One Human Journey

Somewhere Between Rage and Serenity

2011-06-23T11:13:00.003-03:00

In the movie X-Men: First Class, a prequel in which we meet the younger, more innocent versions of the characters from the later movies, the ever-wise and telepathic Charles Xavier (later known as Professor X) coaches Erik -- the vengeful, angry young man who will eventually become his arch-rival, Magneto -- on how to use his metal-bending superpower. Erik cannot seem to unleash the full extent of his power except when he is swept away by emotion -- specifically, anger and sorrow. Xavier instructs him on how to control his mind in order to control his power: "True focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity."

Like most dialogue in superhero movies, this line is too cute by half, but within it there is a kernel of truth. From the Buddhist point of view, the key to working skillfully with our emotions -- both the pleasant ones and the painful ones -- is to find a balance between, on the one hand, feeling the emotion and opening to its energy, and on the other hand, having enough space around the experience of the emotion that we do not get swept away by it. It's rather like the way the Buddha instructed one of his students who was struggling with meditation practice: "Not too tight, not too loose."

In the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, and particularly in the view of "formless" meditation practices like Mahamudra and Dzogchen, whatever arises in the mind -- even powerful, afflictive emotions such as anger, jealousy, or rage -- is regarded as the path of awakening. We don't need to apply any antidotes, or try to get rid of our thoughts or pacify our emotions. Every experience is the play of mind's natural luminosity and emptiness. The only question is how we relate to what arises in our minds -- whether we see its true nature or mistake it for something it is not.

Usually we cling to the thoughts and emotions that make us feel good or reinforce our egos, and we reject and push away the ones that feel unpleasant. Or, like Magneto, we go the opposite way and cling to what is actually painful; we nurse resentments and keep scratching at wounds that eat us up from the inside and become the whole storyline of our lives. In either case, we project a degree of reality and solidity onto our thoughts and emotions that they don't really have. As Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche said, "When you know that thoughts are illusions, you can take thoughts of desire and anger as friends." The stronger the emotional charge, the more it reveals or points to mind's awakened nature. It all depends on whether we can experience the raw energy of our emotions without buying into our own concepts and storylines about them, and without blowing our emotions up into something they are not.

The story of how Erik became Magneto is, of course, a cautionary tale. In the end, Erik was just too consumed by his rage and his thirst for vengeance, and his obsession turned him to the dark side. From Charles Xavier he learned how to unleash his full mutant powers, but not how to let go of his own concepts. He didn't quite grasp the real meaning of Xavier's advice about working with the power of emotions: "True focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity." In other words, it's about finding the middle way.

I think Professor X was on to something. He might even have been studying Buddhism.

More Apocalypse Now

2011-05-26T12:41:00.007-03:00

Just 24 hours after posting my article on our modern obsession with apocalyptic narratives and religious visions of doomsday, the doorbell rang and I was greeted by a smiling Jehovah's Witness in a suit and tie. He wanted to let me know about an upcoming convention in the area, and gave me a flyer with the details. The flyer's content -- about the coming apocalypse and the promise of redemption for the lucky few -- could not have been more perfectly attuned to what I wrote even if I had written the copy for it myself.

"Violence, immorality, and global warming," the flyer asks, "along with oil spills and other environmental disasters -- all these problems have led concerned people to ask, WILL HUMANS RUIN THIS EARTH?" It invites me to attend a three-day convention, where a talk will be given that "will show how this planet will soon be transformed into a paradise and how you and your family can qualify to live there."

This particular vision of apocalypse and redemption is based on a dream recorded in the Book of Daniel (2:31-45), interpreted as a prophesy that details the successive rise and fall of multiple empires: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the British, and the Americans. The dream itself has to do with a statue whose toes are made of iron mixed with clay, and a huge rock that smashes the statue to pieces and establishes God's Kingdom on earth, which will last forever and ever.

