We sit together in the late day, as the sun is passing. We are at rest, and there is a shared heartbeat between us. A shared recognition of consciousness in our eyes. We have relaxed into what is fundamental to our being: the harmonizing field of the heart, the coherence of the present, the surrender of distraction and self-consciousness. Absent our self-centered mental worlds, awareness is simply a light that allows this moment's own transparency to energy and form and emptiness; to the sighing of the sunset fields. And to the undefined reality of You and I awake to each other; which is only the universe's latest recognition and celebration of itself.

Yet how often are we locked into our thoughts of past and future, near and far, theory and explanation, fears and plans; thoughts of he said/she said, thoughts of better and worse, thoughts of self, thoughts of previous thoughts.? What do they have in common? They are all thoughts. They are all an imaginary film in which I live most of my life, in which awareness spends its time like a lost child in some- one else's movie, beholden to the script.

When awareness returns to itself, rests in its own luminous nature and its home in emptiness, reality is wide open, Now the passing day turns from the early gloaming, the gentle and still sparkling wash of post sunset pinks and peacocks and gold-lined grays; and the blue hour begins, slowly darkening into purple and black. But there is nothing fixed, nothing solid, here. There is awareness. This wash of color and form, these transformations of the air, are the transparent shades of an infinite moment; the darkening woods are a lover of infinite space and depth. Now there is a screech, now a rustle. The single note of a bird -- or the wind chime -- or a distant car. Or a heartbeat. Or of love recognizing itself once again.

Reality begins with this moment of awareness. Where else will it arise? Will it be the reality of the film or the reality of open sky and deep woods; the real- ity of the dream images or the reality of empty awareness; the reality that beckons newly and infinitely to us or the reality that is already prescribed? It begins here, in the moment of shadows, and in the sunrise.

When awareness recognizes and relaxes in its own openness, it illuminates all arising content without grasping or labeling, without pushing it away. When awareness does not recognize its own nature, its own openness, it is instead hypnotized by the arising content. That is like the tug of the cart pulling the horse: when awareness identifies with all the random or pre-conditioned contents, thoughts, representations, and projections of the mind that every moment drag us, and structure our experience in fixed ways. We may believe whatever is on the "tele- vision," in which even the present moment is seen through the screen of our mental representation.

This latter is the world as we routinely know it -- with our experience pre- scribed for us. This is called normal. It is is our default, or "automatic," setting. We may even say it is our "sleep" setting. However, if we are able to withdraw our attention from the screen, we may re-allow a receptive openness to the field of experience right now, neither pre-conceived nor pre-judged. This choice often re- quires a conscious "manual setting." This openness of attention is available to any of us any time, and may be practiced.

This faculty of openness obviously serves us in allowing a more present, spontaneous, and creative response to our everyday experience and to each other. It is also the beginning of what we may call contemplative openness; when the awareness is allowed to remain in a state of relaxed and receptive presence. It is not a static presence, but one which has an active and genuine interest in under- standing -- opening to -- the truth of things; an interest which does not enlist the mind's cleverness or projections. Rather it relies on a deeper organ of listening, or receptive awareness, that is more coherent than the perseverations of the mind. Then, this moment emerges as an infinite sea of possibility and revelation that opens itself to us in accordance with our availability; that is, in accordance with our own willingness and capacity to open to it. It will disrobe for us layer by layer to reveal its naked body and its heart -- insofar as we gradually disrobe from our layers of mental preoccupation and conditioning.

Here we have the invitation and the opportunity to drop through many layers of externality, separation, projection, and identification with our personally and culturally inherited ways of defining reality. It is simply an intent and sincere listening into the heart of this moment. This is both the cultivated field of our open- ness, and, we might say, the growing "static electricity," in which the lightning of revelation, of sudden illumination, may strike. We may say that our growing coherence gives way to our transparency. That is how it works. And then we know something directly about the intimate nature of reality -- however paradoxical to consensus reality -- with an authority and confidence that all the other mental faculties are not capable of.

