Quest Magazine

J. D. Walker

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there . . . .
. . . for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by W. B. Yeats

One of my favorite branches of lore is hermitage literature: the stories, legends, and poetry handed down from generations of hermits across the world. Perhaps its fascination lies in the metaphor of the house as an image of the householder, or of the particular kind of life lived within its walls. I picked up a bamboo paint brush for the first time one day in my early twenties and discovered the idea of the hermitage standing in it, smiling, as if it had just been waiting for me to open that door.

When decades later I declared my intention to follow the ancients to the mountain for a solitary retreat in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, this decision was met with joy and support on the Buddhist side of my life, and astonishment and dismay, deepening to outright protest, on the Western side. Some said I was not suited to the enclosed life. Zeus said he would not permit me to go if he had anything to say about it. Listening to my litany of reasons, "Too much 'me' in it!" he rumbled. Some acclaimed the virtues of the active life and opined that to make such a retreat was to shirk responsibility. One even insisted that East and West ought never meet.

When one commits oneself to a sacred task or spiritual purpose, the commitment seems to activate fate in a sometimes most trying way. Things unaccountably change; things or places or people long known and loved may fall away, at least temporarily, until nothing remains of familiar touchstones. One finds oneself in a condition of unknowing and can only follow where the inevitable leads. Like yeast that acts inexorably according to its nature to leaven or raise the loaf, so this commitment leavens one's life. It is subtle but produces an irresistible transformation. If fate, or karma, informs the realm of action, then commitment could be called the engine of fate's fulfilment.

One goes or is carried, whether or not one understands precisely why, exactly where one is needed, with exactly the gifts that the fate requires. Fate itself is always flowing on, driven by what Buddhist texts call the red wind of karma. It is in our bloodstream; our minds and our speech are full of it--yet, until we choose it we have no power to navigate the currents and shoals of the river, like Jonah running from his calling until the belly of the great fish became inevitable. When one chooses to respond, life begins again on a new footing. We learn, sooner or later, to recognize our fate when it comes, as a signpost of our personal purpose or destiny.

The world and the hermit's hill called back and forth to each other through my heart for many years, as I meditated and pondered and made any small retreats I could, both East and West. At forty-six I wrapped up my life in California and headed for the East Coast, where I had been offered a place to make my hermitage. A generous household had bought the house across the road from our lama's meditation center. When he got a look at the room over the garage, he thought it would be ideal for someone to enter the traditional three-year retreat, far enough from the house for solitude, surrounded by miles of state and regional forest. I would meditate, and they would provide the room, wood for the woodstove, and weekly grocery shopping. Together, as Milarepa sang, patron sand hermit would use their karmic connection to walk the path toward enlightenment.

By that time, I had become at last a bit like my new forest home, cut to the bone to feed the furnaces of a steel mill in the valley, now decades gone. Like my hill, my life, not protesting too much, fed the monster of modernity, puffing out the smoke and fumes of what passed for progress. Busy among the grey pavements, I slowly ceased to inhabit my "deep heart's core" and the inward hill with its imagined hermitage. And perhaps that loosing was a necessary prelude to my eventual finding.

Maryland's Catoctin Mountain is to my Sierra-formed California eye a mere rocky hillock, but local custom insists on calling it a mountain. Its forest is new, the hill having been logged to the last tree and replanted perhaps eighty years ago. I have lived here, a backyard hermit, for seven years. This was, I now think, inevitable, given another hill that intervened in my fate twenty years ago. I fell finally and irretrievably in love with a hermit's hut and its lore during the four years I lived in Taiwan, studying and practicing in theCh'an Buddhist tradition, the ancient school that is the mother of Japanese Zen, now so familiar to us in the West.

Dharma Cloud Ch'an Temple stands among its pines and gardens nearly at the top of a vertical mountain clad in primordial bamboo forest, leaping sheer out of a remote river valley in central Taiwan. Beyond the temple, nestled in a shaded clearing just below the peak, was the tiny cement and brick hut of a hermit, its wide red-painted wooded doors facing a bit of grass and a simple flower garden. The hermit, named Mr. Lin, had been a soldier in his youth, one of the many men who found themselves stranded on Taiwan after the painful Chinese civil war that brought Mao to power. He claimed to have become a Buddhist "by accident," having had a spontaneous inner experience that led him more and more deeply into the practice of meditation.

