From the Guide

I know everyone is eager to hear all about the Farm (yes, that is a projection), and I promise to get to it soon, but there’s just a bit of Awareness Practice stuff to get through first.
 
For as long as I can remember I’ve been a religious person. Looking at how I lived my life, that likely would not have been readily apparent, nonetheless, it is true for me. Perhaps being raised without religion gave it an appeal it might not have had had I been required to relate to it. By the time I was in middle school I was asking friends if I could go to church with them. Not that long after, as a rebelling adolescent I became focused on what I perceived to be the hypocrisy in the gap between preached and practiced. I lost interest in the religious, but not the religion.
 
Even after finding Zen and knowing it was my religion of choice, I loved finding what seemed like “the same point in different language” with Jesus and the Buddha. A lot of it fell under a heading that I would now call “koan practice.” Trying to see the Truth that both were speaking from. Intuitively I knew it was the same, but I wanted to see what they were seeing, not just understand what they were saying.
 
When the process we refer to as self-hatred dropped in, I looked to my same sources for clarity. I could see a great deal in the New Testament that could land a person in a pile of self-hate, depending on how those messages were interpreted. Seemed clear that the messages from Jesus were all essentially “love” and “don’t judge.” Yet, more often than not those messages were overlooked in favor of a lot of judging and not loving. The Buddha on the other hand was more difficult to misinterpret. “Here’s how suffering happens. Do these things and you will suffer; don’t do those things, do these things instead and you won’t suffer. Up to you.”
 
So, I found myself in a deep dive into a world of something wrong/not enough/self-hate, how it happens and how to get out of it. When I considered one of the primary messages of Jesus, “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself,” I confess I kind of rolled my eyes. Not sure about the “Love God,” but seems like we’ve nailed the “love your neighbor as yourself.” Self-hate in, self-hate out. We’re conditioned to live in a world of self-criticism, self-judgment, and punishing, self-hating messages, and that’s what we then share with our neighbors. We are with them as we are with ourself. At this particular time in history, we seem to be outdoing ourselves!
 
We all know that is not what Jesus meant. But what did he mean? Was he inviting us to apply the same “generous” standards for behavior to our neighbors that we apply to ourself? I spend most of my time and energy focused on me. What I want, what I like, what I’m doing, what I care about; trying to get what I want, trying to have what I like, trying to do what I want to do, giving time and energy to what I care about. I resent people who don’t agree with me, that get in my way, that take up my time and attention. I suppose that makes me self-absorbed, but I’m a good person, lovable. Deserve to be loved. Should be loved. Is that how Jesus wanted us to be with our neighbors, knowing that they are just like me and I love me, and so then in the same way I love me I love them? Maybe.
 
Then it occurred to me that perhaps the difficulty is that I’ve been reading the “as” in his directions to be a synonym of “like.” I’m meant to love my neighbors like they are me. I’m meant to treat my neighbors as I treat myself. Subtle difference, still I just can’t seem to get past the self-serving, self-hating likelihood in the two. However, if I were to read that “as” not as “like” but as “one with” or “same as,” it begins to open an even more subtle spiritual possibility. What if I were to approach my neighbor as not “as me,” not even being like me, but literally as me. Is that what he means?
 
With that it becomes clear. My neighbor IS me. There is no “neighbor” other than me. There is no “other.” I am projecting it all. I have created the neighbor out of my own ideas, beliefs, and assumptions. All “my” egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate gets projected onto a form called “neighbor,” and I begin believing there is a “them” that is real and actual and that I am truly seeing them accurately, not as “I am” but as “they are.” Not hard to see how Jesus and the Buddha and lots of clear-seeing folk would wish us to realize this is not a helpful direction!
 
The opportunity in this for a practitioner of awareness is unparalleled. And, yes, this particular time we’re living through is unrivaled. It’s not that the world is all that new or different, it’s the technology that allows us to “know” everything about everyone and everything all the time. Social media in particular has given us access to a trove of unexamined, unconscious projections, all supported, echoed, and magnified to, for many people, a nearly unendurable level.
 
People hate Joe Biden viciously. People despise Donald Trump violently. Not just those two, obviously, they are simply the most visible symbols of all they stand for. Listing “what they stand for,” the colorful and creative descriptions of which could fill pages, would be the most marvelous of projection exercises.
 
This is what makes our current moment such a perfect time for anyone wishing to wake up and end suffering. With little effort one could encounter if not all the qualities and characteristics behind the beliefs and assumptions holding one’s own personal world of suffering together, most of them could be revealed in a quick read of the news.
 
Do you mean I am like Joe Biden/Donald Trump? Is that what’s being said here? Is that what this comes down to? “He’s” not like that, I am? Enter big resistance, followed by massive disbelief on one side and self-hatred on the other. We can take a beat to allow all that to pass through and move on to exploring the proposition beyond “yes, we all know everything is projection” and get down to “what does this mean for me?”
 
The opportunity we have is to drop all interest in the content and focus on all that the process opens up for us. With this information, I can know (assuming I approach it as if it has validity rather than dismissing it out of hand) that attention will shift from “what’s going on out there/what are ‘they’ doing” to “what’s going on with ‘me’ in here.” How is what’s happening with me happening? This is not a matter of “is it true that ‘he/they’ are like that, are or are not doing that,” it’s how is that whole “thing” being created and maintained inside me?
 
If I agree to approach this from the logical and quickly obvious perspective that I am the creator of the world I live in, I can begin to dismantle and examine that “reality” piece by piece. The first pushback we’re likely to encounter are the questions, “What is meant by ‘I am the creator of the world I live in’? The world is the way it is whether I like it or not. Are you saying that it isn’t? That I’m making it all up?”
 
