Graduation 2007

Graduation Welcome Remarks
Thomas B. Coburn
President, Naropa University
May 12, 2007

The greatest honor that comes to me each year as president of Naropa University is to extend this welcome to our graduation ceremony.  It is an honor because I know what a tremendous, collaborative effort it has required to get each of you, today’s graduates, to this point in your lives.  You have done remarkable work with us, and just as you have grown over the years, so you have helped us grow, as individual faculty and staff members, and as an institution.  So my first words of welcome are intertwined with words of thanks for all you have done and been during your years with us.  Let me be the first—along with the others assembled here today who are not students—to offer my—and our collective—congratulations.

My second words of welcome go to the parents, spouses, partners, children, other family members, and friends of today’s graduates.  One of the fundamental principles of Naropa’s signature activity of contemplative education is the interdependence of all beings, and nowhere is the truth of that principle more apparent than in the collaboration that has been involved in getting today’s graduates to this point in their lives.  You parents, partners, friends and others have shaped today’s graduates with your nurturance and care for years, often long before they arrived at our doors.  During their years with us you have continued that nurturance in ways best known to each of you—emotionally, spiritually, financially.  So please pause now to appreciate how you, too, share in the accomplishments of today’s graduates, sometimes vicariously, and sometimes much more directly.  And, graduates, please join me in thanking your collaborators in your great accomplishment.

Finally, a welcome to Naropa’s faculty and staff.  You are the agents of the growth that has become manifest in today’s graduates.  You are the ones that today’s graduates will remember in the weeks and years ahead.  Sometimes those memories will occur in obvious ways, as students recollect particular episodes in their learning. But often those memories will emerge more gradually, occasioned by the ripening of seeds you faculty have planted, often without your students knowing it, seeds that will take 15 or 20 years to come to fruition.   Some will then blossom, often in a sudden eruption, as that mysterious link that forever binds student and teacher comes freshly into view.  When you, today’s graduates, have such memories, please smile and drop your teacher a note or an e-mail or a flower.  It’s a precious way of reanimating the bonds that already exist between you.  These communications mean far more to those of us who teach than you can ever imagine.  And right now, graduates, please join me in thanking this remarkable faculty and staff.

Beyond these words of welcome, I will say only one further thing.  It is inspired by something that many of you graduates heard from me years ago during the admissions process, for it is one of the verbal “snapshots” that I usually offer to prospective Naropa students in an effort to capture the spirit of contemplative education.  What I offer, based on my own training as an historian of religion, is the empirical observation that contemplatives in virtually every wisdom tradition have lived their lives along a spectrum.  At one end are the reclusives, the solitary hermits, living their lives in isolation, whose inner work connects them to the broader universe, with the yogi living in a cave in the high Himalayas as a kind of stereotype.  At the other end of the spectrum are the activists, those contemplatives whose sense of being one with the larger universe draws them into the sites of pain, anguish, and suffering that are everywhere in our world, making common cause with victims of social, political, economic and other distress, doing the hard, transformative work, seeking greater justice and equity for all.  This is the style of contemplative life embodied in the Martin Luther Kings, the Mohandas Gandhis, the Dorothy Days, and the Thich Nhat Hanhs of our world.  Our role at Naropa, I have maintained, is to help our students understand the range of possibilities for living the contemplative life, so that they—so that you, today’s graduates—may choose for yourselves your place on that contemplative spectrum, recognizing that, at different times in your lives, as both circumstances and you yourself change, you will likely move to a different point on the spectrum, as have your contemplative ancestors.  It is my hope, indeed my expectation, that each of you now has a firm sense of the spectrum of possibilities that lie in front of you for living the contemplative life.

What I want to suggest is that, by virtue of having such an understanding of the contemplative life, you—today’s graduates—are now in a position to solve the world’s resource problems.  That is not hyperbole.  I believe you are now in a position to solve, to get fresh traction, on the full range of the world’s resource problems.  What do I mean by that?  The resource constraints that we humans face—constraints of time, of energy, of space, of money, of understanding—will, of course, be with us for some time, and while I expect that you graduates, like your predecessors, will play important roles in addressing these various challenges, what you bring to the world, is something different—a resource more subtle and potentially more applicable to every resource constraint and to every life situation.  Each of you now understands far more deeply, far more experientially than when you started your studies with us at Naropa, what an extraordinary resource lies within each of us, as rich and complex and compelling as the stars in our glorious Colorado night sky.  You have learned how to engage, how to tap into that resource, drawing upon it for new levels of discernment and wisdom.

What we call that inner awareness varies, of course, across the different traditions that inform our lives at Naropa.  Some call it mind, some consciousness, some the nameless Tao, the Godhead, or the Great Mother.  One of my favorite formulations comes from the Upanishads, those haunting, mystical intuitions from classical India: Purnam adah purnam idam/ purnat purnam udacyate/purnasya purnam adaya/purnam eva sisyate.  “It is infinitely complete in every way.  Whatever comes forth from it is complete in just the same way.  It is never diminished, no matter how much and whatever comes forth from it.”   It is, in other words, the inexhaustible resource, a resource of which you new graduates are now keenly aware.  It is also an ever-accessible resource, of which my favorite formulation is that of the Qur’an, that “God is nearer to a human-being than his or her jugular vein.”  Imagine that!  Right here, the jugular vein . . . .

What you Naropa graduates have learned is how to gain access to and draw upon this infinite inner resource, a process that Naropa’s founder, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche describes as “the interplay of discipline and delight.”

Both parts of this interplay of discipline and delight are important, but I want to close with a word about the delightful part.  I do so because you know, as I do, that along with the hard work of learning and the pain that is everywhere, there is the joy, the laughter that comes with insight into oneself and the world.  And graduations especially are an occasion for unfettered joy.  Dag Hammarskjold, the former secretary general of the United Nations, who died many years ago on a peace mission to Africa, put the issue this way in his journal: “A grace to pray for: that our self-interest, which is inescapable, may never cripple our sense of humor, that fully conscious self-scrutiny that alone can save us.”  But I want to close with a poem from the great 17th century Hindu mystic, Tukaram.  He puts this point less prosaically, more playfully and joyfully.

FIRST HE LOOKED CONFUSED
I could not lie anymore so I started calling my dog “God.”
First, he looked
confused,
then he started smiling, then he even
danced.
I kept at it: Now he doesn’t even
bite.
I am wondering if this
might work on
people?

Congratulations, and Godspeed!