As students of the same master, Mr. Lin and I had met before in the city, but I had not yet taken up his invitation to see his mountain retreat. The invisible hut on the mountain drew me somehow, steeped as I had become in the work of the poets and painters of China's great periods, when the hermitic life also flourished both as an ideal and as an actual way of living. Tang poet Wang Wei(699 -759) wrote of his retreat at Mount Chung-nan:

My heart in middle age found the Way,
And I came to dwell at the foot of this mountain.
When the spirit moves, I wander alone
Amid beauty that is all for me.
I will walk till the water checks my path,
Then sit and watch the rising clouds
And some day meet an old woodcutter
And talk and laugh and never return.

In his own middle age, Mr. Lin had made his hermitage here among fruit trees on the site of an older hermitage gone to ruin long before. A companion  and I set out to visit him at the end of a day's sunshine, pursued by black clouds that we did not take seriously enough. Up the winding path from Dharma Cloud we went, until suddenly, as happens in those mountains in the rainy season, we were soaked and covered with red mud to our knees between one step and the next. We had gone too far to turn back easily, so on we sloshed, singing in the rain.

Although the arrival of two drenched American women on his remote door step must have been surprising, he welcomed us warmly and set about making us comfortable. Soon, wearing his old clothes and wrapped in blankets while our clothing dried on a large upturned basket over his fire pot, we were deep in cups of good tea and laughter and dharma talk. We sat by the open doors of his two-room hut watching the rain cascade off the wide eaves, chuckling away down the brick walk and dissolving the day into mist.

He would not hear of us slipping and sliding back down to the temple in the dusk, so he cooked us a simple vegetarian supper. After we had cleaned up our bowls and chopsticks, the storm had passed by and the night was fragrant with the flowers in his small garden. The temple bell below us sent its one hundred and eight deep tones across the steep valleys, as temple bells have done for centuries of evenings. Local legend has it that, when it first rang out, the voice of that bell converted all the local people around to the Buddha dharma.

My hermitic future was sealed as Mr. Lin turned on the single dim light bulb that hung concealed among the leaves of a tree outside his door, and in his grey cotton robes proceeded with his nightly practice of Tai Chi Chuan in its shadowy light. This all seemed like an old ink painting come to life, a poem breathing its original breath into my heart with a breath taking familiarity. As his movements flowed seamlessly, contemplatively one into another, I silently vowed that someday I too would have a hut of my own. Fate was as ever listening, but the hut would be a long time coming.

A true fate needs to be fed. In the course of reading every account I could get my hands on about retreats and hermits and huts, I devoured poems inscribed on paintings of solitary dwellings among wild mountains, and the life and songs of the Tibetan poet-sage Milarepa, the early Christian desert Fathers and Mothers, Sufi tales, and the stories of the eighty-four Mahasiddhas of the early periods of Buddhism in India. In the accounts of those great enlightened adepts of India, I found that my backyard hermitage is not by any means the first in Buddhist history, however uncommon it may be in the present-day West. The following tale about a weaver, for example, illustrates how a fate may wait to be discovered and fulfilled until all the conditions are right.

The weaver Tantipa lived a long and very successful life, amassing great wealth, which he passed on in time to his sons and their wives. As he grew old and senile, his daughters-in-law built him a little grass hut in his garden and fed him there, so as to avoid the embarrassment of his decrepit presence. There he stayed, and one evening, perhaps by chance, a wandering guru approached the weaver's sons for food. They invited him to stay, and because he would not sleep under a roof, they offered him a place in the garden.

