Updated: July 2010
The following is a chronology of belief, starting with my introduction to Eastern philosophy. While I initially hesitated on this exercise, I’ve since found it quite helpful in drawing a purposeful path through my experiences. Of course, it’s a projection, but in this case, a helpful projection.
I highly recommend you also try it out. If you do, email me ian@ianmack.com
The Beginning
In late 2002, I came across my first book on Eastern philosophy. I remember walking around the bookstore of my university, essentially wasting time until my next class, when I happened upon The Zen Commandments by Dean Sluyter.
Maybe it was the cover, or the clever play on words, but I decided to buy it and began reading immediately on the bus ride home that night.
Suddenly, I became aware of concepts like: the now, dukha, karma, and non-attachment. It was like someone was finally able to explain the world in a framework I intuitively felt to be true. I was hooked.
Over the next few years I devoured similar books from authors like Alan Watts, The Dalai Lama, and David Brazier.
Meeting The Musician
It wasn’t until 2004 that I took my next leap. I remember the moment vividly. I was on my morning commute to work at the DFO (a co-op job placement at the time).
In the skytrain station, just as I stepped off the escalator, I saw and heard a pan flute musician playing at the exit. It’s not often you come across a pan flute musician – but otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about the man.
I walked past, already thinking about work… until I stopped. Strangely, I felt compelled to talk to the musician. I turned and walked up to him. “Hi,” I said. He stopped playing. I quickly learned his name was Antu. Almost immediately, he asked “Do you like meditation?” I replied that I did, except I hadn’t really done much. “You have to try Vipassana,” he said, with conviction. “I just got back from a retreat, and it was amazing.” He took a pen and wrote on my hand dhamma.org.
From there, I bought his cd, and said goodbye. I visited the website that morning, and discovered that Vipassana means “to see things as they really are.” The non-profit organization offers free silent retreats all over the world. Intrigued, I bookmarked the site and made a mental note to return.
Around this time I also learned of peak oil, among other impending calamities, causing me to enter a period of disillusionment. I was angry at the rest of humanity, and this anger felt not only justified, but comforting. Judging others provided an excuse to maintain my own behaviour – and it would take a while before I realized being anger wasn’t as effective as being the change.
Silence In The Trees
It was almost a year before I actually attended my first retreat. In the summer of 2005, I set out alone, and first drove to The Sanctuary, an alternative housing property in the interior of British Columbia.
Founded by Sean Sands, a friend of my grandfather, I wasn’t sure why I had come. Nevertheless, the experience was profoundly moving, which I chronicled in my essay The Sanctuary. In particular, a conversation with local resident Peter stuck with me:
We talk about how our worldview inside directly relates to how we alter and develop the world outside. “Anywhere you go in the world, you look at the organization of their structures, and their lives. They see the world in a certain way. Here we see the world in our way.”
I ask if that means our reality is entirely dependent on our perception. “Not exactly,” he says, mulling the question over. “You need two parts to create reality: consciousness and energy. When you realize that, you can do anything.”
From the Sanctuary, I drove to the Vipassana retreat, just outside Merritt. 10 days of silence, many hours of meditation. Never would I have believe it was so hard to do so little. The experience cut deep into my psyche – driving a wedge between my automatic perception of the world; a gap between reality and my beliefs about reality.
On the drive home, a glance at a newspaper proclaimed that New Orleans was under water. It felt like having the wind knocked out of me. Days later, sitting at my computer, I was overcome with grief.
Spiritually Incorrect
In late 2005, I began work with author and activist Alan Clements, the first American to ordain as a Buddhist monk in Burma. His book Instinct for Freedom details his own quest for truth, amid the horrors of war and political repression.
Our work culminated in a live show DVD Spiritually Incorrect. His advice:
You are your own bible. Meditation is only as valuable as it offers the clarity to get off the cushion and into the world.
And so, at a time when I was resigning myself to the cushion, Alan’s own experience was an illuminating reminder. The goal of meditation is not an end, but a means to affect change in the world.
Not long afterward, my wife and I traveled to Southeast Asia, where I made another discovery about my relationship to Buddhism. Just as in the US, you can be a cultural Christian without actually following Jesus, so in Asia can you be Buddhist, without actually following Buddhism.
My curiosity about the relationship between culture and spirituality led me to create Brave New Traveler, an online magazine dedicated to the inner journey.
Thought Meets Action
I began to seriously examine my actions in the world. What behaviours are no longer justifiable? What was the impact on others and the world?
With these thoughts in mind, my wife and I became mostly vegetarian, a process that continues to be an on-going challenge.
Also intrigued by movement (as opposed to meditation) both of us began to practice yoga. With obvious parallels between Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, the transition was easy. It also helped that my wife underwent a dramatic transformation, from web programmer to yoga teacher, thanks in part to the spiritual nudging of Osho.
The Essential Self
2009 was the year of the ego. It began with Echkart Tolle’s The Power of Now, a solid deconstruction of the ego’s grip on the heart. The ego, and our unconscious desire to protect it, reveals the extent of our madness, both collective and personal.
