Dass, Ram, Be Here Now, Harmony, 1978.

France, Peter, Hermits: The Insights of Solitude, Vintage Digital, 2014.

Gurdjieff, G.I., Meetings with Remarkable Men, Sanage, 2023.

Herrigel, Eugen, Zen in the Art of Archery, GED Books, 2022.

Huxley, Aldous, Island, Harper Perennial, 2009.

Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper Perennial, 2012.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage, 2011.

Keating, Thomas, Open Mind, Open Heart, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2023.

Ouspensky, P.D., In Search of the Miraculous, GVI, 2022.

Ouspensky, P.D., The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, Sanage, 2020.

Suzuki, Shunryu, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shambhala, 2020.

Wolfe, Tom, The Kool-Aid Acid Test, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2008.

Wood, Michael, Opening the Good Eye: The Path to True Seeing, Miksang Publications, 2015.

Yogananda, Paramahansa, Autobiography of a Yogi, Self-Realization Fellowship, 2014.

When I was younger, asking for help did not come easily. Perhaps that is one of the lessons of growing older: we gradually discover that needing others is not a deficiency but simply part of life.

The well-known scholar of comparative religion, Huston Smith asked for help. He said the simplest prayer he ever uttered, during a period of deep depression, consisted of a single word, “HELP.” Given the tyranny of excessive and inflexible individualism, asking others for help is not always easy to accept and a lesson to learn. I’m learning.

Why is there resistance, especially in Western culture, to asking for help? Certainly individual achievement is a consideration. Most of our formal education focuses on the individual acquisition of knowledge, skills and competencies. I cannot recall taking a class on how to work as a team. Yet, in the world of work teamwork is highly valued and often essential to accomplishing anything of significance.

For example, I worked on protocol teams that conducted international HIV/AIDS research in resource-limited settings. The teams had upwards of thirty members from countries around the world. Each team had specialists who contributed to the overall mission, e.g. data mangers, physicians, nurses, pharmacologists, statisticians, et al. While there was a principal investigator, s/he’s success was dependent upon the help provided from team members, who were high achievers in their respective areas of competence.

Achievements are closely associated with identity. Titles, degrees, accomplishments, and professional roles can gradually become intertwined with our sense of who we are. I think, for example, of physicians who sometimes sign their names followed by M.D. even in situations that have nothing to do with health or medicine. The title has become more than a credential, it can become a part of identity. We all do this in one form or another. What we have acheived can easily become confused with who we are.

Perhaps this helps explain why asking for help can be difficult. If I think of myself as competent, knowledgeable, and self-sufficient, asking for help may seem to threaten that identity. To say “I don’t know,” “I can’t do this,” or simply “I need help” requires relinquishing, at least momentarily, the image of ourselves as self-sufficient and in control.

There is, of course, a practical value in asking for help when we are stuck with a problem or find ourselves in a difficult situation. Someone else may possess the knowledge, experience, or perspective that we lack. But I have come to think there are other, deeper values as well.

In asking for help, the boundaries around “me” and “mine” become a little less fixed. We acknowledge that we are not completely separate, autonomous individuals but are also dependent upon on others. There can be an open spaciousness and a sense of freedom toward both self and other - a certain fluidity. We no longer have to maintain a fixed identity as the person who knows, accomplishes, or has everything under control.

Humility can arise from this recognition, and so can gratitude. Someone has something to give that I need, and I allow myself to receive it. Asking for help also counteracts the kind of limiting ego that imagines itself to be the end-all and be-all—complete, independent, perhaps even perfect.

Seen this way, asking for help might even become a spiritual practice. It asks us to acknowledge our limitations, loosen our attachment to self-sufficiency, trust another person, and become willing to receive. It reminds us of something that individualism can easily obscure: we need one another.

Perhaps this is why Huston Smith’s one-word prayer seems so profound. Stripped of theology, explanation, and pretense, there remained only an honest acknowledgment of need: Help.

Given what I know about her it would seem that she more than qualifies for sainthood. I doubt that she ever used the word non-duality, but it’s clear she clearly transcended opposites and was a uniter of people. This podcast series is extremely well done and tells the story.

They met Br. Raymond Roberts who has lived there for decades and amazingly still does with Karp’s permission. Karp extended his hand. The two men shook hands. Later, the assistant said that Karp never shakes anyone’s hand.