The old weaver heard a stranger's voice in his quiet refuge and called out to see who it was. As the old man recounted the story of his familial woes, the guru suddenly interrupted and asked Tantipa if he wanted the Dharma. The weaver replied, "I want it." Thus he met his master and his exile became his retreat; the thatched hut in his garden served by his children became his perfectly open, perfectly concealed hermitage. He committed his teacher's instructions to memory and practiced them secretly for twelve years, attaining many qualities unobserved by anybody, until late one night, having forgotten to take him his meal, one of his daughters-in-law entered the garden and observed a brilliant light within the backyard hut.

To her amazement, the old man appeared surrounded by celestial maidens and many delicacies. She fetched her husband and his guests, who ran to see, and by morning word had spread and all the citizens of the town came to do reverence to the old weaver. He came forth, transforming his body into that of a sixteen-year-old youth, gleaming with rays of light. He became famous everywhere and did numberless deeds for the benefit of living beings.

Without the seeming chance of the guru's arrival there is no story. Buddhism claims that there is no such thing as chance, as nothing can exist without a sufficient cause, whether we recognize it or not. We tend to resist this idea, thinking that if something is fated, it must be predestined, and predestination renders life meaningless and devoid of flavor and spontaneity. But it is exactly fate--perhaps the term providence might suffice us better--that produces the sufferings and joys that often reveal the deepest meaning of life.

Fate is the source of all movement, story, myth. Being by nature inevitable,fate can only be. It acts as a lens that heats up the waters of unconscious habit we float in; it intensifies experience to the point where we must choose. Because of it, we act; and pushed beyond the limits of self, we come at last to wholeness. Without its commanding question, "Do you want this?" we would remain peacefully sitting in the garden, asleep, the slaves of permanence. Perhaps we need fate to fill a lack in ourselves.

Sitting in my own hermitage one day not long ago, telling a lama the story of how I came to be in retreat, I wondered at how it had found me, how all that was needed had somehow come, and all that was being held onto had almost automatically fallen away. "You decided!" he replied, as if I should have seen so obvious a thing. And like many others before me, having said "yes," I had to endure all that followed, for the sake of what that "yes" would open.

One last hermit tale I offer, in service of the most important element in the ever unfolding, demanding path of those who take the hand of fate. The Zen poet Basho made a six-month hermitage in the latter part of 1690, on a hillside overlooking Lake Biwa east of Kyoto. There he found an abandoned hut called the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling. This curious name repays reflection. The poet likens his fragile refuge to the nest of the grebe, a water bird that attaches its floating home to a reed so that the current will not wash it away.

The wanderer finds himself musing on his rootless ways, expending his feeling on flowers and birds, keeping company with his shadow by moonlight, and contemplating his wholehearted commitment to the poet's fate. He acknowledges without complaint that we all live in a "phantom dwelling" and concludes his account of his hermitage with a haiku:

Among these summer trees
a Formosan oak--
something to count on

Basho recalls us to what we already know--the thing we can count on is just this phantom dwelling, representing equally the flowing, changeful nature of fate and of the self we cling to like the little grebe's slender reed. What else is thereafter all to look to, if we do not trust in the gifts of fate--even the flood--as our homeward road? Thus does fate become our fortune: a blessing opening us into new worlds, an invitation to ripening. Arise and go now!

J. D. Walker is an artist in the Chinese ink painting tradition and a hermit in the Tibetan Drikung Kagyud tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. Her article "A Poem in a Brushstroke" appeared in the Quest of March-April 2000.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there . . . .
. . . for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

By John Welwood

WHY IS IT SO EASY to see the value of psychological work for Western people, yet so hard to imagine traditional Asian people utilizing the services of a psychotherapist? And why do most of the Eastern spiritual teachers I know have so much difficulty understanding psychological work and its potential value fora spiritual practitioner? What accounts for this disparity?

In presenting my hypotheses about this, I am not trying to advance a full-blown anthropological theory. Nor do I wish to idealize the societies of ancient India or Tibet, which certainly have many serious problems of their own. Rather, my intention is to point out some (admittedly generalized) social and cultural differences that may help us consider how we in the West may have a somewhat different course of psycho spiritual development to follow than people in the traditional cultures where the great meditative practices first arose and flourished.

