Repeatable Mysticism
Mediation’s secrets are legendary, Omniscience, Enlightenment, Wisdom, Emptiness, massive potentialities that are our human inheritance, our true nature. Giving meditation instruction is giving a method to experience yourself and your world in an open way, a clear way. A way that can help you feel better. At least that’s the pitch. And I’m not sure why it hasn’t totally caught on. Don’t get me wrong mindfulness is everywhere, but it’s not quite the same as Buddhist meditation.
Buddhism presents spiritual development as repeatable. In that way it is scientific. Your mediation experiences can, and should, be cross-referenced. The problem is that we are talking about experiences that have always been called mystical. Repeatable mysticism. That is the paradox that throws people. If it is mystical it is special, by definition unknowable. Okay, but we can do the things that help foster mysticism in a very pragmatic way. There are methods, that help lead to mysticism. I suppose that has alway been my motivation, what is the right way to be a person in the world.
The actual techniques suffer from their pedestrianness. They are practical, straight forward and easy to understand. Sit cross legged on a cushion or in a chair, with a straight back, eyes open gazing slightly down, hands on thighs which are lower than your hips. Focus on the breath, perhaps even, if you notice a thought interrupting your focus you are taught to label it “thinking” and return to the breath. The ease of understanding the methods lulls us into accepting them as ordinary. My entire purpose is to help see the simple Buddhist instructions as extraordinary. That happens by one person at a time developing experiences in their meditation, that’s it. It is required to progress, and it is definitely a guiding principal in the two groups I belong to in Portland, Maine.
Buddhism In Portland Maine
Our Tibetan flavored shrine rooms are incongruous with the Christian churches where we rent space, both as a matter of aesthetics and the because of the belief systems they hold. Bright orange, ocher red/yellow, lapis, and of course maroon decorated rooms hold incense infused air that support the Sanskrit syllables we repeat over and over. Our prayers invoke and attend to a host of of other beings, similar to us be a bit more spiritually adept. Their images fill our walls. Here there is no God. No central, all powerful creator. Absent. Non-Theistic. To me this lack of similarity, belies a seemingly pre-established harmony that unfolds in the most wonder-filled ways.
Woodfords Church, United Church of Christ, in Portland Maine is on outer Forest Avenue. Woodfords is a 25 minute walk to State Street Church, United Church of Christ, on State Street, of course. These churches are now repositories for the ancient wisdom, embedded in Buddhism that migrated from eastern Tibet to southern Maine.
Shambhala International, https://shambhala.org founded by the notorious Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, now headed by his oldest son and Shambhala lineage holder Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is housed in Woodfords Church https://brunswickmaine.shambhala.org.
Vajra Vidya http://www.portlandmainebuddhism.org is a Buddhist organization growing under the guidance of Thrangu Rinpoche http://www.rinpoche.com, a perfect monk, in his 80’s based in Nepal. Vajra Vidya rents a room at State Street Church.
Getting From There to Here
In the late 1940’s the Chinese were licking their wounds from WWII. They fought heroically against their ancient enemy the Japanese. The Japanese ravaged the Chinese mainland killing 80,000 Chinese soldiers, and displacing millions of civilians, creating a massive refugee crisis. Given their sacrifice to help win the war in the Pacific, the Chinese Nationalist Party thought they would get more than just a seat on the United Nations.
After the meager reward from the world the Chinese Nationalist Party is overthrown by the Chinese Communist Party prominsing to restore the dignity of the motherland by re-incorporating China’s orphaned limbs, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and that resource rich backwater, Tibet. In 1949 they invaded the Tibetan Plateau for the 9th time in a millennia.
In Kham, Eastern Tibet, Surmang Monastery, Est. 1400 AD, housed the Trungpa Rinpoches. The other Lama, Thrangu Rinpoche was three days walk south at Thrangu Tashi Choling, Est. 600 AD. The close proximity meant the monasteries shared resources, primarily teachers and teachings. With both monasteries devastated in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, thousands of monks killed, the buildings looted and razed the Lama’s escaped. In 1959 they walked parties through unbelievable hardship over the Himalayan Mountains, eventually arriving in India.
In contrast to China the late 40’s and early 50’s attitude in Portland, Maine is a mixture of gratitude and pride. Gratitude that war is over. And pride that we had ended it. There was also a sneaky horror, shared with rest of the American psychic en masse, at how we ended it.
Is it really possible that the pinnacle of the evolution of the western mind, the very tip of scientific achievement eviscerated 140,000 human beings, in the blink of an eye? Leaving their souls to float around cities flattened to rubble.
Our joy and terror resulted in comfort seeking around the hearth and in the bedroom and the children came, ironically labeled “boomers”. In these churches we teased apart our mixed feelings of hope and fear. We needed the place to seek; we needed the room to seek.
So in the 1950’s State Street church added 7 classrooms. Across town Woodfords expanded in 1956, adding the present day church and cloister and in 1957 dedicated the Meloon Chapel.
I don’t know how things work, or why, but I do try to notice that they do. Now the rooms in Maine that we built for the boomers to go to Sunday school in house the wisdom chased out of Tibet by the Communists. Curious. Our end of the war energy combined with the Chinese end of the war energy worked together so we can learn meditation in Portland.