shadow of greed that is.
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose."
"Do not give in to fear, and hate, and depression" (from another clip)



"Never! I will never turn to the dark side. I am a Jedi, like my father before me."
"So be it Jedi. You will be destroyed, you fool. For your lack of vision!"
"There is still good in you father."



The power of love over evil is accomplished with losing one's fear of death and at the same time holding life's preciousness as one's highest value. A paradox truth where the highest power is powerlessness.

Where No One Is Missing

We returned from Florida yesterday, sad and tired. Sleep will work miracles once we get around to it. We celebrated the lives of "Buffy and Pa" with lots of tears and laughter, walks on the beach and many hugs. We met many of their friends. Sweet old ladies stopped by with soups, sandwiches and cookies day after day to feed us while we cleaned out their house. Their deaths within two days of each other turned into a romantic love story that made the front page news of the local news paper. Phone calls and condolence cards keep coming, and lawyers are figuring out the estate.

Now it is back to our own lives, but without the occasional conversations and letters from the people who looked over us from afar for all these many years. It feels perfectly natural and perfectly strange.

My mind takes refuge in emptiness - that way I rest from all the memories of the past, the imaginations of where my parents-in-law might be now, their future legacy and all the other stories told all week. As enjoyable and necessary as these reflections all were - my joy is to be in the present here, now were we all are eternal and infinite, where no-one is ever missing, and we all live together as One. Love has taught me this.

Rest In Peace Together

Tomorrow morning I fly to Florida with all my children to meet up with family and friends for Monday morning's funeral service for my mother-in-law. Some family members, including my husband and his brothers have been there already for a few days to make arrangements with my father-in-law who knew all her last wishes.

Finally, everything was organized and in place , and everyone met at an aunt's house for dinner in anticipation of more family and friends' arrivals tomorrow.

It turns out that the service on Monday will be for both of my husband's parents. My father-in-law died in the arms of his three sons tonight after telling a funny story and suffering a massive and instant heart attack. After the joke his eyes just rolled back in his head, and after a few more short, unconscious moments of rapid heartbeats, it was done.

Tonight and tomorrow night they will be lying in the same funeral home together, after a very long year of suffering. One sick, and one sick with sorrow for his suffering sweetheart. On Monday we will say farewell to both of them. So bittersweet. The Reverent said that they had heard of cases like this, but it had never happened in their church. It will be such a difficult day, especially for all the grandchildren.

Here is my father-in-law's favorite hymn, which I found out when I took him to the Mother Church in Boston this summer. His mother was a Christian Scientist and sang this hymn to him at bedtime. She was a well known practitioner, but he had never been to this awe inspiring church. His favorite thing was the soloist singing so beautifully, supported by the breathtaking acoustics of the building itself.

Hymn 211 - O Gentle Presence

O gentle presence, peace and joy and power;
O life divine, that owns each waiting hour,
Thou love that guards the nestling faltering flight!
Keep though my child on upward wing tonight.

Love is our refuge; only with mine eye
Can I behold the snare, the pit, the fall:
His habitation high is here, and nigh,...
His arm encircles me and mine, and all.
No ill, since God is good, and loss is gain.

O make me glad for every scalding tear,
For hope deferred, in gratitude, disdain!
Wait, and love more for every hate, and fear...
His arm encircles me and mine, and all.
No ill, since God is good, and loss is gain.

Beneath the shadow of his mighty wing;
In that sweet secret of the narrow way,
Seeking and finding, with the angles sing:
" Lo, I am with you always," - watch and pray.
His arm encircles me and mine, and all.
No ill, since God is good, and loss is gain.

No snare, no fowler, pestilence or pain;
No night drops down upon the troubled breast,
When heaven's aftersmile earth's teardrops gain,
And Mother finds her home and heav'nly rest.
His arm encircles me and mine, and all.
No ill, since God is good, and loss is gain.