Maybe the Chinese book of wisdom the I-Ching is correct in saying, there are forces in the world bringing people together who need to be together (hexagram 64). Just sayin -

Friend, I have lost the way. The way leads on. Is there another way? The way is one. I must retrace the track. It’s lost and gone. Back, I must travel back! None goes there, none. Then I’ll make here my place, (The road leads on),

Stand still and set my face (The road leaps on), Stay here, forever stay. None stays here, none. I cannot find the way. The way leads on. Oh places I have passed! That journey’s done. And what will come at last? The road leads on.

~ Edwin Muir ~

Japanese calligraphy “The Way”

Chapter Four

Like Father Like Son – The Rev. David Parks

Frederic Spiegelberg (1897-1994), was a professor of comparative religion at Stanford University. He said that Zen was the prototypic “religion of no-religion” as it places little emphasis on doctrine, belief, or formal religious structures. Rather, it points directly to awakening to one’s true nature in the midst ordinary life.

David Parks, has had a long-time commitment to Zen teachings and practice, Christian ministry, and interspiritual dialogue. The following is an edited, adaptation of an interview I conducted with David during the COVID pandemic. I have known of David for more than fifty years. As described in an earlier chapter, his father, the psychiatrist Dr. John Parks (See Chapter x.) introduced me to meditation when I was in college. So, in a sense this encounter with David was like old home week.

David is the director of Bluegrass Zen, a satellite center of the Pacific Zen Institute. It is located on a small farm in Waco, Kentucky. A graduate of Centre College, he was ordained in the United Church of Christ and served for many years as a pastor in Santa Rosa, California. There he became deeply involved in Zen practice. David was fortunate to have Huston Smith, the renowned professor of comparative religion, serve as his spiritual director from time to time.

David’s approach to Zen reflects a deep trust in life’s generosity. He approaches Zen koan statements not as intellectual puzzles (e.g. “what is the hand of one hand) but as vehicles for personal transformation—gateways that open heart and mind to a freer, more fully engaged life. David also explores the sayings and parables of Jesus as Christian koans.

Before we turned to the topic of contemplation, David spoke of beliefs. A belief is something that we have that is separate from ourselves, a belief in this or that, a belief in Jesus as the son of God or whatever. We have beliefs but they are not us. When one’s heart opens, you too experience the kingdom of God and it’s no longer a belief. You too experience Buddha nature and you realize, “oh, this is who I am.”

David’s view of beliefs is similar to Thomas Keating’s earlier comment to me (See Chapter x), “beliefs are important but once you experience what the belief points to they are less so.”

When I asked what makes someone contemplative, David did not begin with methods or techniques. He spoke of growing up in a household where both parents meditated.

“It was unusual in the 1950s and 1960s,” he reflected, “but looking back, I realize there was a grounding in our home that many people never receive.”

He mentioned the famous monk and author Thomas Merton’s epiphany at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville Kentucky. Merton said he realized that he loved all the people around him and that there was no real separation between himself and them as strangers. Merton spoke of it as an awakening from a dream of separateness—and related it to his experience in the monastery where he lived, as waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation as a monk. He said he wished that everyone could realize that they are walking around as bright and shining as the sun.

For David, that awakening captures the essence of contemplation. Contemplation is the realization that we are not separate from life. We belong to it completely, and what we thought was “my life” is inseparable from the larger life in which we all participate. As David put it, “This is my life. This is the life I’m having. And I’m not separate from that life.”

This experience cannot be adequately captured in words. In Zen, this reluctance to rely on language is central. David pointed to the story of the Buddha standing atop Vulture Peak. Instead of giving a sermon, he simply held up a flower. One disciple, Mahakasyapa, responded with a smile. No words were exchanged, yet tradition holds that a profound transmission occurred between the two of them.

The classic description of Zen refers to a transmission “outside the scriptures, not founded on words and letters, pointing directly to the human mind.” This helps explain why Spiegelberg called Zen a “religion of no-religion.”

When I asked David about that phrase, he said with characteristic simplicity: “If you have the experience, why do you need all that (other)?” Beliefs, dogmas, and doctrines may point toward reality, but they are not reality itself. Zen invites a direct encounter with life—not mistaking the finger pointing toward the moon as the moon.

David sees a similarity within Christianity. He spoke of the “I Am” sayings in the Gospel of John not as declarations of personal importance but as invitations into a deeper reality. “I am the bread of life” and “I am living water” point beyond individual identity toward a more universal dimension of being. This same emphasis on direct experience shapes the practices of Bluegrass Zen.

The foundation practice there is meditation. Unlike approaches that focus on excluding distractions or concentrating on a single object such as breathing, here meditation welcomes everything that arises—thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, pleasant experiences, and unpleasant ones.