The apocalyptic narrative put forth by Jehovah's Witnesses may differ slightly in its content and sources from the narrative put forward by Harold Camping and the Rapturists. But the message is essentially the same, and it perfectly demonstrates what I wrote in my previous article. It plays directly upon people's awareness that there are real and serious problems in the world: violence, global warming, environmental pollution, "immorality," and so on (I won't open the Pandora's Box of what constitutes "immorality," but there it is). It plucks at the strings of people's fears that all of this is building towards some kind of imminent turning point, a day of reckoning and dramatic change. For those who are inclined towards interpreting contemporary events in the light of ancient Biblical prophecy, those fears are easily diverted into a consoling vision of how to turn the threat of apocalypse into an opportunity for you and your family!

Apocalypse Now

2011-05-24T23:37:00.004-03:00

Last week the American public was treated to an amazing amount of hype about the so-called "Rapture" predicted by a self-styled evangelical prophet named Harold Camping.

I come from an evangelical background (I bear the scars of a Southern Baptist childhood), so Rapture fever is nothing new to me. But I was astounded at the level of hype and media coverage garnered by Camping and his followers. As a prophet, Camping may have been quite mistaken; but as a marketer, he demonstrated a certain genius. There were at least 27,000 articles published on the topic; Camping and his followers spent an estimated $100 million on billboard advertisements promoting the coming apocalypse. On Facebook and Twitter and on late-night shows last week, Saturday's scheduled Rapture was the subject of seemingly endless commentary and derisive satire. While some of this satire was quite funny and richly deserved, in the end it was depressing to see that our public discourse could be so completely hijacked by a story that really merited discussion only in psychiatric journals, as a case study of religious mania.

It was also sad to see how shamelessly religious believers' fears were exploited for profit. On eBay, one man last week was selling, for $99, a fail-safe message delivery service ensuring that those lucky enough to be taken up could have their goodbye letters post-Rapturously delivered to loved ones who were left behind. Another service was offered to insure ongoing care for beloved pets forsaken by those pet owners who were expecting to be levitated into the sky and escorted directly to Heaven.

As some have noted, the amount of hype and discussion generated by last week's Rapture bubble is probably miniscule compared to that which has already been building for several years in anticipation of the apocalypse predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar for December 21, 2012. If, like me, you quickly tired of the Rapture bubble, just wait: there is still a year and a half to build up a proper media frenzy about the Mayan doomsday. It has already been the subject of a major Hollywood film with a $200 million budget -- twice what Camping spent to promote his brand of apocalypse.

The ascendancy of apocalyptic narratives in popular culture belies deeper forces at work within the American mind. Apocalyptic narratives are the clothing in which we dress up our fears of the future, our dread of change and loss, our basic fear of death. If our need for such narratives is growing, it indicates a corresponding amplification of fearful mind. Behind our fear, and fueling the narrative, is the collective awareness that we are playing a game that is nearing its inevitable end. The way we live today is not sustainable, and people sense that the repercussions are building towards a day of reckoning. That awareness -- which isn't necessarily mistaken -- is easily hijacked by apocalyptic narratives of any kind.

It would be much better if we could begin to face our fears -- and their causes -- directly, rather than projecting them into mythological narratives of apocalypse. We are right to sense that our modern human life is out of balance, and that we are nearing a tipping point. We may also be right to sense that a moment of truth is approaching, and that facing the truth may not be easy or comfortable. But when we divert this awareness into apocalyptic narratives derived from ancient prophecies, we only distract ourselves from our real problems.

Love's in Need of Love Today

2011-04-23T20:27:00.004-03:00

This morning I attended a funeral service for an acquaintance who died last week. Most of the small, Acadian town here turned out for the service -- a very traditional Catholic funeral in the town's single, large cathedral.

Having grown up Baptist, I always feel like I've stepped into another world when I visit a Catholic church, with its alien liturgies and rituals and rich iconography. The feeling of being a visitor from another planet was heightened, this morning, by my being dressed conspicuously in the robes of a Buddhist monk, which literally marked me as an alien presence and made it impossible to pretend otherwise. But the local people here are accustomed to having Buddhist monks in their midst.

