commentary by Marti

COSMIC TRAILS

Our universe is monstrously big, exquisitely beautiful, and exceedingly generous.

Conscious evolution requires a journey. Whether we simply wander down the road on a country path or take a celestial highway to distant stars in faraway galaxies, there are no real formulas or detailed maps to chart the way. If we go to the chilling fiords of the Arctic, of course we need warm clothes, but what we will find there is uncertain. I have learned that no formulas really exist for meaningful journeys. We may have a precise goal in mind but if we are open to positive and beneficial change, we usually get what we need, not what we think we need. And in a journey based on brutal honesty, we may face our darkest shadows and have the opportunity to use our own unique hidden gifts. As we look into the distance and prepare our journey, we always have to accept that there are no safety nets that will insure our return. At least, not to the place we were before.

The universe is monstrously big, exquisitely beautiful, and exceedingly generous. As we seek the path of the way of being, countless approaches may pop up, depending on our nature and our needs. But there are a few universal steps that will help us to get onto the path as effortlessly and genuinely as possible. As the Chinese say, 

“If you don’t lose yourself, you will never find your way.”

Facing our fear to begin is the first step.

Recognize we have a mission.

We have been born in the here & now. We live in a unique moment in history. Our planet is in rapid decline and most of us have somewhat muddled lives, but we have understood that nothing is by accident. Our quest will be to connect the dots, to find our real role, to understand how we fit into the picture. Recognizing that we have a mission even if we don’t have the faintest idea of what that mission is – this is the first step. We cannot travel the path without becoming the path itself.

Travel light.

We will need to travel light. To stand naked before the truth of our existence. To leave our physical, intellectual and emotional baggage behind. To empty our minds of everything. To erase all of our expectations and to be entirely in the moment. And this is our first big challenge. Tibetans say:

“When the home is nowhere, the mind is centered.” 

We might be on a journey of 10,000 steps to visit a sacred shrine somewhere or spend nights and days in a dark cave where our own fingers and toes will be our only real friends. Or our journey might be a foray into an intellectual understanding that an empty box is tightly packed with whizzing particles moving at the speed of light and that nothing is really nothing and that everything is connected to a deep soul force that we cannot even see or measure. 

Then again, we might sojourn into the world of plant medicine and look up at the stars and see huge globs of light coming from who knows where. Or more simply, we may be on a road trip to visit a friend and to acknowledge whatever teachers may appear along the way. Our universe was born out of incredibly dense energy the size of a marble and one of nature’s beautiful laws is that the smaller the hero the bigger the adventure. Wherever our journey takes us, even if we don’t leave the confines of our own home, the lighter we travel, the more mobility we will have to navigate the dangerous curves and eddies along the way. And moving through the entrance to our own home may have as many constraints as traveling by raft up a jungle river. 

Traveling light means that we can take risks that we otherwise wouldn’t even begin to consider. Traveling light means we can look around and write things down in our invisible database of destiny and pay tribute to the constant struggle of alignment of empty mind and full mind. When our rattled brains have too much dispersed input to deal with, there’s no room for real insights. When our minds are empty, there’s room for interaction. Then we might notice a small budding blue-green flower that is peeking up at us from the grass near the beginning of the path. Small and insignificant as she seems, she is one of our guardians. And then we begin our journey, taking in the heat of the sun, listening to the falling rain, moving like the wind that gently touches and brushes, hiding behind a trusty tree when danger approaches, sleeping under vibrating stars at night, and breathing the precious breath of I am alive.

Go with the flow.

When we first take to the road, we know that the miracle of our universe is that it functions with an internal mathematical regularity that creates order out of disorder and disorder out of order. There is no beginning, no end, only moments of perpetual movement. We cannot predict where a tiny speeding particle of light will collide with another particle in the mind-blowing vastness of space. Sometimes we can chart the probability that it will happen in a certain part of the sky and we feel bigger than life because we have understood something profound, but usually that feeling lasts for only a few gleaming moments. 