The depth and fullness of the world lies in what we do not routinely see or feel, and have forgotten. But this knowing is not only about the physical form and texture of things – it is a seeing deeply into, and through, the world of appearances itself, to palpate the living flesh beneath the skin of our projections and concepts. It is like palpating the warm flesh of non-duality through the cold skin of separateness. It is a relaxation in awareness. It is the receptive attention that allows the more holistic truth of this moment to reveal itself to our deeper organ of knowing.

.....This is the context in which the shifts of experience described in this book have occurred. They may happen spontaneously, as many people have testified, apart from any formal or deliberate practice. The "shift" cannot be contrived or "accomplished" by anyone. It arises as a slip, an accident in consciousness, in a moment when our separative scaffolding can no longer be sustained. But, as it has been said, meditation -- contemplative openness -- makes us more accident prone.

Although my own tendencies, and ongoing practice from an early age, predisposed my availability to the experiences that I will recount and comment on in this book, they are not the province of one person as opposed to another. They constitute the greater landscape, or context, of all the other personal landscapes we each choose to become absorbed in; and that greater landscape becomes apparent only as we relax our preoccupation with our manufactured landscapes for a while.

I think of when I was a boy and would travel with my parents on long camping trips up through New England, into the maritime provinces of Canada and elsewhere. As we traveled through this countryside, my parents would make continual comments on how beautiful the landscape was. But my brother and I were surviving these long car trips by being buried in comic books in the back seat . My parents would express dismay that we were not enjoying what was outside the car window. But we had more compelling and stimulating landscapes for our attention -- the landscape of comic books. I can remember glimpses of the countryside fleeting by, but I did not choose -- I was not naturally ready -- to make it part of my story. Yet the actual landscape was always equally there for me; and, of course, I later came to love it. The landscape I describe herein is also always fleeting by for all of us, though the prevailing landscapes of the mind are usually too compelling.

But that landscape will be there for each of us when all the other land- scapes are gone. It is what we are.

Our vulnerability reminds us that we are never truly independent, but always exist in a field of reciprocity. Thus reciprocity is a deep spiritual principle. And its understanding also arises in the context of any mature and intact culture that has preserved wise counsel as to how we should function in human community. (Unfortunately, to find examples of reciprocal social models, we must look to some of the indigenous cultures that are vanishing in the wake of our hyper- individualism.) Hence the Nguni Bantu philosophy of ubuntu, and its teaching "umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" which translates as "a person is a person through other persons;" or "because we are, I am." Or the Tzutzujil Maya term, kaslimaal, which refers to the mutuality by which we enliven, or light the spark, in each other; and which also translates as a profound mutual indebtedness.

This is not only enlightened social philosophy. It is true right down to the level of our neurobiology. As we have said, the neural network that allows us to directly experience our own felt sense of self is activated by our first experience of eye contact and attunement to others. Stated again, this inner "social" nerve net- work that grows in response to our relationship to others is also the nerve network that enables us to perceive a direct meaningful sense of our own being. Thus we are a gift from others. We "become a person through other persons."

This principle is true not only of our human relations; it is fundamentally true in terms of the interdependent origination of all things, impermanence, and the emptiness of any fixed self -- all as an expression of 'inexhaustible non-exclusiveness.' This is the divine hologram, the Buddhist dharmadhatu -- or the 'mind of God' -- in which all things embrace and embody each other in an infinite display of reciprocity and nurturance. That is the field out of which we are born. And it is a field that, even within the structure of our life in time, enjoins us to the experience of being fully nurtured and of then being able to fully nurture.

Thus we may see here how this metaphysical principle manifests at the heart of a mental-emotional principle, a social principle, and, as well, an ecological principle. This principle was demonstrated to me repeatedly and directly by the experiences of an intra-penetrating totality alive in service to itself in the aspect of all others. And whether it was revealed as the mutual embrace of mirror-like being (as in the chapter Dancing at a Festival) or birth into creation as the function of creative love itself (as in the chapter I and My Father are One), our absolute being and our evolutionary drama are the same.

