Sermon # 1: Appreciating Energy

I am happy to be here. And I am happy you are here.

A few months ago, my acupuncturist William Potter said to me, “You know, I just woke up this morning, and thought ‘Forget Love!’  If I can just appreciate something for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, a minute, I mean really appreciate something--that would be good.  So that’s what I’ve been doing.  You know appreciate anything--even things you don’t like, and what it took to create that, to bring that into the world.”

I immediately thought of a certain politician—you can fill in your own blank—and said to myself, “Even that person? What it took to create that person?”    

And suddenly in that moment, I felt it—what it took to create that person. 

Then from there, my awareness expanded, and I thought of what it took to create tons of toxic coal dust, to remove mountains, to produce floating islands of plastic waste, to destroy so much of this planet, and to create the human equivalent of these toxic dumps.

I thought of recent experiences where someone I trusted told me lies and half-truths, making a stressful situation much more stressful and creating an atmosphere of bewilderment and distrust and taking advantage of me. 

I thought of all the situations in which people abuse other people and the enormous energy such abusers expend on creating toxic rather than nurturing atmospheres.

Then I thought of my jaw.  An orthodontist once told me I was stronger than I realized, that it took enormous power to hold my jaw so tight, one of the tightest jaws he had felt, and in such a small body.

Since 2009, I’ve been studying a Tibetan Buddhist text—“The Aspiration of Samantabhadra”—translated and commented on by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.  

Samantabhadra is the primordial Buddha, not the historical one, but the energy from which the historical arose. 

The opening lines are “Ho! All that appears and exists, all of samsara and nirvana,/Has one ground, two paths, and two results.  It is the display of awareness and ignorance.”

“Ho!” Is an expression of the inexpressible delight and wonder of awareness of the “inexpressible ground” of all being.  It’s an expression of appreciation, wordless wonder, and non-dual awareness.

Suddenly in hearing my friend’s statement, and in hearing my own thoughts in response to his words, the first 2 lines of “The Aspiration of Samantabhadra” floated up again to the surface of my mind: 

“All that appears and exists, all of samsara and nirvana, has one ground.” 

Samsara is suffering; nirvana is bliss.  They have the same ground. 

If we can appreciate the energy it took to create the toxic waste dumps of this world—and the beings and actions we don’t like—then we are appreciating the ground of being, rather than the illusions and delusions and stories we as confused beings create from the raw materials of existence.

Meghan told me to say that line again, so I will:  if we can appreciate the energy it takes to create something, even things we don’t like, we are appreciating the ground of being, rather than the illusions and delusions and stories we as confused beings—I know I’m confused, anyway--create from the raw materials of existence.

Even a fleeting appreciation of this pure energy unwinds us from the toxicity that is being generated and places us right in the center--if even for a moment--of the energy of life, and enables us to detach. 

Detachment in this sense does not mean to ignore, to bury, to excuse, to approve, to judge, or to condemn, but to see the energy involved as energy and to appreciate the energy, rather than get involved in dramas of attachment and aversion to what the energy is used to produce or destroy.

Appreciating this creative energy without attaching to the results is not taking a bland, disaffected, cynical stance that disconnects from reality and that doesn’t care about anything.  It does not mean to excuse behaviors that hurt and actions that destroy or to deny our own values and judgments.

It does mean to disengage with whatever energy is disturbing us, so that we don’t fuel it and sink into it.  It is finding some space in the experience to step away from the drama and see the energy as energy, fulling feeling the power of the energy without making it good or bad. 

Every time I am able to detach in this way and appreciate energy as energy, it fills me with joy and a deep sense of freedom and confidence.

It’s relatively easy to detach in this way when I am not threatened, and it gets harder and harder the more personal the threat.  

For example, in my job as a teacher and administrator at UCSD, I regularly meet with students who have plagiarized in other teachers’ courses.  It is very easy for me to see how misdirected their energy is, and to discriminate what is true and what isn’t without getting caught up in their stories, because nothing they do is a threat to me.  They aren’t even my students.  They do, however, astonish me with their actions. 

Take, for instance, the young man who was caught and punished for plagiarizing 2 years ago, and then shows back up in my office for resubmitting the same work that got him caught 2 years ago.  First, he tried to get out of the appointment 2 times.  Then he actually stole the offending paper from his teacher’s office.  I asked him to email me a copy of the paper since the original was no longer in his teacher’s possession, and he did that.  Finally, he met with me, and before I could say a word, he straight-up admitted what he had done and took responsibility without any attempt to excuse himself, other than that he was having a very hard time personally and just wasn’t thinking straight. 

He could have not turned in the assignment, or just deleted the offending 2 sentences, and he would have had no problem at all.  Or he could have met with me when I first asked and not stolen the paper back from his teacher.  He had to actually expend more energy to do what he did than he would have to have done nothing or to have done a little editing of his paper.  

It took him more energy to self-destruct than it would have to self-construct. 

I marveled at the energy he spent working himself up into such a state that he would have done such a thing in the first place, and then all the energy he spent trying to weasel out of the situation.  I could feel him relax when he came clean, and we all had much more energy available to deal with the consequences, once he did.