“If all of this is one piece,” David asked, “what would you exclude? This is your life rising to meet you.” The practice is deceptively simple. One notices whatever arises in consciousness without grasping, judging, or pushing anything away. Gradually, a spacious awareness emerges that is larger than identification with any particular thought, feeling, or desire.

Alongside meditation, at Bluegrass Zen there is an emphasis on koan practice. A koan is not something to solve. It is something to enter. He compared a koan to a symbol rather than a sign. A sign points beyond itself. A symbol participates in the reality it represents. In the same way, a koan becomes a doorway into a deeper encounter with life.

As one sits with a koan, memories, emotions, questions, and insights may arise. The instruction remains the same: notice them, but do not cling to them. Over time, the koan begins to work within the person.

David described moments when a koan would unexpectedly surface while he was digging a post hole, walking across his farm, or attending to ordinary tasks. The koan gradually becomes less an object of thought and reflection and more a living and opening presence within one’s life, a living question.

In this respect, koan practice bears a striking resemblance to contemplative prayer. Just as a symbol of intention to consent to God’s presence and action in Centering Prayer, may “disappear” and recede into silence, it continues its work below conscious awareness. Similarily, a koan continues its transformative activity and brings us to one of Zen’s most challenging teachings: not knowing.

David cited a classic Zen story in which a pilgrim tells a master, “I don’t know.” The master replies, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

For modern the post-modern individual, who often equates knowledge with certainty and control, such a statement seems regressive. Yet David suggested that labels, assumptions, and fixed conclusions frequently distance us from reality. When we relinquish at times the need to know, life becomes fresh again.

One of the greatest obstacles to this openness is our attachment to who we are, our identity. We become convinced that we know who we are—a parent, a minister, a professional, a success, or a failure. “Far better,” David suggested, “not to know who you are.”

Beneath those identities lies a deeper reality. As we encounter it, qualities such as compassion and love arise naturally. They are not imposed from outside nor cultivated per se. They emerge from the heart of things themselves as that’s their nature. This insight is not an invitation to withdraw from the world. Quite the opposite.

For David, genuine awakening must become embodied in everyday life. It must find expression in relationships, work, service, and character. Otherwise, what good is it?

I asked David what Zen might offer a world so clearly in need of healing. His answer was disarmingly simple: “Maybe, I’m not separate.”

Political divisions, ideological conflicts, and personal grievances all depend upon creating an “other.” Zen challenges that assumption. Even those with whom we strongly disagree remain part of the same fabric of life. This does not eliminate disagreement or the need for action. It does mean that opposition need not become hostility.

For David, this insight also forms the basis of interspiritual dialogue. Different traditions employ different languages, symbols, and practices, yet point toward the same realization of the interconnectedness of all life. He illustrated this with a saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas where it’s said: The Kingdom of Heaven is like a woman carrying a jar of grain home from the market. Unnoticed by her, the jar develops a crack and the grain spills out along the road. Only when she arrives home does she discover that the jar is empty. David regarded this as a koan. What remains when everything we use to define ourselves (the grain) falls away?

As our conversation drew to a close, he offered a final teaching from the Zen master Linji: “There is a solitary brightness. It knows how to listen to the teachings, understand the teachings, and teach the teachings. You are that solitary brightness.”

He paired this teaching with the words of Jesus: “You are the light of the world.” Not one person. Not a select few. Not only saints and sages. All of us.

That insight may best summarize David’s understanding of Zen, Christianity, and the contemplative life. Beneath our identities, beliefs, divisions, and fears, there is a light shining. The work of contemplation is not to create that light. It is to awaken to it.

As we ended David remarked, “Zen comes alive in you.” Indeed, there is no other place it can come alive.

Introduction

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. - Joseph Campbell1

Looking back over more than seven decades, I realize that my life can be understood through the people who taught me. Some were teachers in the conventional sense. Others never intended to teach me at all. Yet each, in a different way, awakened me to what I now call the contemplative dimension of life.

One can awaken to this dimension via experiences in nature, scientific investigation, artistic creation, religion or otherwise. A religious person might say such awakening is a grace and is divine will. Other’s that it is simply an expression of human potentiality, common to all. In any case, there is contact with a reality that transcends the senses and conceptual, discursive thinking and from which one learns.