Since this morning, I've been reflecting on something the priest said during his homily. "In order to experience life in its fullness, we must share the fullness of God's love with others." To put that into more secular language: no man is an island. We are relational creatures, and we find and experience the fullness of meaning in our lives through the love, kindness and compassion that we give and receive in relationship to one another.

The Buddha expressed this as the truth of interdependence. We do not actually exist as solid entities, separate from one another; we "inter-are," as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it. In the fullness of realizing our interdependence, we feel others' pain as our own, and there are no barriers to the natural flow of love and kindness. Sounds like heaven, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, back on earth, there seems to be no shortage of barriers blocking the flow of kindness and compassion between human beings. Open the newspaper or turn on the TV. The world is hurting, burning with violence and conflict. "Hate's goin' round, breaking many hearts," mourns Stevie Wonder. "The force of evil plans to make you its possession. And it will, if we let it, destroy everybody. We all must take precautionary measures."

In his book Awakening Through Love, the Dzogchen teacher Lama John Makransky writes:

"Everything that is most important to human beings is dependent upon love. Powerful and enduring love, grounded in wisdom, is the panacea to cure the ills of this world, starting with our own. We all have this curative power of goodness within us; all we need are the means to unveil it."

Replace "God" with the "power of goodness within us," and that's pretty much exactly what the Catholic priest said this morning.

Oh, and here's that Stevie Wonder song, from 1976. Its message couldn't be more true, or more timely.

Descend into Your Body and Wake Up

2011-04-16T15:59:00.007-03:00

Cross-posted today at the ID Project.

Lately I've been seeing more and more meditators and teachers talking about Mindfulness of Body -- which makes me very happy. Last month, Kate Johnson published a thoughtful piece at the ID Project blog called "Mindfulness of Bodies." Will Johnson had a fantastic article, "Full Body, Empty Mind," at Tricycle. A little further back, in November, I published (also at the ID Project blog) "You Are Not a Brain on a Stick (Or Are You?)".

In that piece, I wrote:

"...We modern people have become tragically disembodied, alienated from the most basic level of our own experience as human beings.... Most of us have lost the felt sense of what it is to be embodied, to experience the world in and through the medium of this material and energetic body into which we have been born.

"We think about the body a great deal, sometimes obsessively, but this is not the same as being in and with the body on its own terms. Our allegiance to thinking about everything -- mediating and managing our experience and our lives through the conceptual thought function -- is the very root of our disembodiment in the first place. For the most part, we think of our bodies as mere tools (and sometimes obstacles) to serve our ambitions and our ego's goals of attaining happiness and comfort; we rarely descend into the darkness of the body itself and witness, without an agenda, the naked experience that arises there."

As Reggie Ray says in his book Touching Enlightenment, it's not simply that we can find realization and awakening in the body -- there is actually no other place to find it.

But it would be just like us (wouldn't it?) to sit here in cyberspace and chit-chat and theorize about Mindfulness of Body, without actually doing it. So -- enough talk. Embedded below is a simple, 20-minute guided meditation on Mindfulness of Body that I led about a year ago at Nalandabodhi New York. You can download the MP3, or listen in streaming audio online. Close your Facebook and Twitter windows, silence your mobile phone, sit down in a comfortable meditation posture, click "Play," and explore the mystery of being alive in a human body. There is a world of somatic experience unfolding in your being at this very moment -- just waiting for you to notice it.

Note: Email subscribers may need to click through to One Human Journey's web page in order to see the embedded audio controls.

Eclipse

2011-04-10T19:45:00.002-03:00

This poem was written in Pleasant Bay, Cape Breton, on December 20, 2010 -- the night of the winter solstice and a full lunar eclipse.