But I find it much harder to appreciate the energy of an action, when the action is horrific or threatening to me or others.  For instance, I went to graduate school with a man who turned out to be a killer and abuser of multiple women.  

I had spent hours talking to him one semester and thought he was the brightest person I had met in grad school and smarter than the professor in the course.  I had no idea that I was talking to a serial killer and abuser of women.  I thought he was a nice guy!  It’s much easier for me to talk about any politician, than him.  

Even to this day, even now that this person is dead, having killed himself in prison, I get chills of fear even thinking about him.  He’s come back to mind as I’ve been working on this talk, and after 2 months of sitting with the memory, I can honestly say, I can muster a second or two of appreciation before the revulsion settles in.  But that second or two of spacious appreciation definitely helps defuse the fear that only feeds such horror and helps me be able to talk about it. 

Can appreciation of even the most toxic and reprehensible things we can think of begin to offer space for healing by recognizing and appreciating the energy? 

Can it take away the mesmerizing power it takes to destroy?  

For instance, if we appreciated the energy it took to create Darth Vader, would he begin to relax a little and feel his energy appreciated, and so give an opening for light? 

It’s hard to imagine, and it definitely didn’t happen in the last installment of the Star Wars saga in which Han Solo and Princess Leia’s son is trying to be the new Darth Vader and kills his father Han, when Han reaches out to him in peace.

But maybe that’s not the point.  Maybe that’s too attached to results, especially too attached to the results of others’ actions.  

Maybe the point is that we would at least be able to relax into our own power and the creative energy permeating all and overcome his darkness with our light sabers? 

And if we did, would we be able to appreciate something, even if it’s toast or a tiny square of unleavened bread, with our whole being, as if it were indeed the body and the blood of the lamb, as if it were sacred?  Because in this sense, it is.  

Maybe that’s what transubstantiation means.

Could we disconnect for a moment from the fear that fuels the haters of this world, and instead fuel ourselves and love?

This past week as I was preparing for this talk, I got a very bad sore throat.  I was raised to see illness as a sign of personal defect, and so I have a deep, knee-jerk tendency to feel badly about myself when I get sick.  It’s a hard habit to kick, but I do know better.  Deep down, I know that when I get sick, it’s just energy that is being directed at fighting off something that I don’t want in my system anyway.  And that, I, like people everywhere, sometimes get sick when my system is overwhelmed, and that it’s nothing to take personally.

I went to see William Potter, the very same acupuncturist I quoted at the beginning of this talk.  He set the needles in all the right points to get my chi buzzing quite vibrantly, and I said, “I’m all abuzz!”  

He said, “Well, appreciate that energy!  It’s your immune system kicking in.  Every time you feel it, be grateful and thank your immune system for being so strong.”

It might take me awhile to truly be able to appreciate the energy that creates even beings and actions I don’t like, but I am starting here with myself and the sore throat and my immune system.

How do I know, though, when I’m really appreciating the energy of my immune system or sore throat or whatever the object of focus, and not just thinking I’m doing it or trying to do it?  How do I know when I’ve got it?

When I feel joy and ease and confidence and freedom as I am present with something, then I know I’m there.  When I feel like it’s an effort and I’m straining, then I know I’m not there.  It’s a visceral experience, not a concept.

When I was a little kid, we were taught to sing in Sunday School, “When you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”  It’s like that: you know it because you feel it.  I think that’s what “Ho!” means.

And when you don’t feel it … 

“The Aspiration of Samantabhadra” describes that feeling well: “Through the habit of developed dualism,/ From the agony of praising oneself and denigrating others,/ Quarrelsome competitiveness develops/….One falls to hell as a result/. . . . Through the distraction of mindless apathy,/Through torpor, obscurity, forgetfulness, Unconsciousness, laziness, and bewilderment,/One wanders as an unprotected animal as a result.”

I have been there!

The prayer--the aspiration--that follows is: “May the light of lucid mindfulness arise/In the obscurity of torpid bewilderment./May nonconceptual wisdom be attained.” 

How is that possible?  By recognizing as the text says that, “All beings … are equal to myself, the Buddha, in the all-ground./  It became the ground of mindless confusion./  Now, they engage in pointless actions./  The … actions are like the bewilderment of dreams.”

That means Donald and Hillary and Bernie and every one of us are equal in the “all-ground.”  

How do we wake up from the “bewilderment of dreams” and stop the pointless actions?  What do we do?

I return to the beginning of the “Aspiration of Samantabhadra:”  “All that appears and exists, all of samsara and nirvana,/Has one ground, two paths, and two results./It is the display of awareness and ignorance.” 

Every moment, we have a choice—awareness of the ground of existence or ignorance of it. 

We can be connected to the ground through appreciation, or cut off by fear and loathing, anger, resentment, pain, heartache, any host of emotions, but the ground is always there. 

Maybe if we appreciate the energy it takes to loathe something or someone, such as a political candidate we don’t like, as well as the energy it takes to be that person we don’t like, we will find the ground to create something new and wonderful, a space in which to expand awareness, be happy and free, and act effectively. 

Maybe that’s what “May the force be with you” means?