Life has a way of placing teachers before us, sometimes through formal education and sometimes through unexpected encounters. There are our parents, our teachers at school, and mentors who intentionally share their knowledge. But there are also those who appear in our path at just the right moment and offer something far deeper than information or skill development. They may be a therapist, a physician, an artist, a beloved relative, or someone rooted in a religious tradition. Often, they do not realize they are teaching. Nevertheless, something essential is transmitted to one who is ready to receive it.

This distinction between formal and informal teaching became one of the most important lessons of my life. Formal teaching is conveyed intentionally through instruction, books, lectures, or spiritual practices. Informal teaching is conveyed through one’s presence, character, way of being, and response to life’s circumstances. While both have shaped me profoundly, it has often been the informal lessons that have left the deepest impact.

I recall one of my undergraduate psychology professors. It scarcely mattered what course he offered—I enrolled in it. His enthusiasm for learning was infectious. He conveyed something that never appeared on his syllabus: learning was worthwhile simply for its own sake. He once spent a summer studying theoretical physics because he wanted to understand its relationship to the human mind. He often remarked that, given sufficient time and motivation, one could learn almost anything. A devoted fan of Star Trek, he called his exams “knowledge probes.” We students never minded being probed. His joy and enthusiasm in learning transformed examinations from something to be feared into something almost eagerly anticipated. Without intending to do so, he taught me a lifelong love of learning.

This book is about teachers of another kind. Although I briefly describe significant family, educational, and social developmental events, it is not a conventional autobiography. Rather, it is an account of my spiritual development told through the contemplative teachers who significantly influenced my life and through the moments of awakening that gradually revealed the contemplative dimension of living. Their lives provide the structure through which I tell my own story.

I was baptized in the Baptist church as a boy but stopped attending with the onset of adolescence. At the age of twenty I began exploring non-Christian religious traditions and soon adopted a Hindu meditation practice. Although the word was not yet part of the contemporary spiritual vocabulary, I eventually realized that I was following what is now called an interspiritual path—a search for truth wherever it might be found, guided not by allegiance to a single religious tradition but by an inner sense of “higher” guidance that transcended my own ego.

I had the extraordinary good fortune—what some would call divine grace—to study closely with three remarkable contemplative teachers: John Parks, M.D., Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO, and Michael Wood.

The first was John Parks, M.D. (1927–2017), a Harvard-trained psychiatrist whose own spiritual life had been profoundly shaped by Swami Akhilananda, founder of the Vedanta Center at Boston University. As a medical student, John and his wife Elvira were initiated into Hindu meditation by Swami. Throughout his life John became an uncommon bridge between the wisdom of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Before long he had became much more than a psychiatrist. He became, in every meaningful sense, a spiritual father.

This book also includes a brief chapter about John’s son, David Parks, a Christian minister and Zen teacher. Although David was not one of my primary teachers, his life forms an important continuation of John’s influence and therefore belongs naturally within this story.

My second contemplative teacher was Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO (1923–2018), the Trappist monk whose writings and teaching introduced countless people to Centering Prayer and the Christian contemplative tradition. His formal teaching was intellectually rich and spiritually profound, but some of his greatest lessons occurred quietly, almost invisibly. Thomas’s teachings on awakening to the Divine within oneself were especially influential— as was our personal friendship.

Thomas rarely criticized others. Whether discussing personal struggles or difficult organizational decisions, he created an atmosphere in which every aspect of a situation could be considered without defensiveness or haste. He seemed to embody an interior spaciousness that invited others to become more spacious themselves. Nothing about these moments appeared instructional, yet they often became the most memorable teachings of all. They exemplified what I mean by informal teaching: the silent transmission of a way of being in the world. What accounted for this equanimity of being? Observing it made me want to learn of its source and acquire a degree of it myself.

My third principal teacher was Michael Wood (born 1949), professional photographer and student of the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Michael created the Miksang Training Curriculum in contemplative photography, which I studied for ten years. I learned that contemplative photography is not primarily about making beautiful photographs. Rather, it is about learning to perceive the visual world before it is filtered through thought, memory, and concepts. Photography became a vehicle for cultivating contemplative awareness itself.

The chapters that follow trace this lifelong journey. They begin with childhood experiences that, in retrospect, hinted at a contemplative disposition long before I possessed language to describe it. From there the narrative follows my encounters with John and David Parks, my return to Christianity through Thomas Keating and the practice of Centering Prayer, and finally my study of contemplative photography with Michael Wood.

Appendix A includes previously unpublished teachings of Thomas Keating drawn from my personal files. Appendix B presents a portfolio of my contemplative photographs.