Some would argue that psychotherapy is a sign of how spoiled or narcissistic Westerners are--that we can afford the luxury of delving into our psyches and fiddling with our personal problems while Rome burns all around. Yet though industrial society has alleviated many of the grosser forms of physical pain, it has also created difficult kinds of personal and social fragmentation that were unknown in premodern societies, generating a new kind of psychological suffering that led to the development of modern psychotherapy.

Traditional Asian culture did not engender the pronounced split between mind and body that we in the West know so well. In giving priority to the welfare of the collective, Asian societies also did not foster the division between self and other, individual and society, that is endemic to the Westernmind. There was neither a generation gap nor the pervasive social alienation that has become a hallmark of modern life.

In this sense, the villages and extended families of traditional India or Tibet actually seem to have built sturdier ego structures, not so debilitated by the inner divisions--between mind and body, individual and society, parent and child, or weak ego and harsh, punishing superego--characteristic of the modern self. The "upper stories" of spiritual development in Asian culture could be built on a more stable and cohesive "ground floor" human foundation.

Early child-rearing practices in some traditional Asian cultures, while often far from ideal, were in some ways more wholesome than in the modern West. Asian mothers often had a strong dedication to providing their children with strong, sustained early bonding. Young Indian and Tibetan children, for instance, are continually held, often sharing their parents' bed for their first two or three years. As Alan Roland, a psychoanalyst who spent many years studying cross-cultural differences in Asian and Western self-development, describes Indian child rearing:

Intense, prolonged maternal involvement in the first four or five years with the young child, with adoration of the young child to the extent of treating him or her as godlike, develops a central core of heightened well-being in the child. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, servants, older sisters and cousin-sisters are all involved in the pervasive mirroring that is incorporated into an inner core of extremely high feelings of esteem. . . . Indian childrearing and the inner structuralization of heightened esteem are profoundly psychologically congruent with the basic Hindu concept that the individual soul is essentially the godhead (atman-brahman). A heightened sense of inner regard and the premise that a person can strive to become godlike are strongly connected. . . . This is in contrast to the Western Christian premise of original sin.

According to Roland, this nurturing quality of the Indian extended family helps the child develop an ego structure whose boundaries are "on the whole more flexible and permeable than in most Westerners," and "less rigorously drawn."(One telling sign of the difference between child rearing influences East and West is that Tibetan teachers, who traditionally begin compassion practices by instructing students to regard all sentient beings as their mothers, have been surprised and dismayed by the difficulty many American students have in using their mothers as a starting point for developing compassion.)

Growing up in extended families, Asian children are also exposed to a wide variety of role models and sources of nurturance, even if the primary parents are not very available. Tibetan tribal villages, for instance, usually regarded the children as belonging to everyone, and everyone's responsibility. Extended families mitigate the parents' tendency to possess their children psychologically. By contrast, parents in nuclear families often have more investment in "This is my child; my child is an extension of me"--which contributes to narcissistic injury and intense fixations on parents that persist for many Westerners throughout their lives.

Certain developmental psychologists have argued that children with deficient parenting hold on to the internalized traces of their parents more rigidly inside themselves. This might explain why the Tibetans I know do not seem to suffer from the heavy parental fixations that many Westerners have. Their self/other (object relational) complexes would not be as tight or conflicted as for Westerners who lack good early bonding and who spend their first eighteen years in an isolated nuclear family with one or two adults, who themselves are alienated from both folk wisdom and spiritual understanding. Asian children would be less burdened by the emotional plague of modern civilization: ego weakness, the lack of a grounded, confident sense of oneself and one's capacities.

In addition to fostering strong mother-infant bonding, intact extended families, and a life attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, traditional Asian societies maintained the sacred at the center of social life. A culture that provides individuals with shared myths, meanings, religious values, and rituals provides a source of support and guidance that helps people make sense of their lives. In all these ways, a traditional Asian child would likely grow up more nurtured by what pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott called the "holding environment"--a context of love, support, belonging, and meaning that contributes to a basic sense of confidence and to healthy psychological development in general. By contrast, children today who grow up in fragmented families, glued to television sets that continually transmit images of a spiritually lost, fragmented, and narcissistic world, lack a meaningful context in which to situate their lives.

