I Am a Buddhist Geek - Published Today

An excerpt from my article, which has been published by the wonderful podcast/magazine BuddhistGeeks.com today:

I have taken many lessons from Bernie Glassman’s extensive work with the homeless. Glassman’s street retreats, in which people live outside, beg for money, eat in soup kitchens, and sleep out or in shelter beds, have helped thousands of participants generate wisdom and compassion, the kind that only direct experience can spark. The first precept of Glassman’s Zen Peacemakers Order is “not-knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe.” Working as a socially engaged Buddhist has made me rethink many of the notions I once held, nested within my desire to help “others.” As I was busily considering them as “others,” I was looking down from a mountain of separation. Certainly I have always felt compassion for the homeless, but that issued forth from a secure position of being housed and “feeling sorry” for their “lesser fortunes.”

But as I practiced the Zen Peacemakers’ tenet, the notion of merely doing service work transformed into recognizing a truth of Buddhism: nondualism. I began to realize that, despite the illusion of separation, the boundary between “subject” and “object” is unreal. Like the Jungian use of figurines in sandplay therapy, perhaps our minds have dualistically projected the separateness of others as a way to explore concepts we could not have experienced within the closed loop of a mind.

Glassman states that not-knowing should be “a state of open presence without separation.” Yet if one has never experienced homelessness and is frightened by both the beggar’s mask and the fear of possibly being in his shoes, it is an act of courage to merge with the person on the street. It takes guts to truly own the times when we have felt homeless, not had a safe place to occupy, felt discomfort in our own skin, and dissolve into pure awareness that in essence we are all there, all the time. Whatever props we use to build security around ourselves, homelessness is our natural state. And the often intimidating manifestations of fear and other emotions that we witness in the homeless are states we have all experienced. Cold, hunger, rejection, being turned out—we’ve all known those conditions, too. And at the end of the day, we all have kindred goals: to be safe, to be loved, to be sheltered, to be fed, to be understood.

To read the entire piece, please see:
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/01/of-nondualism-and-cooking-for-the-homeless/