No ill - since all is good, and loss is gain. This is the truth, as found in the Tao also - I'll have to remember that on Monday.

Rest In Peace

Grandma passed away in the early morning hours in Florida yesterday. Her last card to us - a Halloween card sitting on my nine year old's desk, is still making the same spooky noises when you open it up and see her familiar handwriting. I wonder how long the little computer chip battery will last. I still have her voice on my voice mail, too. I wonder how often Comcast will let me save it.

There is such a wonderful peace in death, especially when, as in her case, there was a year long, painful battle with cancer after decades of rheumatic arthritis. It is the same peace we try to cultivate in meditation so it becomes part of our life and we can enjoy it here. It eluded her much of her life as it eludes many, but she found it in the end - or rather - when she was down and out and weak and surrendered - it found her.

As I learned from an Indian Mystic a long time ago - we just have to get out of our own way. Then we can truly discover ourselves as peace itself - or rather - finally peace can find us as peace. If missed in life, in death it is the gift, the treasure and the love we have been looking for our whole life.

Death And Toys R Us

Our 82-year-old grandmother - my husband's mother - is dying of breast cancer. Her youngest grandchild - our 9-year-old son - who is used to people dying every day in car crashes, falling off cliffs, and getting blown up into a million pieces in massive explosions, but who then, instantly pop back up on the next level - does not quite know what it will really mean. When it happens he may just think she is now on the next level, and we won't see her again until we ourselves get there.

It reminds me when my oldest son - now 29 - had his first Nintendo, and Mario became a permanent member of our family. From then on, whenever I called the kids to dinner - his "reassurance" to me that he was on his way, was: "OK, Mom... I guess I'll just kill myself." - in that floppy-eared, defeated Eore voice.


My kids ended up killing themselves regularly to comply with dinner rules. I was always a bit uneasy about that. Somehow video games have given us this take on death. Kind of like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Last week - when days of homework, soccer games in the rain, and all the other stresses of being a nine-year-old came together in one devastating moment of having to postpone the purchase of a five dollar toy, I said to my wailing child:"I understand your disappointment, little man, but let's think a bit about how distraught you are right now, in contrast to last week's rather calm reaction when I told you that Grandma might be dying."

"I know Mom... I get it... and I know I'll be really sad when she is actually dead, but now it doesn't seem sad to me - 'cause she's still alive!That's why I can't be sad about her now, and it's why I can't be happy about getting that toy all the way next week, either!"

Checkmate. Once again, reminded by one of my children of what it's like to live in the present.

But - he did wake up to the vast difference between "life and death issues" and issues of mere childhood consumerism. It was a growing-up day. We celebrated that he wasn't a baby anymore. To babies everything is a life and death issue. He was very pleased in the end about this grown up delayed gratification.

Then, we received a - just in case- early Halloween card in the mail from Grandma - which contained a surprising $10.00 bill - to spend on something fun. The card played a spooky song when you opened it and featured lots of skeletons dancing around a fire, and announced - "Halloween is just around the corner. I can feel it in my bones!"

"Me too!" Grandma had signed the card.

We drove to ToysR Us the very same day, happy that Grandma was still alive.

The God Particle

The Dalai Lama is trying to bring science and religion together by especially working with brain researchers as described in "The Destructive Emotions". So are some other theologians. We should take notice.

Science and religion seem to be at war the same way the Democrats and Republicans are at war. A whole new approach is needed to our search for truth. An approach that does not have power or profit as a motive, and that doesn't suffer from mutual disdain. A Buddhist monk may just be a good leader in this endeavor.

Science describes everything it sees, then formulates laws which it tests through predictions and verifiable experiments. Since all those laws are bound to hit "horizons" where they no longer apply, science then looks for more insight in the far, far away in time and space all the way back to the big bang, both in the macro and micro cosmos. Thus science is endlessly fascinating. But not as much as meditation, and much slower and more expensive.