At the mental-emotional level, the immediate recognition of our true mutuality as human beings is compromised by certain primitive hormonal imperatives (which we are technically capable of overriding), by personal and historical trauma, and by the reifications of our separateness in the form of greed, anger, and ignorance. And further by the mind's acquired categories of physical and social difference, amplified by fears, family conditioning, cultural history, stories, propaganda, and institutional structure. This, in turn, is exploited by the reactive self- interest of others: and, now, by the destructive and disembodied algorithms of the demonic online matrix, which amplifies our delusive conceits. This profound social illness, and all of its consequences, is made possible in the moment of our development that we abandon the immediacy and direct experience of our empathy circuits for the virtual constructs of our programmable mental circuitry. Whereas when we are able to rest in the open field of empathetic relationship, no internal conditioning or external propaganda will turn us from our immediate shared presence with others. Propaganda has no place to fall.

This open field also characterizes our primordial relationship to the natural world, a luminous field of reciprocity that our human consciousness once participated in. What was made clear to me in all my experiences was that all creation is woven of one conscious fiber, or reality. And that fiber is a mutually interpenetrating totality. When in my last experience I witnessed, and entered into, the creation of worlds, there was no separation between my soul and the world soul; it was one creation in which consciousness was at play, and born of the same love. Put simply, the earth is luminous truth, and reflects back to us the truth that is also our own being. Hence it is also a field of mutual presence and respect. And it speaks in a language of being that suspends the verbal representations of our thinking mind.

The empathy field, and the natural recognition of mutuality and indebted- ness that was once true of our indigenous relationship to the earth, has been lost to the progressive self-centered cultural, technological, and mental structures that at first distance us from -- and then manically and depressively compensate for the loss of -- our indigenous connection to the land and to the life of all species; even as we go on destroying. Our capacity for objectification propels our technology, but it has proceeded apart from any reciprocity with the earth, or, for that matter, with the heart. When we as humans hold to our notion of separation, superiority, or that we alone are truly living or conscious, we confine ourselves to a very small world; and we are dangerous to the network of living beings. Or, as I wrote in a very relevant chapter of a previous book, "No matter how much mastery I gain, if I've not learned the principle of reciprocity, I'm out on a limb." *Moonlight Leaning Against an Old Rail Fence.............p 220

The point is that the dysfunctions, disharmonies, and disasters that we experience or enable, both in our personal, social and ecological lives and in the lives of our civilizations, are based on that same obscuration of the reciprocal field of consciousness. Our separative mode of consciousness is naturally come by, but dysfunctionally entrenched, and often addictively defended. It has its own limited operational value; but it sunders the web of human community, and plunders the web of life. And it cannot restore the intrinsic joy of our true being.

Genesis

I said “heart,” and the heart gathered like a galaxy at the center of life.

I said “earth,” and the heart was encompassed

in a great womb of infinite fecundity, dark and echoing with unseen presence.

I said tree. And stone.

And with the speaking each emerged out of the womb of the earth, which was my body.

I was the body of all.

And when I said “deer” there was a leaping,

and it was a leaping that tickled the earth, and tickled my body,

and space gave way for forests; and mountains arose for the deer to bound on.

And I said crow, and frog, and raspberries – I said fruits and thorns –

and my body made room for them all.

With each word, my body shifted to allow the shape and energies of life.

It sighed and released. It loved and it let go.

And as it sat up straighter to accommodate, the bones and organs stretched wider –

till the sky became my breath, and the sunset became the first smile, and the sunrise became the first laughter.

We human beings work hard to be "at home," yet we tend to suffer from a deep sense of not being at home. When we are at home, we feel directly connected, through our participation, in the cycles of earth and heaven. Our wholeness, our integrity, is not other than the fruit of our reciprocal relationship to the critical forces of our existence. Our indigenous cultures thus maintained a certain direct relationship to home – though it could be traumatically lost. In many ways, the progress of civilization has been the progress of homelessness. And when we are homeless, we tend to expand, move out, and displaces others from their homes. When we lose our integrity, we lose our capacity for reciprocity. When we lose our reciprocity, we lose an essential ingredient of our integrity.

