He was in his age 90s. He was dressing himself in a nice suit and said he was about to leave. He had taken risks for many years, he said. He advised us to take risks. He was joyful. Life was moving onward. He was, too, whatever that meant. What was to happen? He could curse the unknown, or he could welcome it. His choice was welcome - he had lived that way. Death, to him, was not a stopping but a stepping forward.
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A monk once asked his master, "What is the essence of Buddhism?" The master said, "Step forward from the top of a hundred-foot pole."
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First, we must take action. We cannot stop taking action. Self and action are one. Even sitting quietly, breathing in and out, stepping is taking place. We sit on a globe of action - spinning, spinning, spinning. Galaxies are alive, moving. Cells are being born and decaying on your skin. A healthy heart beats an estimated 100,000 times a day. Look and look away, and something moves. Buddhism is a stepping, for life is stepping. In this sense, Buddhism is not special, yet not not special. A step is a step. There is nothing supernatural about this. There is no Buddhist, Christian, or Sufi stepping.
"Forward" entails not going back. A spiritual path is not about recovering something from back there somewhere. You can meet Buddha, Christ, or yourself now, but no other time. As Buddhism teaches us, "We never step in the same river twice." Things end. People leave. Memories are memories. There has never been a back then when and with him or her or them. Such is a memory now; memory is present tense.
Stepping forward means no regression. There is no better time to return to. This takes courage - to wake up daily and not hide from now. Some days, we may not want to step forward, which is okay. But we do not go back, even if we feel we need to take a brief hiatus - that is action, that can be stepping forward. Sometimes, we need to sit on the road, but the road is still moving us along. We never get off the road, for the road and we step forward together - to say road is to say you and vice versa.
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That "top of a hundred-foot pole"? Well, how do you step into the air? Can the sky hold you up? There is something unspeakable about that stepping, but we do not know why it is unspeakable. That is the point. We do not know.
Stepping into the openness can be a tragedy or a joy. A tragedy if you think it is. A joy if you see that as an adventure, an experiment.
You are not being reckless; you are accepting there is no place to stand relatively, so you know it is wise to accept that and go along with life. You are not saying, "Oh me! I've gotta do this." You want to. You realize the futility and stupidity of trying to balance yourself on top of the pole. You see how much you will miss out on by trying to do that. Anyway, the pole act is tedious and something in you is longing for more. The life of abounding love, joy, and peace is off the pole, in the air, stepping along nowhere.
Yet, nowhere does not mean nothing. The sky is not a vacuum, a void. You do not know what is there, and you may give it a name, but it differs from what you call it. Still, we name it. Naming it helps us feel some sense of ground. So, you can call it a name or many names. Yet, the more you learn to walk in the sky, the more you sense what you call it melting like ice in a boiling kettle.
Before stepping into open sky, we find out trying to live on top of the narrow pole only leads away from our deepest wish. We find it leads to too much suffering. No matter how we try to fill the inner sense of lack, of something is not right, it remains. We feel the fatigue of this, and we are desperate. Life being denied - suppressed - leads to this exhaustion and angst. The self closes more and more around itself, and it becomes unbearably claustrophobic.
So, this stepping into air and off the one-hundred-foot pole can happen now. You can do that everywhere. Why? Well, it is simply the way life offers itself. The pole is only an illusion, after all.
We are stepping off the illusory pole again and again. We did when we were born. We will with our last breath. We do it daily. Life is filled with moments of stepping here or there. Even not deciding to step is a step. Relief happens when we stop trying to step into the past or future or put now in neutral.
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Stepping into the openness is stepping into yourself. That is part of it, for our basic nature is openness, which we can call welcome. If you want to step into a god, you must step into yourself. There is no detour. As ego develops, the openness can get crowded, very crowded. But it can get crowded only because the welcome is present. That openness is not touched, whether you put a nightstand or a city in it.
Stepping forward into space means we can relax the clinging, and we may feel we are moving along, but we can sense, too, we are being moved along. Buddhist, Gaylon Ferguson, in Welcoming Beginner's Mind, writes of this by using the metaphor of walking on Earth -
The irony is that lessening the tight grip of anxious control- loosening the reins - allows the flow of experience to carry us. Lo and behold, maybe there really is no need to push the river. Again, it's as though the road under our feet is supporting us, moving us along. We're discovering how things actually are. It's only in our fearful imaginations that each step we take needs to create new ground beneath to support us. Earth and foot find themselves together.
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Now is always a meeting with what appears to be the next moment. The meeting is about you and everything about you. Movement arises from stillness, sound from quiet, and self flows out of the solitude of no-self. Ego arises and becomes the ground of community. This is happening, constantly. You and the birdsong and the clouds and everyone move together. We are all dancing together on the floor that sits in the sky, and the floor is dancing, too.
I enjoy facilitating groups. Relaxing into the flow, welcoming it. Reading the responses of those present. The group is like a hologram. Everyone joins in a mandala of moving energies. My role is to work with all that and be like a conductor of these energies. I recognize I am part of the movement. That is life. We fully participate. We are not passive. We are part of it all; stepping forward, we act in welcoming, but we act to make change possible, too. In stepping, we cannot control, but we can influence, inspire, and participate. We are changed in the participating. Communion points not to a some-thing but to a some-doing.
How does this relate to meditating? So, we can meditate, observing all this stuff happening. Not zoning out, not going blank. And we sit, not trying to conjure up a bliss trip to heaven or dash toward a nirvana holiday. We discover peace and contentment here, but to do so, we sit with peace and unpeace, and discontentment and contentment.
The sky is nonjudgmental welcome. The sky does not say, "Oh! that is bad. Yes! that is good." The sky, however, recognizes spontaneously what is a move with it or from it. The sky is before good or bad, that is why it is absolutely welcoming. Basic openness is like that.
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When stepping forward, we are not going anywhere. We find we never needed to go anywhere. That is the paradox. Stepping, we step nowhere. There is a lot to discover by doing this, and the discovery always continues - not back somewhere, not forward anywhere. In this way, life is adventure, with ceaseless new beginnings, because everything is stepping with us. We know, as did the man preparing to leave, life keeps moving, and we are life, but life is so much more. The more you can experience, but the more you cannot identify or know what it is. And you can only experience it, so know it, now. Still, you do not know what it is, but you know it is, for it is there. There is no past tense to it, no was, and no will be. So, we keep stepping into the sky.