When we tune into the sound of the Earth breathing and see the Earth’s path in the movement of stars, we understand that life and our very existence are a beautiful mysterious precarious dance into the unknown. And despite all our modern sophisticated algorithms, we don’t really know what is going to happen tomorrow any more than we really understand what happened yesterday. 

We can postulate probabilities that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening, but if a maverick asteroid of large proportions knocks our tiny planet even a fraction off its gravitational course around the hot festering sun, we are done for. We will either burn up or experience glacial freeze. But trust me, we will not be gone, just transformed into something else and it’s likely that we will not have a choice about what that will be. In the new order of things, you may not be you and I may not be me, but we will probably be part of similar energy fields. So just lean back and enjoy the ride. 

The only certainty we have is that everything--pebble, rock, and mountain--is perpetually changing and the winds of time may seem motionless, but out there in space, we are moving fast and furious through a flurry of cosmic dust. And let’s remember that a table is only a table with four legs and a basket on top of it because that’s how we see it. This table doesn’t appear to be moving, but it is a molecular field filled with particles in space that aren’t actually empty at all. This leads us to understand an ancient Taoist principle and the eternal paradox: 

“What IS isn’t, and what ISN’T is.”

Give gratitude to the universe.

Walk humbly. With no expectations and a quiet mind, we see our environment in an entirely different way. In fact, we are able to observe it down to the tiniest details. Plant a carrot and watch it grow and we will learn patience. Focus on the ocean waves that sweep in and go out ad infinitum and we will literally feel the moon tugging. See the way the wind plays with the grass, a whale follows a ship, a sled dog defies our GPS systems and finds its way back home in a blizzard and we will see that the interconnections are boundless. 

No one has ever seen an atom, but we know that our universe is full of atoms that break down into photons and electrons and eventually become the miniscule evasive but ever-present neutrino. They may be our link to the beguiling dark matter in the universe and the secrets of our own origins. These tiny nothings buzz through our very bodies by the zillions and constantly change properties like chameleons. And much like fish swimming in the sea or birds flying in formation, they almost never collide, but move in perfect harmony.

There’s a lot out there and an immense landscape inside of us, too, just waiting. We can see the furious eye of the hurricane, the creepy microscopic worlds of dragonesque micro-organisms, the terrifying cycles of the hunter and the hunted, the massive circuitry of the bloodstream in the human body. We can hear the miraculous pumping of the human heart, the sound of mighty trees swaying in the wind and reaching up like children to tickle the clouds for rain, the rumbling voices of rocks and red hot fire flowing from chasms in the Earth. 

Our world is immense, dangerous, beautiful, loving, and defying all description. And so are we the moment we move beyond self and see how we are interconnected with everything that exists. When we observe carefully and with deep gratitude, the delicate structure of the universe appears to us. Our cosmos is immeasurable in its delights and horrors and takes us on a magnificent ride, if we trust in ourselves and in her.

Recognize the Signs.

When we go with the flow, signs will appear. Hints of direction, synchronistic patterns, seeming coincidences, hidden connections, accidental un-accidents. When we are seriously looking for signs, they may hide behind a mountain of facts and figures and nervous reactions and we don’t necessarily see them. When we are not really looking, that’s when signs appear to us. Kazzaaam. Most scientific discoveries were accidents. 

Researchers were actually looking for something else when they stumbled on some kind of an unfolding pattern that was invisible until they took the wrong right road. Everything exists in context or in fields of energy. The hard part is deciding whether the signs are generated by nature or the product of our imagination, but does it really matter? They appear to be there and they provide us with meaning. 

Synchronicity is seeing the same phenomenon repeat itself over different geographic areas at the same time. I see it here. You see it there. It’s only really significant if we decide it is or if we are really listening to the design of the universe. And then, like harmonic fields, we sing the same song but perhaps in a different pitch or octave, but it is the same song. Then we start to see fractals, or repeating geometric patterns, everywhere.