Even our desire to “seek” – to find our essential selves, can become an exercise in ego, as revealed by spiritual teacher Adyashanti. As he writes in The End of Your World, the process of stripping away the ego is fraught with false insight.
Sometimes, we need to take more drastic measures.
I’d known about Burning Man for a while – some call it a drug-fueled excuse to release your inhibitions and lose your mind. Others won’t speak about it, only shake their heads, and say “You won’t know until you’ve done it.” With this cryptic message in mind, I vowed to make my way out to the Black Rock desert.
The journey also happened to culminate with the passing of my wife’s Aunt Lily. Her final weeks were spent in the hospital, her life seeping out with each day. While I wasn’t present to see her final moments, both events combined to induce a powerful lesson in death and compassion, as chronicled in my essay, Burning Man:
We burn the Man as a symbol. It is the burning away of your old self, your old worldview. The pretences you hold dear, the person you thought you were. We burn the Man to mirror the burning away of our outer shells. And what’s left is the divine self. What’s left is the truth.”
Sustaining and connecting with the divine self is another matter.
Finding The Flow
In moments of stillness, of non-thinking, we often sense the underlying direction of life. It’s what the Taoists call “flow.” I was turned back onto this concept by Adyashanti, who describes it as:
When we’re not so conflicted and divided inside, we get a feel for the inevitable – where life is moving, what direction it is going in. We no longer ask “Is this the right way? How do I know it’s the right way?” This kind of question actually distorts our perception. There’s something much more subtle occurring; it’s the flow of life itself.
This is the wisdom that surrendering control over how your life “should be” actually opens you up to the life you want.
A quick Google search on flow led me to Taoist master Casey Kochmer, and his book A Personal Tao. Here he was able to demonstrate what many people only intellectualize – how to dance with the flow of life.
In late 2009, I flew to Hawaii to study with Casey under The Path of the Awakening Dragon:
Taoism, more than any other faith or philosophy, concentrates upon the relative nature of the self. Awakening Dragon Taoism both removes ego and embraces ego in order to reveal a person’s full nature. This is the process of discovering kindness and connection to a larger world.
Through Casey, I’ve explored the nature of potential, and the value of acting with kindness. Whereas Buddhism teaches ultimate non-attachment, Taoism appears to celebrate the art of being. As Casey writes:
We don’t need to seek enlightenment… it is lived, by living life well. As flows the river into the sea: you can even say enlightenment is attained by all in the end once we release.
The Ascent of Humanity
In 2010, the global crises appears to be strengthening. While the economic collapse seems to have slowed, the damage to collective certainty has been done. More and more people are beginning to question the validity of our system.
For me, the epiphany arrived via a reusable shopping bag. The “solution” to global catastrophe was to shun plastic bags. Change a lightbulb. Ride your bike. But for the first time, rather than intellectualize, I felt I finally understood the problem goes much deeper.
Within a few hours (literally) I came across an excerpt of Charles Eisenstein’s book The Ascent of Humanity. He writes:
We begin to grow hopeless as our solutions—new technologies, new laws, more education, trying harder—only seem to worsen our problems. For many activists, hopelessness gives way to despair as, despite their best efforts, catastrophe looms ever closer.
This book explains why trying harder can never work. Our “best efforts” are grounded in the same mode of being that is responsible for the crisis in the first place. As Audre Lord put it, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
The full 600 page book is an incredible dissection of humanity’s hubris, and the real reason we’re reaching the breaking point. Namely: our broken story of self.
Essentially it is that we are discrete and separate beings in a world of other. We are bubbles of psychology, we are flesh-encased souls, we are rational economic actors seeking to maximize self-interest, we are genetically-determined individuals seeking to maximize reproductive self-interest.
From this basic sense-of-self arises deep paradigms of control, since the interests of these competing selves are fundamentally opposed.
This old story reveals the underlying causes of all the issues we see today: community breakdown, greed, environmental collapse, depression, religious violence, and more. Individually, while one person may seek inner peace, it is impossible when the rest of the world is crumbling.
How to fix the story? John Michael Greer says eloquently:
“For three hundred fifty years, people in the Western world have convinced themselves that they live in a bleak world of dead matter spinning in empty space, when the real universe all around them is aflame with magic and power and infinite life. We need to wake up from the trance of scientific materialism and embrace …the dancing powers that surround us at every moment.”
a love story
Over 60 years ago, Aldous Huxley distilled the golden thread running through all religions, what he called The Perennial Philosophy. He writes:
“Now it is a fact of experience that we can either emphasize our separateness from other beings and the ultimate reality of the world or emphasize our oneness with them and it. To some extent at least, our will is free in this matter.”
Our belief that we are alone in a meaningless universe has removed sacredness from the world. We fail to respect life, and so we diminish life within ourselves.
The only true evolution, as Eisenstein believes, is to fall in love with the world again. And this is already happening, at this very moment.
… to be continued.
Ian MacKenzie is a filmmaker based in Vancouver, BC. He shoots video journalism, documentary films, and original webseries. He also blogs about pop culture, new media, philosophy, and religion. 