Experiments typically try to split matter into tinier and tinier units, using stronger and stronger colliders. You don't need to be a physicist to realize that no matter how often you split matter you will never get to nothing or zero. We are trying to find the Ur-Particle, presently called the Higgs Boson - a no-mass, no-spin "particle".

Here is how Brian Greene, professor of math and physics at Columbia, puts it this morning in the New York Times:

"Perhaps space is pervaded by a field...that acts like invisible molasses. When we push something to make it move faster, the Higgs molasses would exert a drag force - and it's this resistance, as the Higgs theory goes - that we commonly call the object's mass."

Meditators - and that is where we need the brain scientists to join the party - would call this hypothetical molasses field "thought". Everything we know comes out of nothing and returns to nothing by the mystery of thought. Meditators know both the most subtle levels of thought, and - if they have experimented long enough - the realm of no thought, where there simply is no physical phenomena or mass of any kind. Thought, not as words but as subtle movements of mind, creates the resistance needed for matter to appear in time and space. We also know of supersymetry were every such movement has its exact opposite - together they can annihilate the universe.

The physicists have baptized the Higgs Boson the God Particle. Are physicists prepared to be in the presence of a God particle? I can't wait to see this - it will be amusing.

The fact that physicists may know nothing of meditation, may not understand thought and its origin, or how it creates and destroys the universe, is of some concern when they go to great length at smashing particles in an effort to discover the secret of the universe. Hopefully they aren't even close to the "answer" or ancient history might repeat itself where curiosity killed the cat. The fact that religious people have, and are still stoning people, has made us overlook some of the warnings in religious texts about trying to discover "the secret of the universe" and acquiring "God power". One aspect of God's infinite power is his infinite powerlessness. Are we prepared for such powerlessness?

A meditator knows that the secret of the universe is revealed in its annihilation - and we are wondering how this will turn out in the physics lab. To a meditator, the physicist is someone who is standing in front of a mirror studying every movement, color, shape etc., with ever more precision and complicated math, making predictions and designing experiments to test his theories - without ever realizing he is looking in a mirror. He needs to wake up to this fact or his more and more intense efforts are going to shatter the mirror. Which may be one way - and hopefully a harmless way - to this discovery,a s well.

Physicist look down on people who don't understand their elusive math and their sophisticated machines, while we look down on their attachment to the mind and its infinite illusions. They think we are fooled by our stupidity, we think they are fooled more dangerously by their intelligence. If we don't come together we may indeed destroy our world. The wisdom of smashing two tiny particles together at a velocity or violence level of twice the speed of light is at first thought, frightening. It seems that only the speed of light, is the level of violence natural in this present universe. Then again - doubling it would be a natural next step for universe dwellers to try out. Hopefully it is built into the universe's plan for us. That would indeed be very exciting.

Meditators would be well prepared for infinite and eternal existence outside of time and space, and to them it would be pure bliss - while to physicists the same realm would be eternal and infinite boredom, because there is no thought. Physicists are very attached to thinking but don't know what it is, because they have never stopped it long enough.

Hopefully the experiments in Switzerland will not mean the end of the material world. Here is a video of Brian Greene explaining things, which makes it easy to jump on the excitement wagon. We are still hoping for logic in a final, elegant, unified theory. The final truth can only be expressed in a paradox, so it will be a while before we'll get there, if at all, in physics. Jesus said:"You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." We all long for this truth and freedom. For a scientist this freedom means no more questions. What scientist may not know is that the final answer will be a question that dissolves into omniscient not-knowing.

In this video, notice the physicist who studied swimming by reading a book - those are the folks who tell us we won't sink - even though we are swimming in the water waiting for them to jump in. Hopefully they won't drain the pool. Physicists and meditators have one thing in common - they love experiments and danger, and are willing to risk all - for truth.

While some scientists are still worried about the experiments scheduled at the LHC in Switzerland, most scientists are as excited as this guy - Brian Greene, mentioned above. We live in interesting times...