Because the word contemplative means different things in different traditions, it may be helpful to explain how I use it throughout this book.

In ordinary language, contemplation often means thoughtful reflection. Spiritually, however, it points toward a mode of knowing that arises when conceptual thinking falls silent.

Within the Christian contemplative tradition, this silence becomes a receptive openness to God—or Ultimate Mystery—from whom understanding and transformation is received rather than planned and constructed. One does not think one’s way into contemplation; one consents to it.

Within Buddhism, contemplation refers to direct, nonconceptual awareness of present-moment experience before it has been interpreted by thought. Awareness becomes increasingly free from identification with concepts, allowing experience to reveal itself with clarity and immediacy.

Both understandings appear throughout these pages because both profoundly shaped my own journey. They share the movement beyond ordinary thinking into direct awareness. They differ primarily in whether that awareness is understood to arise from a transcendent source or through the mind resting in its own natural, unconstructed clarity and awareness.

This book is ultimately less about remarkable teachers than about the mystery of becoming teachable. Looking back, I can see that each teacher appeared at precisely the moment I was ready to receive what he had to offer. Whether through words, friendship, example, silence, or simple presence, each helped awaken within me a contemplative life. It is my hope that these pages will not only honor them but also encourage readers to recognize their teachers—both formal and informal—who have quietly shaped or are shaping their own lives.

References:

Joseph Campbell, Robert Walter (Ed.), Diane K. Osbon (Intro.). (1991). A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.

I wonder, am I getting messages about living a more simple lifestyle, i.e. as in “less is more”, KISS - keep it simple supid”, “do less accomplish more”, etc. Has life become too busy, too complex, too many trees obscuring the forest, more noise than signal?

How are these messages arriving? Here are several items I’ve recently purchased - all of which are minimal and less complex as compared to more complicated, bigger versions - a dumb phone (no email, social media, or web surfing), a mini-camera, a digital book reader the size of a credit card, and a hard copy mini-book. This pattern of dots may indicate a larger emergence, so I’ll stay tuned to see what it might be. I also wonder, do other people get messages?

A small international group from Germany, Japan, Canada, and the US of like-minded photographers gather online several times a year to discuss topics of common interest and share our recent images. Here’s a few of mine that I shared with them today.

End

However, we were primed to embrace Aldous Huxley who said ‘’I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas and with a great certainty of what’s what….to realize that the world he has constructed is by no means the only world.” - Doors of Perception

It turned out Castaneda’s best selling books were fiction yet were widely read and influential in the early 1970s counterculture. There’s now a 600 page biography of Casteneda - no foolin. Putney Swope said it’s “hipsters, tricksters, and finger snappin mamas.”

It turned out Castaneda’s best selling books were fiction yet were highly read and influential in the early 1970s counterculture. There’s now a 600 page biography of Casteneda - no foolin American Trickster. Putney Swope from the same period nailed it saying it’s “hipsters, tricksters, and finger snappin mamas.”

So it seems as I’m trying out a new minimalist phone (no email, no internet, no social media) and these quotations come to mind:

- Tis a gift to be simple - The Shakers

- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler - attributed to Einstein

- Occam’s Razor, entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity - William Ockham, 14C

- Simply, as simple as can be. Simply, the songs that you can sing - Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks

- Clarity often comes from not accumulating thoughts but from letting unecessary ones fall away - ChatGPT

What’s the meaning of all of this? How are the dots connected? What is emerging that might seek manifestation? What needs expression? IMHO receptivity wins the day.

He was featured in Peter France’s excellent book, Hermits. I’m currently reading The Way of the Dreamcatcher by S.T. Georgiou with its forward by Patrick Hart, Merton’s last secretary. Next up, Michael McGregor’s biography Pure Act - an uncommon life. Here’s some Robert Lax.

And in the beginning was love.

Love made a sphere.

All things grew within it.

The sphere then encompassed

beginnings and endings,

beginning and end.

Love had a compass

whose swirling dance traced out

a sphere of love in the void;

in the center thereof

rose a fountain.

Robert Lax - from Circus of the Sun

There is such a thing as unconditional expression
that does not come from self or other. It manifests out of nowhere
like mushrooms in a meadow, like hailstones, like thundershowers. - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche - True Perception - The Path of Dharma Art

The words contemplative (adjective) and contemplation (noun) can each have different meanings. They can mean thinking reflectively about a topic of interest such as a quality like courage, compassion, or forgiveness. My use of these words, however, has differed. I have primarily been referring to experiences that were not of my own making but seemed to originate from a transpersonal or transcendental source.

