Wisdom Is Knowing I Am Nothing

"Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,

love is knowing I am everything,

and between the two my life moves."

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

I think one of the most difficult Buddhist principles to wrap one's head around is the idea that one is nothing. Non-personhood. The ego fights against this principle. It fights against the sense that it is nothing. For it must be something. Distinct. Individualized. To let go of this ego-hood is to face ... an abyss. Or a bridge.

I had a profound spiritual experience when we were in Maui this past spring. We were on Little Beach and sunset was approaching. Mark went up to the clearing above the end of the beach to meditate, and I joined him, a few feet away.

As I sat, eyes closed, listening to the waves of the ocean, I felt a call to open my eyes and look at what lay before me. The thoughts came into my mind: What would your worldview be if you didn't focus it around the concept of a creator? What if things just ... were? Are? What if there wasn't an intelligent design as the Western intellect conceives of this notion? 

As I allowed my mind to go to places it had never before been, I suddenly felt a kinship with the ocean and the waves and, for the first time in my life, I felt one with the earth and the ocean - in both a physical as well as a metaphysical sense. I looked at the water and realized, profoundly, that it was this same ocean that touched the shores of British Columbia, of Japan, of Australia, of India, of Africa, of Europe, of South America, of the entire world. And here I was, a spec of humanity sitting on a beach on an island in the midst of one part of this vast ocean. 

I felt the insignificance of my place on this vast planet, which in turn is a spec in vast cosmic ocean. I knew I was nothing. Yet I also saw how I am part of the whole - both of the human family and as part of the organic whole. The paradox is that I felt more alive, more enlivened, more in touch with who I really am, by considering myself as nothing ... than I ever had by celebrating my separateness. For the whole fed me, whereas the parts diminished me.

I thought of the many references I had heard and read to an ocean wave. One in particular by Alan Watts came to mind:

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing 

in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”

That experience was truly one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life. As I later explained to Mark, I felt I had learned more in those few minutes of staring into the ocean than I could have learned by reading a half-dozen Buddhist texts.

I couldn't wait to go back to Maui to learn what else the ocean has to teach me.

"They all found me ..."

I have written in previous posts about my daughter Hannah's blog post at the end of June, in which she wrote about her efforts to reconcile her love for her father and his partner with what leaders in the LDS Church had taught and told her about relationships such as I have with my beloved, Mark.

The line from her post that stuck with me, that resonated the most, was this sentence: "In a moment of frustration, [my husband] said to me "You need to stop looking for the negative things about the Church!" But I know, and he realizes now, I never looked for any of them. They all found me"[emphasis added].

How profound, and how true. When one is gay (and Mormon or various permutations of "Mormon"), the whole world looks different. But especially, the Church looks different. Because one is "other." The same often applies to family members of such "others," such as my beautiful daughter, Hannah.

Hannah went on to write, "The Mormon world is a beautiful, happy, wonderful one. I never wanted anyone or anything to ruin that for me. I WANT to be a part of that world. But my integrity won't allow ignorance anymore."

How beautiful is that? How poignant? 

I wanted that beautiful Mormon world more than anything for so many years. I tried SO hard to obtain it, to make it mine, to be a part of it, to breathe it, to live it. The Plan of Happiness. But it was not the Plan of Happiness. It was, sadly, a difficult, hurtful, destructive path. 

And ... at the end of the day, that [Mormon] world was and is ... an illusion. And being gay, accepting gayness, accepting loved ones who are gay, makes everything different. Because the old world no longer fits. It no longer exists. It is lost forever. And that is frightening ... and liberating.

If the second most senior apostle of the Mormon Church, Boyd K. Packer, had not given his infamous October 2010 Conference address, this blog might not exist. I might not exist as an openly gay man. 

I never planned to come out of the closet in which I had deposited myself many, many years ago. I resisted divorce and the end of the Mormon idyll, even when my ex-wife was pushing for divorce long before I "came out." But, in the end - as my daughter Hannah wrote - I didn't look for the negative things about the Church, they found me. Boyd Packer's words found me. And they catapulted me out of the closet ... and, ultimately, out of the Church to which I had devoted almost three decades of my adult life.

Talk about tragedy (in the truest sense of that word ...

My wish tonight, as I sit on my front porch on a Summer's eve, is that all those out there who, through no fault of their own, are finding troubling truths, might find peace and comfort. Because, there really, really is, LIFE ... somewhere over the rainbow.