Daniel Wheeler

A little boy, many years ago - on a whim, as children do - used to let himself sink to the bottom of pools and look up at the sky through the water. I used to do the same as a little girl. The magic world under water somehow fascinating me with its silence and the bright play of light, as well as the liberation that came from liquefying solid reality.

When I think of this boy who loved to look at the world from the bottom of pools to see what would happen to the shapes of trees and clouds, I am reminded of my husband's best childhood friend who drowned in a pool when they both were five years old. Maybe a drowning child's last moments are full of wonder and peace as he or she looks up into the dancing light above, immersed into the peace found under water. Isn't it this peace and letting go of the world that is the idea behind baptism by submersion? A small taste of the freedom from the fetters of the world that the spiritual life holds in store for us. A small taste of death as blissful peace that is available to us in life if we only lift our thoughts or let them go all together.

Well, this other boy grew up and became an artist in Los Angeles. After years of sculpturing, and installations of all kinds that started him on his way to fame, it occurred to him to take photographs from the bottom of pools. His name is Daniel Wheeler, and we bought one of his 40" x 40", "Gulp" prints last year, which is now hanging in our house to greet visitors at the front door.

What Andy Goldsworthy is to stone, earth and wood, Daniel Wheeler is to trees, clouds and water. Just as Andy Goldsworthy arranges leaves and feathers, stones and sand, and wood and ice for his photographs, Daniel Wheeler waits in the silence of the bottom of a pool for the light and water to arrange itself around the solid shapes of trees and clouds above, until it is all just so. The active yang, and receptive yin, of two great artists.

When we are born our first breath is in, and when we die, our last breath is out. In an interview Daniel says: "Exhaling is what allows me to descend. I can't go down if I don't let go of that gulp of air. So the resulting image is a document of that action."

This stillness after a breath let out is a small death and surrender. As such - in addition to the pleasure that comes from the fantastic blues, and greens, and whites, that float and ripple around familiar yet mysterious shapes and glorious, ascending bubbles - Daniel Wheeler's work communicates a spiritual concept of great significance, whether this spiritual experience is fully understood by the viewer at the time or not - it instantly feels familiar and true.

Freedom From Death

We know we are immortal. We know we will always be together. And yet - in this life - we all have to experience the painful illusion of death and separation from our loved ones, again and again. With the recent death in our family of a beloved grandmother - my daughter-in-law's - we are all reminded of the limits of our mortal existence, which has little to do with our real existence. Without meditation it is hard to ever know this for sure.

Death surprises, saddens and frustrates us, even when we intellectually understand and expect it. The thing with death is that we cannot truly trust our five senses with their reports regarding so-called reality.

This inherent knowing that we are immortal, and always united, is like the sense we sometimes have in sleep reminding us that we are dreaming. Life is but a dream. Death and separation is nothing but an illusion - a very convincing one, but an illusion nonetheless. Love is the key to this puzzle. Knowing this, we may suffer a little less, and wonder about what it is like to wake up.

Buddha said "I am awake" and Jesus said: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free". We will all wake up naturally once we have had enough sleep. Sleep then becomes infinitely enjoyable once we are awake and free.

This post is dedicated to all our grandmothers who taught us a level of freedom, joy, unconditional love, and compassion beyond even that of our mothers' whose own unconditional love for us is naturally handicapped by the many day-to-day responsibilities of mothering, with its many fears for our well-being. There is more freedom in the love between a grandmother and a grandchild. Love at its highest level is freedom and peace. Freedom and peace from all fears, worries, attachments, comforts, desires, hopes and dreams. When our loved ones die, it takes a long time to realize that they have just given us a new, unfamiliar freedom to again love differently. We don't want to trade our loved ones for this freedom or peace, and often resist this new level of love for years, but in the long run we have no choice but to drop this false idea of death, separation and abandonment.