Recently I remembered an article by John McPhee in the New Yorker from the early 1980s. The article was titled, “Minihydro.” It chronicled the history of small hydroelectric dams in the mountain streams of northeast United States that were numerous early in the 20th century, before rural electrification programs made them obsolete. After the gas crisis in the mid-seventies, small towns and individuals began bringing them back online. As I recall, they were simple, sturdy machines that basically just had to be cleaned and lubricated and they were spinning up electricity again.

It occurred to me that these reliable little generators are a great metaphor for our spiritual training. I imagine a dharmachakra wheel in the center of our being as the generator, and a stream of compassion, love, and wisdom flowing forth from the Eternal that turns the wheel and produces positive spiritual energy. Not being artistically gifted, it is hard for me to illustrate this intuition, but I hope this conveys the idea:

In Asian art and iconography, the Eternal is often represented as an empty circle, or a solid circle of gold or silver. The problem with two-dimensional images—however meaningful—is that they are inherently static and cannot convey the dynamism of what is being represented. Here, I’m filling the circle with an image of flowing molten gold in an attempt to give a sense that the Eternal is not unmoving and unresponsive.

The dharmachakra is a universal Buddhist symbol representing the Noble Eightfold Path, where each spoke represents an aspect of the Path: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.¹ People can make the mistake of thinking that these are sequential. Although at any time we may need to focus on a particular “spoke,” they are, in practical effect, all operating together and all contribute to the structural integrity of the wheel. And the faster a spoked wheel turns, the more the individual spokes blend together and are indistinguishable from one another.

In this metaphor the spokes are like the blades of a turbine that turn to generate power when driven by a focused stream. Our inner, “spiritual generator” is turned by the unceasing flow of the compassion, love, and wisdom of the Eternal. We put our spiritual generator online with our active practice of pure meditation and the Precepts. When we do, positive spiritual energy is generated that lights up the days and nights of our life in the world and banishes darkness and despair. And the more deeply and open-heartedly we train, the faster the turbine turns and the more spiritual energy is generated. This energy animates ourselves and our relationships with others.

The river of the Eternal does not need our spiritual generator; It flows endlessly on whether we open our spiritual channel to It or not. We, however, need It. If we do not open to Its flow into us with our training, our spiritual generator is offline. And the longer it sits idle the more rusty with disuse it becomes, making it harder to restart in the future. Even so, it always has the potential to tap into the unceasing flow of the Eternal and generate spiritual energy again when lubricated with meditation and Precepts. Whether we open the floodgates or not, the flow is always applying gentle pressure at the gates that we both resist and long to open our hearts to.

We resist opening to the flow because our spiritual generator needs the ongoing maintenance and attention of our training. This requires an effort of time and an effort of mindfulness and willingness that the self is reluctant to yield. Self-indulgence and self-regard and the gratification of passing impulses is the self’s modus operandi, which shuts our generator down. Selfishly breaking Precepts and avoiding pure meditation throws karmic “debris” into the flow that pollutes and blocks the intake into our spiritual generator.

The potential for being a dynamo of positive spiritual energy is not limited to a few special “engineers.” The compassion, love, and wisdom that streams forth from the Source flows in every one of us. We just need to get ourselves out of the way and throw wide the floodgates with our openhearted training.

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NEWS OF THE TEMPLES