Ananda, the Buddha's attendant, engaged in a long period of fasting. He became feeble. He could not sit and meditate. Finally, the Buddha told him, "Ananda, if there is no food, there is no body. If there is no body, there is no dharma [teaching, wisdom, truth]. If there is no dharma, there is no enlightenment. Therefore, go back and eat."
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Everything is our environment, the tangible and intangible, what breathes and does not. Food is part of our environment before we eat, during eating, and after we eat. What was outside enters inside. Inside and outside are one habitat, and the habitat keeps moving. With one breath, the atmosphere, inside and outside, shifts some. With a single step or turn of the head, there is a total change in surroundings.
Taking care of ourselves means taking care of our environment. If we meet someone at the checkout in the store, that is part of our environment. Our environment keeps moving in ceaseless interaction with what changes around us as we change inside and outside.
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Today, I took the trash and recyclables off for processing at a transfer station. I took it out to the truck, loaded it, and separated what needed to be. Then, I took it to the station and unloaded it, taking it to different containers. That was an act of Karma Yoga - uniting with the ultimate dimension by action in the relative.
In theistic terms, you can connect with God by taking off your garbage. All that garbage-taking this morning was part of the moving environment. That meant being grounded to the earth element, the dirt realm. The human realm is the dirt realm. Your god - the ultimate dimension - is right there sitting on the earth, rear on the dirt or grass and breathing the same air you do, or it might be behind a tree in the park peeing or swimming in the lake.
As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, "Lift up the rock, and I'm there." Not, "Look into the heavens, I'm there." You can meet the Buddha during your daily walk. Buddha is there as much as at the week-long meditation retreat led by some esteemed roshi or lama. Your spouse or friend or son or daughter could be your roshi or lama or pope.
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Late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, speaking to mental health professionals -
You do not have to be heavy-handed, particularly, but … you can work with whatever connection a person may have, any little simple thing. Try to work with the pinpoint of the situation by being very practical and ordinary. Working with environment basically means bringing people down to earth. If a person suddenly loses his gravity and floats up to the moon, he wants to come back to earth: he may be willing to become sane. At that point, you can teach him something. He will be so thankful to feel the gravity on the earth. You can use that logic in every situation. Earth is good. If somebody is dancing in the sky and breathing air, that is worse than if he is sitting on the earth, eating dirt - which has more potential. It's as simple as that! But at the same time, as therapists, we also have to ground ourselves first. Otherwise, we become more patient than therapist, which doubles the confusion. So we have to come down to earth. Then we can work with others.
*The Sanity We Are Born With.
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So, it is easy to seek to fly up in the etheric atmosphere spiritually, wearing a brightly shining halo and looking to see who is amazed by our other-worldliness. If others are not looking, at least we are looking at ourselves in perpetual admiration. If they do not look, we can be our own cult of unquestioned and unquestionable adoration. No one can challenge such glory! We see being spiritual as some sense of ego rejection, flesh rejection, and world rejection. The body is a prison, holding captive our immaculate soul. Sex is dirty. Fasting is holy, but not eating. Chanting a scripture is sacred; singing a secular song is just singing a secular song.
With that mentality of prevalent sanctimony, we do not see how loading trash and taking it off somewhere is an enlightened activity, the play of buddha nature, holy communion. We do not appreciate how we can worship and connect with all life simply by loading garbage and taking it to meet other garbage. We are like the Catholic leadership who got upset at a priest who danced around the eucharist - how dare he celebrate like that... get serious, priest!
Loading up trash and taking it somewhere – well, we do it because we have to, or the garbage would pile up and get rather stinky, but otherwise, there is no value in doing anything with it - so we think. If we are going to pray or meditate, we need to hurry and get the garbage unloaded to get back to our prayer or meditation time.
Again, Trungpa -
That is the basic logic of the Buddhist teachings and of Buddhist psychology. We can actually be decent and sane on the spot, not through extreme measures but by managing our life properly, and thereby cultivating maitri [my'-tree].
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Buddhism uses "maitri" for "friendliness, benevolence, kindness, human warmth, hospitable welcome." We can have some warmth about ordinary activities, including things we must do to keep our lives balanced and meet expectations but which have no apparent holy or spiritual credentials at all. How we work with our garbage, clean our room, shine our vehicle, cultivate our garden, or wash our dishes can be a wise means of nurturing a spirit of kindness and gentleness. You can be maitri walking down the road or sleeping in your recliner.
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A spontaneous insight arose years ago when working on cleaning a floor for resurfacing with decorative concrete. I had left serving as a chaplain in Florida and returned to my native home. I was jobless, so I began working with my nephew. One night, as I was on my hands and feet on a concrete floor, scrubbing to clear the old wax off, what arose to me was: "This is prayer."
That simple message was profound. For the first time, I saw that ordinary activity can be worship. Later, I saw that worship can be an ordinary activity. Really, I could see how to say either is not on the mark. Yet, we must say something.
That was an awakening to how there is no separation between what we call ordinary work and spiritual work: it is one activity. What makes it one is not the work itself but how one engages in the activity - how one includes oneself as the work environment. The how includes the how you are.
To one person, disposing of garbage is just disposing of waste; to another, it is prayer, or meditation, or an act of love. If it is prayer, it is also disposing of the trash. So, one does not go about thinking, "I'm praying," one just wholeheartedly disposes of the garbage. You and garbage disposing become united in one action. Then, you and the garbage can form part of a unified, balanced habitat.
In this sense, sacredness becomes where it might not have been. The late Zen Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, in Opening the Heart of the Cosmos, tells the following -
I once made the acquaintance of a man in New York. When people came to visit him he would usually offer them a soft drink. If the guest was well-known, he would write their name on a piece of paper, put it inside the empty bottle, and keep it as a souvenir. He had a large collection of bottles with names in them. These bottles were not really worth anything, but because they were connected to some famous personality my friend felt that they had a special value. Similarly, the personal effects left behind by great artists, scientists, political, or religious leaders - a walking stick, a hat - come to be regarded as valuable and meaningful in and of themselves. The value or sacredness of such an object is not due to its original nature or function but rather to a sense of the spiritual presence that has touched and infuses it.
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So, one person can enter a church or meditation room, and it is a sacred space. For another, it will be neutral. For a third, it will be a profane territory. The environment is an extension of ourselves - what we bring to the space. Still, we are not talking about morality. Sacredness can shine through an immoral being that does not through another being of outstanding moral repute. Something might be shining through the apparently immoral that cannot with the other, even though you would much prefer the moral one to be your neighbor or date your son or daughter.
You are wise to nurture yourself through pinpointing the ultimate dimension through commonplace action. But this pinpointing is not about thinking anything spiritual, or holy, or enlightened about what you do. You do not put the garbage in one category and your god or the ultimate in another; otherwise, you have lost the wholeness, and the environment is fragmented. This fragmentation means you are divided, for thought divides you.
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Last, some talk about the goal of spiritual life being to have a union with their god. Well, if so, you must stay in the commonplace. You must act on earth as just one other being, with all the humans and other critters. You give up your wings and take off the halo. You decide it is time to give up levitation classes. You like the feel of the dirt, so you are not interested in being known as a saint or referred to as an enlightened being. You are a light shining, not needing to say, "Hey! Look at me shining?" What a relief! - to others and yourself.