Integrity and Reciprocity constitute the fulfillment of the integrative and relational nature of our human lives and psychology, and of the integrative and relational nature of our own heartfields. It is also the nature of the Primordial Self, or God. It is the essential meaning of the trinitarian understanding of reality that expresses itself in different language and imagery in all spiritual traditions. The One-ness of Integrity and Reciprocity – of the For-Itself and the For-Others – is the expressive play of the mystery of non-duality. To be truly at at home is to be truly at home in both.

Today, in the face of the social, cultural, technological, and psychological momentum of distraction, alienation, and homelessness, we are challenged to the profound inner work of being at home, for the sake of ourselves and for others. Some of us recognize this as a "lifestyle issue," as we try to prioritize our fundamental commitment to the land, and to community. Deeply and inwardly, however, it is an act of the heart and of the attention on our inner indigenous ground. It is no less than Jesus' two primary commandments. And because so much of our attention, activity, desires, habits, and identity is geared to surviving and making our way in a world of homelessness, it is even a sacrificial act. To take this meditative or prayerful moment to rest again at home in the humble ground of our intention and openness – to taste of the foundational integrity and reciprocity indigenous to our relationship to being, or spirit –is, for this moment, to surrender the learned projections and agendas of the mind, and the ego's separative pretensions, grasping, or resistance it deems necessary to survival.

We can do this. Though it is a non sequitur to the restlessness of our agendas, we can stop and actively give ourselves a moment to establish our direct sense of home with the ground beneath us; with the earth beneath and around us. There are no short cuts here; we must take the time, the attention, and the love. We must take the time and attention to reestablish our sense of home in our bodies and in our breath. We must stop and surrender our attention there. We must make our home in our feeling sensations, not to own or to trample, but to walk lightly, to breathe and to trust the landscape. We walk and rest even there where our deepest griefs arise, or our sensations of shame, or our fears of death. We breathe them in and we offer them back. We make our home in the simple capacity of awareness that illumines our experience.

As we expand our capacity to be at home with what is, we relax the mind's mechanisms of separation, denial, and alienation from experience; the mechanisms underpinning our incoherence of body, mind, and emotions; the incoherence of our conscious and unconscious behaviors and recognitions that necessitate our projections and our reactivity. Our compassion invites, as we have said, our unintegrated parts to come in from the cold. And even here, as we deepen the foundations of our integrity, it is not the final accomplishment or achievement of our separate personhood. We will continually lean into the immensity of our experience –pain, shame, vulnerability –that we cannot ourselves contain or master except by moment to moment surrendering it to a higher relationship - call it a higher self or higher power. It is a surrender to the nature of reciprocity itself, only through which can our integrity ever be complete. This is the integral nature of meditation and prayer. After all, it is not until we experience the primordial Other as our own being that we will truly surrender our separation and fear of otherness or death in all its forms.

Finally, it can be said, we are at home in that relationship which is also the very ground of our being.

At the Edge of the Great Marsh

On the late afternoon marsh, a sea of reed grass trembles in the least breeze.

This is the pregnant hush of a great voice. This is the language of the slow.

Here in the awake world is a mutual respect. The grasses and their witness

are of one intelligence. The mosquitos nod and give safe passage.

We are each of the other. Only this silent.... hearing begins.

Only this slow.... the earth moves. There is no forbidden door,

but we do not seek admittance; we do not bow in entry before the great open.

There is a community as vast and intimate as space, and we are its lost children.

I have come back to my home by the great pine at the edge of the great marsh.

Lone spider threads glisten silver in the late sun like slender streaks of moonlight.

All share one tremulous anticipation as sun paints the marsh from descending angles,

and the air grows cool: The Great Mother Bear is coming in her dark robes

to hold close the trembling tribes; to wear them as her own fur.

To keep them to the world's end. To be shown through with the new day.