Winter had urgent business elsewhere.
She stopped by to leave a note:
"I'll be back late this year:
don't wait up for me."
Her note lies melting in raggedy patches
of late December snow that pepper the ground.
Confident, we wait for her to return
and give us her full, devoted attention.
She never fails to come home to us --
although, last winter, she forgot
to freeze the Gulf of St. Lawrence
for the first time in fifty years.
Perhaps her memory isn't what it used to be.
Like a dancer, the mountain behind us flashes her eyes
through a veil of fog hiding her face.
First one eagle, then two, swimming above in a lazy circle.
Tonight, the longest night, the full moon will rise,
then dissolve in our shadow, and emerge again.
Stiff spruce trees, unruffled in the breeze,
flex their branches upwards, anticipating
the burden of snow they will be asked to bear
when winter returns as promised.

Practicing Dharma Without Becoming a Doormat

2011-04-08T12:13:00.003-03:00

Recently someone wrote to me with the following question:

How does one who is on the path practice love, tolerance, compassion, forgiveness, etc. without becoming a doormat? Our culture is so plagued with fear greed, ignorance and anger that I find it difficult to rise above it all and work from a higher spiritual plane. When people violate me, I want to fight back instead of sort of "stepping off the playing field."

Over the years, I've found that this is a frequently asked question -- especially among people who are new to the path of meditation and Dharma practice. That is not to say that it's a naive question. It's a fundamental one, for it goes right to the heart of the matter. And there is no easy answer for it. The path of Dharma does not provide us with easy, prefabricated answers to living questions; we must find our answers in each moment, and then find them again in the next.

But I've observed that this is one of those questions that ceases to plague people as they continue going deeper into their practice and spiritual path. It's not that it ever really goes away; but we begin to understand that the question hinges on a perceived separation between life and spiritual practice that doesn't truly exist.

Practicing love, tolerance, compassion, forgiveness and so on does not, of course, mean that we should make ourselves into a doormat for other people's abuse. For starters, we should extend the same friendliness and compassion to ourselves that we aspire to extend to others. The Buddha said that we could search the entire universe and we would not find anyone more worthy of our love than we ourselves are. So putting ourselves in a position of being repeatedly violated by another is not practicing compassion or love towards ourselves.

The Buddhist path is often misunderstood (and mis-applied) as a practice of passivity -- dis-engaging from the world and retreating into oneself. Certainly, retreat (in the literal sense) has its purpose and value for a practitioner, in terms of deepening and stabilizing one's own experience of truth. But real Dharma practice is not navel-gazing, or fiddling while Rome burns -- it's being fully engaged in one's life and world and relationships, with no separation and no prefabricated rules.

In the Sadhana of Mahamudra, Chogyam Trungpa described -- in poetic language -- the wisdom of a fully realized being:

He is dark red in color, symbolizing the oneness of everything within compassion. He is inseparable from peacefulness and yet he acts whenever action is required. He subdues what needs to be subdued, he destroys what needs to be destroyed and he cares for whatever needs his care.

If being inseparable from peacefulness and yet acting whenever action is required seems paradoxical, that's good -- because it is. As Zen master Suzuki Roshi said, if something isn't paradoxical, it isn't true.

As we grow on our path, we begin to see that we can act whenever action is required, but that action can come from a different motivation. It's no longer "fighting back" in the usual sense, which comes from aggression and fear, a sense of closing down and tightening. Rather, our action can come from a place of compassion and staying open to other people's basic goodness (even when they're behaving atrociously).

Sometimes that means retreating from the situation and giving it space. Sometimes it means sitting down and having a frank conversation, and sharing your perspective. Sometimes it means protesting. Sometimes it means walking away entirely, and never looking back. Sometimes it means giving someone a gift to show that you care. Sometimes it means calling the police and pressing charges. You get the idea.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, no predetermined course of action. We meet each situation that arises with fresh awareness and open heart, and we respond in whatever way is most beneficial. Making ourselves into a doormat is rarely the appropriate response.