Another understanding of their meaning comes from Buddhism. In this view, contemplative experience does not arise from, nor is mediated by, thoughts and thinking. Rather, it emerges from a state of awareness that is non-identified with thought itself. One perceives from a contentless state of awareness.

As someone with a lifelong interest in visual experience, my contemplative and meditative interests eventually led me to ask a simple question: “What is a contemplative photograph?”

I often heard people say, “oh yes, that’s a very contemplative photograph,” when referring to a lovely sunset, a beautiful flower, or some other pleasing image. Yet such comments usually led me to ask further questions. How, exactly, is the photograph contemplative? What makes it contemplative beyond the fact that it’s of a beautiful sunset or flower?

Part of this inquiry arose from a print that has hung in my home for many years. It is a photograph by Eliot Porter entitled Intimate Landscape. The image depicts a simple woodland scene that, by conventional standards, is quite ordinary and unremarkable. Yet there was something about it that continually stopped me as I walked by, drawing my attention to it. The only word I could find for it was that it had presence.

Presence.

Again and again, that word presented itself.

How could a few simple trees reveal such a quality? What was I perceiving that went beyond the trees themselves? How could an ordinary woodland reveal a sense of presence?

These questions stayed with me and eventually became the doorway through which I entered an exploration of contemplative photography. (And in fact, had this experience even become a metaphor for life itself?)

He responds to a student’s question about an evolutionary understanding when one has transcended or included aspects of multiple faith traditions such as Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. Fr. Thomas recognizes this as an interreligious question and focuses on how the human condition obstructs awakening to one’s true nature. He says.

What the interspiritual journey is doing is not denying the human condition with its weakness, etc., but it’s trying to restore our true nature, as some would say, especially in the Eastern religions, to a revealed, natural state, e.g., one’s original face before you were born in Zen Buddhism.

What is this nature from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint?

Genesis says we were created in the image and likeness of God. This is not an image that can be lost nor can its beauty undergo diminution; nor shattered by the human condition, social influences, or our personal development. Moreover, further damage is done by our choices that seek illusory ideas of happiness which do not deliver. And an inadequacy of the will that even if we are going in the right direction on the spiritual journey, we can’t follow it consistently; and are like all of the heroes who confront struggles and challenges on a journey described in the great world myths. (See Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.)

Interreligious dialog has not gone deeply enough to be able to speak with any absolute assurance that the ultimate experience is numerically the same in all the religions. Yet there are striking similarities and dissimilarities that are very significant.

Did these come from cultural conditioning or from a revelation of higher intelligence? This can only be answered, by people who are having relatively similar experiences on the level of moving beyond a false self into the territory of the true self; and who have confronted the ultimate issue. And what’s that?

It’s the separate self sense. This is symbolized, and in fact, literally described in the story of Adam and Eve. They were doing fine when they were not thinking. But they started to think, how can I be God too? - of course on their own terms. There’s something in a creature that wants to be something.

So, as long as we want to be something, we’re attached to or identified with a separate self sense. We may look upon it as an object or as something else, but to let go of self, or to lose interest ultimately in a self, this is the ultimate battle and search for the Holy Grail that we were discussing earlier, i.e. the Grail, a metaphor for awakening to the true self. How can this happen? How to address the human cry of a consciousness that penetrates the innermost secrets of the Divine Life and knows it as absolute holiness, goodness, and love. The Gospel of Matthew provided guidance.

One who seeks to save their life will bring themself to ruin. But anyone who brings themself to nothing (no thing) will find out who they are.

Rock Me, Mercy - by Yusef Komunyakaa

The river stones are listening

because we have something to say.

The trees lean closer today.

The singing in the electrical woods

has gone dumb. It looks like rain

because it is too warm to snow.

Guardian angels, wherever you’re hiding,

we know you can’t be everywhere at once.

Have you corralled all the pretty wild

horses? The memory of ants asleep

in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur.

The magpies gaze at us, still

waiting. River stones are listening.

But all we can say now is,

Mercy, please, rock me.

It's message?

• The self we normally assume ourselves to be is largely a mental construction.

• Awareness space is empty of personal characteristics yet full of the world.

• The boundary between self and world is unified not separate - no subject/object.

• Awakening is about recognition not acquiring something new

• Direct experience matters more than beliefs and doctrines.