One way these differences manifest is in how people inhabit their bodies. In observing Tibetans, I am often struck by how centered they are in the lower half of the body and how powerfully they are connected to the ground beneath their feet. Tibetans naturally seem to possess a great deal of hara--grounded presence in the belly--which is no doubt a result of the factors mentioned above.Westerners, by contrast, are generally more centered in the upper half of their body and weak in their connection to the lower half.

Hara, the vital center or earth center, is connected with issues of confidence, power, will, groundedness, trust, support, and equanimity. The child-rearing deficiencies, disconnection from the earth, and over emphasis on rational intellect in Western culture all contribute to loss of hara. To compensate for the lack of a sense of support and trust in the belly, Westerners often try to achieve security and control by going "upstairs"--trying to control life with their mind. But behind the ego's attempts to control reality with the mind lies a pervasive sense of fear, anxiety, and insecurity.

Another difference that has important consequences for psycho-spiritual development is the greater value traditional Asian cultures place on being, in contrast to Western cultures, which put more emphasis on doing. Winnicott in particular stressed the importance of allowing a young child to remain in unstructured states of being: "The mother's nondemanding presence makes the experience of formlessness and comfortable solitude possible, and this capacity becomes a central feature in the development of a stable and personal self. . . . This makes it possible for the infant to experience . . . a state of 'going-on-being' out of which . . . spontaneous gestures emerge."

Winnicott used the term impingement to describe a parent's tendency to interrupt these formless moments, forcing children to separate abruptly from the continuity of their "going-on-being." The child is "wrenched from his quiescent state and forced to respond . . . and to mold himself to what is provided for him. The major consequence of prolonged impingement is fragmentation of the infant's experience. Out of necessity he becomes prematurely and compulsively attuned to the claims of others. . . . He loses touch with his own spontaneous needs and gestures . . . [and develops] a false self on a compliant basis."

Traditional Asian families often give the young child plenty of room and permission just to be, in an unstructured way, free from the pressures to respond and perform that Western parents often place on their children at a nearly age. Allowed to be in that way, these children would be more comfortable with emptiness, which we could define here as unstructured being.

But in our culture, which emphasizes doing, having, and achieving at the expense of simply being, emptiness can seem quite alien, threatening, and terrifying. In a family or society that does not recognize or value being,children are more likely to interpret their own unstructured being as some kind of deficiency, as failure to measure up, as an inadequacy or lack. Thus the Western ego structure seems to form in a more rigid and defended way, in part toward off a terrifying sense of deficiency born out of fear of the open,unstructured nature of one's very being.

As a result of this brittle ego having to work overtime to compensate for a lack of inner trust and confidence, many Western seekers find that they are not ready, willing, or able to let go of their ego defenses, despite all their spiritual practice and realization. On a deep, subconscious level, it is too threatening to let go of the little security that their shaky ego structure provides. That is why it can also be helpful for Westerners to work on dismantling their defensive personality structure in a more gradual and deliberate way, through psychological inquiry--examining, understanding, and dissolving all their false self-images, their self-deceptions, their distorted projections, and their habitual emotional reactions, one by one--and developing a fuller, richer connection with themselves in the process.

In sum, to the extent that traditional Asian children grew up supported by a nurturing holding environment, they would be more likely to receive more of what Winnicott defined as the two essential elements of parenting in early childhood: sustained emotional bonding and space to be, to rest in unstructured being. As are sult, these children would tend to grow up with a more stable, grounded sense of confidence and well-being--what we call in the West "ego strength"--in contrast to the self-hatred, insecurity, and shaky sense of self that modern Western people often suffer from.

In discussing Asian child development here, I am speaking of influences in the first few years of childhood, when the ego structure first starts to coalesce. In later childhood, many Asian parents become much more controlling, exerting strong pressure on children to conform and to subordinate their individuality to collective rules and roles. Thus Roland notes that most neurotic conflicts among modern Asians are found in the area of family enmeshment and difficulties with self-differentiation. Indeed, while Eastern culture more generally values and understands being and emptiness, as well as interconnectedness, the West values and has a deeper appreciation of individuation.