Practicing Equanimity in Times of Terror

2011-03-15T11:09:00.004-03:00

A few weeks ago, my friend Hokai shared on Facebook this incredible Fiona Apple video, her version of the classic Beatles song, "Across the Universe." I became slightly obsessed with it, and watched it repeatedly.

The original Beatles song, which some critics have argued was more the product of hippie-era drug culture than any kind of authentic spiritual practice, does seem slightly naive today (as my friend pointed out when he shared the video). But what Apple and her director Thomas Paul Anderson did with the song in this video took it in a whole new direction.

Apple's unyielding, peaceful, undistracted focus amidst the chaos and violence taking place all around her has, I feel, something deceptively simple and instructive to say about the practice of equanimity in difficult times. It reminds me of the legend of King Ashoka of ancient India, who looked out with sadness and horror over the desolate battlefield strewn with the corpses of his troops and enemies, and saw a monk walking through the fray with an aura of peace and dignity about him. Seeing that monk's equanimity was the spark that led to Ashoka's own spiritual awakening. As legend has it, he went on to become a benevolent ruler and did many noble and compassionate things, like building some of the world's first hospitals.

This week, the news coming out of Japan -- the earthquake, the tsunami, the ongoing nuclear crisis that seems at this moment to be heading towards catastrophe -- has rocked everyone's equanimity. Like so many others, I've found myself glued to the awful news reports; my emotions have been locked in a seemingly endless cycle of hope and fear, even at times despair. I've found myself wondering once again how to continue practicing equanimity in the light of such tragic and fearful circumstances.

Last night, I turned back to Fiona Apple's video for consolation, and for a reminder. For all its brilliance as a music video, a more cynical person than me could easily dismiss her message as a glib, staged celebrity portrayal of the practice of equanimity -- like the song itself. And, from a certain perspective, that may be so -- but it doesn't bother me. Surely the practice it is pointing to is still a relevant reminder, even in times like these -- perhaps most of all in times like these. If, after all, our practice of equanimity disappears when things look really bad, then what is it good for?

A word of caution: in traditional Buddhist teachings, it is said that equanimity has two obstacles or enemies -- near and far. The far enemy -- which is easier to recognize because it's so obviously the opposite of equanimity -- is losing your cool, getting swept away in aggression or attachment. But the near enemy -- which is harder to recognize because it can look superficially like equanimity -- is indifference, not giving a shit, a "couldn't-be-bothered" attitude. There's a lot of that sort of thing going around these days, too, but that's clearly not what is meant by the practice of equanimity.

In a way, it seems like a perfect koan: how to let the suffering of the world into your heart and to respond in whatever way is most helpful, while not getting swept away in attachment or hope and fear.

What do you think? What is the role of equanimity in times of tragedy and terror? How do you maintain your balance when the world around you seems to be in chaos?

Revulsion Is the Foot of Meditation

2011-02-01T11:48:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted today at The Interdependence Project.

I've been thinking a lot lately about this quote by Robert Aitken Roshi:

Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away.

Renunciation is one of those widely misunderstood and misrepresented Buddhist ideas. The misunderstanding usually has something to do with what Aitken Roshi refers to here: getting rid of the things of this world.

As Western Buddhist practitioners this may be an easy groove for us to slip into. Our cultural religious heritage is one that regards this world and its things (and us, as creatures embedded in the world) as fallen -- fundamentally corrupt. According to this view, there is a pure and uncorrupted world somewhere else waiting to be exchanged for this one -- but to go there requires getting rid of the things of this world. This idea finds its most vivid expression in those zealots who flagellate or otherwise mutilate themselves as a way to mortify the flesh and aspire to a world beyond this one -- but it also comes in much more common and more subtle flavors.

It would be natural to carry that kind of trip into our Buddhist practice, and think of renunciation as some kind of ascetic mortification. But the Mahayana Buddhist view of renunciation to which Aitken Roshi was referring is quite different. It is an internal attitude of renunciation towards the cause of suffering itself: the ego-clinging that distorts reality. "The primary cause of unhappiness," says Eckhart Tolle, "is never the situation but your thoughts about it."