Its core message is, one's true nature is not a separate ego looking out at the world, but open awareness in which the world appears.
In my world someone recently broke a Jizo statue in my home. I said "don't worry, I'll glue it back on" but I decided to not reattach it. I like it as is - it’s become a reminder and symbol of nondual awareness.

The psychiatrist Victor Frankl wrote about our search for meaning and how one can lose most everything but survive by holding tight to meaning. He observed that people who found meaning, even in Nazi concentration camps were more likely to live than die and survive intolerable conditions.

And then there’s my mystical Mother. She often saw grand meanings that connected the appearance of seemingly unrelated, discrete dots and asked how they were connected? Despite years of scientific training, I suppose I inherited this maternal predisposition since recently these dots below appeared and left me wondering.

1. I bought 3 lbs of Bullybee’s Honey.

2. Let us put aside how different we are…and think of ourselves instead as bees, the hum of our wings coming right out of our hearts, lifting us into the Great Errand of our lives. Do you feel that? That silent hum of light in the middle of your chest? That’s religion, the religion of us bees, though we don’t know how to explain it.

   - Pir Elias Amidon (arrived in my inbox)

3. Last night, as I was sleeping…I dreamt

   that I had a beehive

   here in my heart.

   and the golden bees

   were making from my old sorrows

   white wax and sweet honey.

   - Antonio Machado (read in a meditation group)

Just sayin -

Chapter 5 - Like Father, Like Son: Roshi David Parks

Frederic Spiegelberg (1897–1994), a Stanford University professor of comparative religion, described Zen as the prototypic “religion of no-religion.” Zen, he suggested, places little emphasis on doctrine, belief, or formal religious structures. Instead, it points directly to experience: awakening, true nature, and ordinary life.

David, the son of psychiatrist John Parks, MD, has spent decades immersed in Zen practice, Christian ministry, and interspiritual dialogue. I have known of David for more than fifty years. His father introduced me to meditation when I was a college student, and when I interviewed David in 2020 during the first year of the COVID pandemic, it felt less like a podcast and more like reconnecting with family.

David is director of Bluegrass Zen, a satellite center of the Pacific Zen Institute, located on a small farm near Waco, Kentucky. A graduate of the elite Centre College, he was ordained in the United Church of Christ and served for many years as a church pastor in Santa Rosa, California. There he became deeply involved in Zen practice. His approach reflects a deep trust in life’s generosity. He understands Zen koans not as intellectual puzzles but as vehicles of transformation—gateways that open heart and mind to a freer, fuller life. He has also explored the sayings and parables of Jesus as koans.

When I asked David what makes someone contemplative, David did not begin with techniques. He spoke of growing up in a household where both parents meditated. “It was unusual in the 1950s and 1960s,” he reflected. “But looking back, I realize there was a grounding in our home that many people never receive.”

We then turned to Thomas Merton’s famous experience at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky. Standing on a busy street corner, Merton suddenly realized that he loved all the people around him and that there was no real separation between himself and the strangers passing by. Merton later described it as awakening from “the dream of separateness.”

For David, that insight captures the essence of contemplation. Contemplative awakening is the realization that we are not separate from life. We belong to it completely. What we thought was “my life” is inseparable from the larger life in which we all participate.

As David put it, “This is my life. This is the life I’m having. And I’m not separate from that life.”

This experience cannot be fully captured in words. In Zen, this reluctance to rely on language is central. David pointed to the traditional story of the Buddha standing before an assembly on Vulture Peak. Instead of giving a sermon, the Buddha simply held up a flower. One disciple, Mahakashyapa, smiled. No words were exchanged, yet Zen tradition holds that a profound transmission occurred.

The classic Zen description says this transmission was “outside the scriptures, not founded on words and letters, pointing directly to the human mind.”

This helps explain why Spiegelberg called Zen a “religion of no-religion.” When I asked David about that phrase, he responded simply: “If you have the experience, why do you need all that?”

Beliefs, doctrines, and theological formulations may point toward reality, but they are not reality itself. Zen invites direct discovery. David sees this same dynamic within Christianity. The “I Am” sayings in the Gospel of John, he suggested, are not declarations of personal importance but invitations into a deeper reality. “I am the bread of life” and “I am the living water” point beyond individual identity toward a more universal dimension of being. This perspective naturally led us to Bluegrass Zen.

The foundation is meditation. Unlike forms of meditation that exclude distractions or concentrate on a single object, Zen meditation welcomes everything: thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, pleasant experiences, and unpleasant ones.

“If all of this is one piece,” David explained, “what would you exclude?”