Cultivating one's own individual vision, qualities, and potentials is of much greater significance in the West than in traditional Asia, where spiritual development could more easily coexist alongside a low level of individuation.Here is where psychological work may serve another important function forWesterners, by helping them to individuate--to listen to and trust their own experience, to develop an authentic personal vision and sense of direction, and to clear up the psychological conflicts that prevent them from authentically being themselves.

Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has argued that since Buddhism is a path of individuation, it is inaccurate to characterize this tradition as not promoting individual development. Certainly the Buddha gave birth to a new vision that encouraged individuals to pursue their own spiritual development, instead of depending on conventional religious rituals. In that broad sense, Buddhism can be regarded as a path of individuation. But this is a different model of individuation from the one that has developed in the West. As Roland notes, individuation in Asian cultures was usually limited to the arena of spiritual practice, rather than supported as a general norm.

The Western notion of individuation involves finding one's own unique calling, vision, and path, and embodying these in the way one lives. To become oneself in this sense often involves innovation, experimentation, and the questioning of received knowledge. As Buddhist scholar Anne Klein notes:"Tibetans, like many Asians who have grown up outside Western influence, do not cultivate this sense of individuality."

In traditional Asia, the teachings of liberation were geared toward people who were, if anything, too earthbound, too involved in family roles and social obligations. The highest, non-dual teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism--which show that who you really are is absolute reality, beyond you--provided a way out of the social maze, helping people discover the trans-human absolute that lies beyond all worldly concerns and entanglements. Yet these teachings rest on and presume a rich underpinning of human community, religious customs, and moral values, like a mountain arising out of a network of foothills and valleys below.The soulful social and religious customs of traditional India and Tibet provided a firm human base out of which spiritual aspirations for a transhuman absolute, beyond human relationships and human society, could arise.

Because the traditional Asian's sense of self is embedded in a soulful culture rich in tradition, ritual, and close-knit family and community life, people in these cultures did not lose themselves or become alienated from their own humanness in the way that Westerners have. And since soul--the deep, rich,colorful qualities of our humanness--permeated the whole culture, the need to develop individuated soul qualities never assumed the importance that it has in the West. Never having lost their soul, traditional Asians never had to develop any consciousness about how to find it--that is, how to individuate in a distinctly personal way.

In the modern West, it is quite common to feel alienated from the larger social whole--whose public spaces and architecture, celebrations, institutions,family life, and even food are lacking in nourishing soul qualities that allow people to feel deeply connected to these aspects of life, as well as to one another. The good news, however, is that the soullessness of our culture is forcing us to develop a new consciousness about forging an individuated soul--an authentic inner source of personal vision, meaning, and purpose. One important out growth of this is a refined and sophisticated capacity for nuanced personal awareness, personal sensitivity, and personal presence.

This is not something the Asian traditions can teach us much about. If the great gift of the East is its focus on absolute true nature--impersonal and shared by all alike--the gift of the West is the impetus it provides to develop an individuated expression of true nature--which we could also call soul or personal presence. Individuated true nature is the unique way that each of us can serve as a vehicle for embodying the suprapersonal wisdom, compassion, and truth of absolute true nature.

We in the West clearly have much to learn from the Eastern contemplative teachings. But if we only try to adhere to the Eastern focus on the transhuman,or suprapersonal, while failing to develop a grounded, personal way of relating to life, we may have a hard time integrating our larger nature into the way we actually live.

John Welwood, associate editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, is a clinical psychologist and a thirty-year student of Tibetan Buddhism. His article "The Play of the Mind" appeared in the September-October 2000 Quest magazine. This article is excerpted from his recent book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation (Shambhala, 2000).

Originally printed in the November - December 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "Letting Go to Receive." Quest  91.6 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2003):202.