Once I went to a famous stone and sand garden in Kyoto. You are supposed to stare at it and see the sands and rocks transform into islands sitting pristinely in an ocean of waves. I ripped my jeans as I hastily climbed over the fence at dawn one morning and sat in meditation for nearly two hours trying to see it, but to no avail. Suddenly at 8 AM a Japanese tourist guide rounded the corner of the temple with some 60 trampling tourists and a loud microphone. At that moment my mind jarred and flipped a switch. I looked out at stone and sand and saw islands and the ocean. That’s how I got pushed into letting go, the-you-never-know-where-or-when-or-how-or-why. So that’s when I remembered that I often seriously need to stop planning, see the signs, and just go with the flow.

Talk to animals, plants, and elevators.

Other species are as alive as we are. They may see differently, feel differently, but they are sentient beings. A tree is silent witness to all. A mountain watches us. Our lifetime speeds by in a faction of a second in its life. An ant colony is one of the most sophisticated forms of collective existence in our world and yet its workers are tiny dedicated fragile creatures. An elevator in a skyscraper contains the vibrations of its occupants, observations about the weather, the secrets of unrequited love, yearnings to have nuts and bolts oiled by that skilled industrial mechanic who comes once a fortnight. Plants can kill us in an instant or accompany us on a journey to heal diseases of the body and mind. They can trigger our metabolic rates, affect our nerve centers, show us glimpses of eternity, bring us close to dying or help us escape death. Plants tell us to stop thinking we are the center of the world.

Be kind to children.

We were all once children. Some of us had happy childhoods. Some of us are still struggling with our past, but all of us were parachuted into this world with the help of our mothers. If we were not battered or discarded, we instinctively knew how to play and warped immediately into the delight and innocence of being. There is a darshan moment when a child is born and the stars twinkle a tiny welcome. The child in each one of us needs to be nourished, to remember how to play in this over-serious world. We have many responsibilities, but one of them, always practiced by our ancestors, was the joy of play and playfulness and fulfilling our responsibility not to complain but striving for our own well-being and the well-being of others, come what may.

Live without undue interference with our surroundings.

There’s another Taoist saying that can guide us:

“Enter the forest without moving the grass: 
Enter the water without raising a ripple.”

It takes practice, but it is something to remember on the path. Our footprint should be so light that we leave no trace that we passed this way.

Know that the journey itself is the destination.

Know that the journey itself is the destination, whether it is filled with wonder and delight, or some kind of unexpected forays, or even nightmares. We may have to leave friends, slog through bad weather, throw away our shoes, wear down the soles of our feet, wade through rising waters, battle insects and disease, and confront visible and invisible enemies. But given the true warriors that we are, we will move forward, never doubting our place in the universe because we know the universe has chosen us. And when we take to the road, nature is our wondrous teacher. We look and listen and become one with her. As the ancient philosopher Chuang-tzu once said:

“The sound of water says what I think.”

Develop discernment, discipline and patience.

Listen to the frogs croaking and the stars whispering. Watch how raindrops and snowflakes touch our hands and faces. Slow down and enjoy being on the path because we will become the path, however long that will take.

This reminds me of one of my favorite ZEN stories: 

THE GREAT MARTIAL ARTS MASTER AND THE PUPIL

A young swordsman traveled all the way across Japan to study with a great martial arts master.
When he arrived, the student asked the master: 

“If I study very diligently how long will it take me to become a great swordsman?”
“Ten years,” the master said.
And if I study twice as hard?” asked the student.
“Twenty years.” said the master.
“And if I study three times as hard?” asked the student.
“About thirty years,” said the master.

The student was puzzled. “Why is it that that every time I agree to study harder, you say that it will take even longer?” he asked. 
The master paused in silence. Then he said, “Why divide your energy? If you have only one eye on the target, you will have only one eye on the final goal.” 

Just as a young swordsman learns from a great martial arts master, our COSMIC TRAIL requires that we remain focused, observe nature with great respect, honor our ancestors, thank our teachers, and enjoy our adventure as we discover who we truly are. We may have to transform, transmute, and become one as the oceans rise, and the winds swing insanely hotter and acutely colder. Like the martial arts student, we will need to remain focused as our lives take on new and challenging dimensions that require awareness and great compassion, always remembering that we are all part of the same Earth that has always cared and provided for us.

--The ZEN story is from MARTI’s book, Indigo Spirit Towards a Child-friendly Planet