The practice is simple but demanding. One notices whatever arises without grasping, judging, or pushing it away. By allowing experience to unfold naturally, the practitioner gradually discovers a spaciousness larger than any particular thought or feeling.

Bluegrass Zen also emphasizes koan practice. Popular culture often presents koans as riddles: What is the sound of one hand clapping? What was your face before you were born? David sees them differently. A koan is not a puzzle to solve but an invitation to encounter reality more directly.

He compared a koan to a symbol rather than a sign. A sign points to something else. A symbol participates in the reality it represents. A koan becomes a doorway into the vastness of life itself.

As one sits with a koan, unexpected emotions, memories, and insights may arise. The instruction remains the same: notice them, but do not cling. Eventually the koan begins to work on the practitioner. It may reappear while working in the garden, digging a fence post, or performing ordinary tasks. The koan becomes less something one thinks about and more something that lives within.

In this respect, koan practice resembles contemplative prayer. Just as a sacred word in Centering Prayer may recede into silence while continuing its work within the heart, the koan continues its transformative activity beneath conscious awareness. This brings us to one of Zen’s most important themes: not knowing.

David cited a classic Zen story in which a pilgrim tells a master, “I don’t know.” The master replies, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

For modern people, who often equate knowledge with mastery and control, this teaching can seem paradoxical. Yet labels and concepts often create distance from reality. When we stop imposing assumptions, life becomes fresh again.

One obstacle to this openness is our attachment to identity. We become convinced that we know who we are: a parent, a minister, a professional, a success, or a failure. These self-descriptions can become barriers to deeper realization.

“Far better,” David suggested, “not to know who you are.”

Beneath these identities lies a more spacious reality. As we encounter it, qualities such as compassion, grace, and love arise naturally. They do not need to be imposed from outside.

This has practical consequences. Spiritual realization is not withdrawal from the world. Genuine realization leads to fuller participation in life. Zen traditions speak of bringing insight into everyday activities, relationships, and character. Otherwise, what good is it?

Near the end of our conversation, I asked David what Zen might offer a world in need of healing.

His answer was simple and challenging:“Maybe I’m not separate.”

Political divisions, ideological conflicts, and personal grievances all depend upon creating an “other.” Zen challenges this assumption. Even those with whom we strongly disagree remain part of the same fabric of life. This does not eliminate disagreement or action. It means opposition need not become hostility.

For David, this insight also underlies interspiritual dialogue. Different traditions use different languages, symbols, and practices, yet many point toward the same realization of interconnectedness.

He illustrated this with a saying of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a woman carrying a jar of grain home from the market. Unnoticed by her, the jar cracks and the grain spills out along the road. Only when she arrives home does she discover that the jar is empty. David regarded this as a koan. What remains when everything we use to define ourselves falls away?

As our conversation drew to a close, David offered a final image from the Zen master Linji: “There is a solitary brightness. It knows how to listen to the teachings, understand the teachings, and teach the teachings. You are that solitary brightness.”

He immediately paired this Zen image with the words of Jesus: “You are the light of the world.” Not one person. Not a select few. Not only saints and sages. All of us.

Perhaps that insight best summarizes David’s understanding of Zen and contemplation. Beneath our differences, identities, beliefs, and divisions, there is a light already shining. The work of contemplation is not to create it, but to awaken to it. As David remarked near the end of our conversation, “Zen comes alive in you.” Indeed, there is no other place it can come alive.

To be continued…

Yesterday was Pentecost Sunday in the Christian tradition. My teacher, Trappist monk Thomas Keating once said, some say the holy dove was not the most accurate symbol because the Spirit was the silent, moving air beneath it.

Here’s our interspiritual Charis Circle reading from last night as I reflect upon a visit in 1997 to the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse in Kentucky. Sometimes the mystical appears in solitude by a small lake.

Last night, as I was sleeping,

I dreamt—blessed vision!—

that a fountain flowed

here in my heart.

I said: Why, Oh water, have you come

along this secret waterway, spring of new life,

which I have never tasted?

Last night, as I was sleeping,

I dreamt—blessed vision!—

that I had a beehive

here in my heart.

and the golden bees

were making from my old sorrows

white wax and sweet honey.

Last night, as I was sleeping,

I dreamt—blessed vision!—

a fiery sun shone

here in my heart.

It was fiery because it gave heat

from a red hearth,

and it was sun because it gave light

and because it made me weep.

Last night, as I was sleeping,

I dreamt—blessed vision!—

that it was God I had

here in my heart.

Antonio Machado, translation Ivan M. Granger