By Betty Bland

It may be a simple thing for those who do not have the same fixed Taurus nature that I have, but for me moving is the most odious task of a lifetime—and I ought to know since I have made many major moves. While I am writing this there are boxes and chaos all around me. The upheaval calls to mind the importance of being able to let go.

First there is the issue of selling the house. It is difficult to guess how this ordeal will proceed. The right buyer has to be found. Price and timing have to work. But there is also an inner side to the process. When we moved from Kentucky where our children had grown up, I was most reluctant to leave. I said I was ready to go, and I made all the right efforts, but my heart of hearts was just not in it. Part of me was still clinging to our home and garden spot, which we had built and created for ourselves. It took us a full year to sell that house. Reflecting back on it, I realize that my unwillingness to let go actually created an inhibiting energy. I was unconsciously blocking the process.

There is a tradition that if one cannot sell a house, a statue of St. Joseph should be buried upside down in the back yard. In fact rumor has it that in some areas where this tradition is strong, one can tell how many times a house has been sold just by digging up the back yard and seeing how many St. Joseph statues there are. A realtor friend of mine told me that she had to replace the Joseph in her nativity set several times before she bought some cheap St. Joseph statues and began retrieving them from the back yard of a house after it had been sold.

We do not know a whole lot about Joseph, the carpenter and earthly father of Jesus, except that he was obedient to God and a dutiful husband. Perhaps as the model householder, he is the guardian of a stable home. By burying him upside down, one might break that pattern of stability and be free to move on.

I thought about that recently when we were trying to sell the house in Pennsylvania. I had delayed jumping into the real estate market all spring, until I realized I was holding a resistant attitude. After a good talking to myself, my release was sufficient enough to effect a quick sale. Thereafter, however, I was confronted further with the tearing down and packing up process—another letting go. Life is the great teacher and will continually provide these little lessons until we get it. In every area of life we need to be able to let go of old circumstances in order to make way for the new. This not-so-easy discipline is a cornerstone for the spiritual life. The second Fundamental Proposition of the Secret Doctrine says that there is a constant movement, a cyclicity of all forces in nature. If our lives, as part of that flux, are in a continuous state of change, then one of the most painful things we can do for ourselves is to try to hold on to things as unchangeable, in avoidance of the inevitable. We have to be able to let go of possessions, habits, and patterns, as we encounter change from moment to moment.

An aspiring student had the privilege of being invited by a Zen master to a tea ceremony. The anxious would-be student put on fine clothing and best manners for the auspicious occasion. After properly performing the ritual, the master asked the student to hold out the cup. The master carefully poured the cup full, and then kept pouring and pouring until the cup ran over into the saucer and spilled over onto the floor. In response to the student's puzzled inquiry, the master said, "It is clear that a full cup cannot be a vessel for more tea, just as a mind that is full of its own self-importance cannot receive new teachings. When you have digested what you know, and are an empty vessel, come back and I will pour out for you new understanding."

Many areas of our lives can benefit from an attitude of greater openness. On the physical level we might be more ready to move, or relinquish cherished possessions. On the emotional level we might cling less tightly to the compulsion to have things our way, to be the center of attention and adulation, or to be so possessive of loved ones. On the mental level, we might be able to recognize our most precious ideas as tentative hypotheses open to expanded horizons of understanding. And on the deepest levels of spirit we can be open to the wonder and magic of consciousness, especially as it reveals to us our unity with all of life. This kind of openness is a gift that enfolds us and those we encounter within a universal atmosphere of loving-kindness.

So I suggest that we all perform the imaginary ritual of burying St. Joseph in our mental backyards as a way of committing to being more open to the many gifts of life. We can let go of our prized possessions and attachments in order to receive the greatest gift of all—love.

VOLUME 91, NUMBER 6

Content

Letting Go to Receive
By Betty Bland

Karma and Dharma: Twin Keys to the Heroic Journey
By Joy Mills

The Matrix as the Hero's Journey
By Chris Richardson

Flowers in the Sky
By John P. O'Grady

Legends of the Grail: The Chivalric Vision
By Karen Ralls