There is a zen saying, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. It’s a metaphorical pointing to the truth that buddha is awareness of the impermanence of our experience. Buddha is not any specific experience. It is not suffering or joy, wealth or poverty, abundance or deficiency. Buddha is not a being outside ourselves who requires our belief or compliance. Every attempt to externalize Buddha is an attempt to prevent our realization of awareness and release from suffering.

Buddha is literally, “being aware.” Seeing anyone or anything as a Buddha obscures this reality and we need to destroy this illusion in order to be free from suffering. The saying emerged from the fact that in his last teachings, the Buddha said to “believe nothing” he has said. Only be aware of your experience. Awareness is sufficient for all skillful means. Only be here, now. Only notice.

Gratitude, applied to the present and future, becomes being grateful for possibilities. In this sense, we can learn more from the future than from the past.

Attended a talk tonight with buddy Bill Lawrence by relationship expert and author, John Badalament, who argues that connectedness is key to relationships at work and home.

This he defines as “knowing and being known”, which parses out into shared insights into each other’s thought processes through the media of personal story telling. It’s going beyond talk that barely qualifies as texting or strident attempts to tell others how they should be going about their world. It’s knowing and being known without seeing each other as either audience to be entertained or problems to be fixed.

So long the journey home,
lands unknown and landscapes uncertain.
Though genuine in arm’s embrace,
distances reach into the night.
So long the journey home.

I dream of my return
to sun ripened smiles,
feasts of seven fishes,
and buddhas dancing on beaches.
I dream of my return.

I recalled today reading social activist and visionaries, Phil and Dan Berrigan, in 1972, who talked about community as re-membering. Bringing members together into a whole.

We need to remember our goodness, given to us, remember our gifts, remember our wisdom that transcends our knowledge. We need to remember the future that calls us, and our source.

There is a Zen practice of realizing what we don’t know, understanding that the open space of “don’t know” allows us to be receptive to discovery. What we don’t know is a more powerful place than what we do know, especially in the impermanence of life.

Here is a quote from Nobel winning Poet, Wistawa Szymborska, from her 1996 acceptance speech in Stockholm.

“This is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Planet hangs suspended … Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating, ‘I don’t know’.”

We sometimes take on relationships for learning we think we need in the world. Sometimes we learn what we think we need to learn. And sometimes the learning is about discovering what we really don’t need to learn. Which is powerful learning in itself.

Spent time with old friend Anton Zuiker who continues to do amazing and inspiring work at Duke Medical center and the region there, innovating at the edges of social technologies and sociologies. He reflected that there is a theme that runs through all of my 6 books, including the upcoming “Radical Transitions”: conversations.

True that. I grew up realizing that conversations were the soul of shared lives and the shape of perspectives that give shape to our lives. In the beginning is the conversation. The universe continues to emerge from conversation, the interplay of form and consciousness. And we celebrate this quantum-spiritual reality every time we chat.

Here in the states today, we celebrate Thanksgiving. Ironically, it’s the one holiday in this country anyway when gifts are not given, wars not honored, or religious differences not celebrated. There are no gifts, ideologies, or remembered casualities, or revolutions required. It is simply about simple thanks, expressed in simple ways, usually around tables of abundance. It is the one day a year, we set aside the unconsciousness of deficiency perspectives and realize reality in its essential abundance.

On other Holy and Hallmark holidays, I am often asked what Buddhists celebrate. No, we are not holiday orphans, Today is our day. In Buddhism, the highest emotion in our nature as human beings is gratitude, second to none. Not because gratitude is a virtue in a transactional spiritual system of merit. Not because gratitude makes us morally superior or higher order intellectual capitalists. But because gratitude reflects our understanding of the impermanent and interdependent nature of things. It flows from our being enlightened to this understanding, our awakeness.

Benedict Carey’s NY Times article yesterday on denial reminded me of family holiday dinners growing up. Carey describes four kinds of denial: Inattention where we don’t pay attention to a violation of standards, Passive acknowledgment where we notice the behavior but don’t act on it, Reframing where we rationalize the behavior as somehow justified, and Willful blindness where we keep conversation about the behavior off limits.

It was willful blindness at work when my aunts would preemptively warn my uncles before marathon holiday dinners that “there will be no talk about politics or religion.” It was a great example of the social research cited in the article supporting mutually agreed upon denial, if only implicitly, as the glue that helps maintain relational cohesion. Interestingly, denial turns out to be highly related to capacity for forgiveness. Where denial in excess may lead to dysfunctionality, denial in moderation may be the prudent alternative to the kind of truthing that gets in the way of forgiveness.