Yes. You’re making up your world/universe. I’m making up mine. Everyone is making up the world/universe they’re living in. Are there similarities? Overlaps? Points of agreement? No doubt. But we don’t want to look too closely because very soon we will find our points of divergence. We can see this in every relationship we’ve ever had. There are places where we meet and places where our experiences/opinions are so different that we have to struggle to be with the other person through those encounters.
 
We would have realized long ago that the world we live in is of our own making if our conditioning hadn’t been so heavily weighted in the direction of “the world is the world, we are all living in the same world, the right people see things the right way, the wrong people see things the wrong way and that’s just how it is.” If you’ve been groomed to believe that, the question “what is wrong with them?” will be one that springs to mind often.
 
Now, back to “are you really suggesting that I am like Joe Biden/Donald Trump?” It would be most helpful to choose the one you struggle with. It’s true that egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate makes it difficult to accept that we are projecting those folks we really admire, but we don’t tend to suffer as much on that side of the duality. To me Mother Teresa was unconditionally loving, patient, kind, caring, self-sacrificing, and noble. Am I projecting all that? Yes, and the ego voices can scoff and with a roll of the eyes let me know that I can go right on ahead and say all that, but that doesn’t make me like that. And, I’m conditioned not only to agree, I’m meant to feel kind of embarrassed and bad at the very notion that I could think I have those qualities.
 
On the other side of the duality, the ego voices conversation in conditioned mind is much different. If I think that “he” is hateful, greedy, manipulative and dishonest, and there’s the suggestion I’m projecting that, well, it’s time for an ego party! See, you’re just like him! They’re not the problem, you are! You’re a bad, awful, horrible, hateful, greedy, manipulative, dishonest not to mention disgusting excuse for a human being and you deserve to die!
 
Neither of those is quite it. My great spiritual opportunity is to really get it that this is a nonseparate reality, that duality is a mode of experiencing, that we are each and all each and all, and there’s nothing wrong with any of it and no problem, unless we fail to realize this and waste our life suffering over what is not true.
 
In other words, I am not suffering over “him/them,” I am suffering over “me.” I have to face that.
 
Am I as bad as I project he is? Who knows? But how might that be possible? Well, I have these qualities but I don’t express them to the degree he does. Does that mean I get a pass? Not if I want to end suffering. If I don’t want to suffer, it behooves me to explore how I do express those traits in my life. Do I really want to settle for “Yeah, but I’m not as bad as he is”? After all, I now realize there is no “he,” only me living in an imaginary world in which “he” has all the qualities I don’t want to recognize or admit in myself.  (Of course, this is not the Authentic Self, a subject we will explore in the Yearlong, but facing that there is an identification with ego-I and transcending that is necessary to get to Unconditional Love.)
 
A simple way to get in touch with this is to see how quickly “we” can become what we think/believe/say “they” are. What’s the difference between us then? We get told that we are only that way because they are. We hate them because they’re so hateful. We hate them because they’re mean and dangerous and hurt people. Again, where’s the difference? Do we really want to cling to a belief that some kinds of hate are okay while others are not? Don’t we have to admit that hate is hate whether it’s being done by the good people or the bad people? Especially when we realize that each side sees themselves as the good/right people and the other side as the bad/wrong people.
 
As spiritual types we’re likely to realize we don’t actually care what they’re doing if the result of caring is letting egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate take over and cause us to be the very ways we don’t want to be. No matter what “they” are doing, if the deepest desire of our own heart is to be Unconditional Love, then that’s what we must practice. That’s our goal. That’s why we’re willing to drop all the ego conversations about me and you and them and that so we can be HERENOW, choosing the LOVE that is what we are.
 
Given all that, it feels as if here on these few acres of the world our best direction is to pour all the love we have into growing a farm that will give back that love in the forms of beauty, vegetables, fruits, berries, and habitat for birds and butterflies, all of which can be shared with any who wish to enjoy. Please read this as an invitation to explore how you want to be Love in Action, to Be the Love that is you for the part of the world given you to nurture.
 
As many of you have, we’ve been making our way through winter. Just in time for Daylight Saving, we’re seeing signs of spring. More sunlight, warmer temps, longer days. The usual good stuff. The compost is heating up more quickly without its snow blanket. (Did we mention it is now caramelizing the onions we add to it?) The greenhouse is being assembled and a foundation created for it. In the next few days we will have an upstanding temporary home for the babies.
 
In the next couple of weeks, 250-300 trees and shrubs will be arriving to make their home here. Our first Farm Steward will be on hand to assist with getting these new little beauties into the ground. As that happens we will continue to prepare cozy spots for the thousands of seeds we’ve found and purchased.
 
I am/We are loving farming. It feels wholesome and nurturing and hopeful in the face of the “The Sky Is Falling” nature of so much of what’s passing for news currently. Jen has mastered the sourdough pizza. The sourdough is from a 100+ year old starter that’s a gift from a volunteer at the Food Bank. Brian has ordered seeds for every kind of tomato, etc., required for every kind of sauce we might want for our pizzas. And, yes, the “Soup Kitchen/Pizza by the Slice” for folks needing a hot and delicious meal is still very much in the conversation. True, we don’t know where all this is headed, but then we never do and we’re fine with that.
 
If you’d like to spend some meditative quality farming time, read more about how to apply here for the Farm Steward Program. It’s a tangible opportunity to be Love in Action. And, to join Sangha in an in-depth exploration of getting to the clarity of what is Me, a la this blog, sign up for the Yearlong retreat.
 
In gasshō
ch
 
P.S. A Long View Farm YouTube Channel will be debuting shortly, as soon as we get all the videos to our production manager!