So much of our suffering in life arises not from the things of this world, but from the way we relate to them with our minds. We cling to things; we do not want to accept that they pass away. With possessions and relationships and circumstances, we grasp at what makes us happy and push away what makes us suffer. But maybe at this point we have begun to suspect why the mahasidda Tilopa advised his student Naropa: "You are not bound by appearances; you are bound by clinging. Cut through your clinging, Naropa."

Appearances -- the things of this world -- are just what they are. They come and go. Sometimes they rock and sometimes they suck. But we get ourselves all in a twist trying to control things, and trying to keep them a certain way. Refusing to work with things as they are, we suffer. Accepting that the things of this world pass away means that we do not hold on to anything. Appearances have no real power to bind us if we do not cling to them.

In the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, there is a famous lineage prayer that includes the line: "Revulsion is the foot of meditation." We have to be sick and tired of our own suffering, and able to see how much of it we cause ourselves -- and willing to stop. That revulsion towards our own self-created suffering, which is rooted in ego-clinging and misunderstanding, is the basis, the foot, the foundation of everything else on the Buddhist path.

Towards Open-Source Buddhism

2011-01-14T21:15:00.004-04:00

Towards Open-Source Buddhism

I have a guest post today at the Tricycle blog that uses Linux and open-source computing as a metaphor for the evolution of Western Buddhism. Here are two short excerpts from the post:

What we call Buddhism is a widely distributed network phenomenon designed to optimize the human experience. Like the Internet, it started out as someone's idea, but then spun out of control: no one person or group now owns it, and it is being modified and updated from day to day in millions of little increments, from every corner of the known world.

Where is “the Internet?” It seems to adhere somehow to the computers and networks that are part of it, but the Internet itself can't be found. Where is “Buddhism?” It seems to adhere to the people and networks that are practicing it, but the Buddhism itself can't be found. Yet both the Internet and Buddhism can be demonstrated, utilized, applied in countless ways.

...

In my own practice, I have benefited from [the fusion of different traditions]. Although I study with a Tibetan teacher and look towards the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism as the primary lighthouse by which I navigate the waters, I have at times experienced bubbles of conceptual confusion and intellectualization that were helpfully popped by the sharp concision and no-nonsense directness of Zen teachings. At other times, exposure to the Theravadan view of the stages on the path of awakening—different in many ways from the Mahayana and Vajrayana views—has helped me view the teachings and practices in a more expansive light. I have even deepened my Buddhist path, at times, by incorporating spiritual teachings and practices from outside of Buddhism altogether. As long as I feel firmly rooted in my “native” tradition, I find this sort of cross-fertilization to be fruitful.

I now have to admit, though, that I know less than I once imagined I did what “Western Buddhism” is, or what it may become. It feels sometimes that there are as many “Western Buddhisms” taking shape among us as there are Western Buddhists who practice them. As with the emergence of Linux in the world of computers, perhaps what we are witnessing in the West today, with so much polymorphous blending of traditions, is the emergence of Open-Source Buddhism. (This moniker is, in fact, already in use on numerous websites.) Like the populist software movement from which it borrows its name, Open-Source Buddhism proposes a grassroots, do-it-yourself alternative to the old closed, proprietary operating systems. And it may yet produce new applications that were not possible within the framework of those systems.

However, buyers beware: I have dabbled in Linux, and frankly it gives me a headache....

Check out the full post at Tricycle to see what lessons can be drawn from the emergence of Open-Source Buddhism. Add your comments and join the conversation.

The Teeter Totter

2010-12-28T12:20:00.004-04:00

A Guest Post by Kenneth Folk

I love you./I hate you.

You make me smile./You make me sick.

I’ve never met anyone like you./You aren’t the person I thought you were.

Question: What is the difference between the first and second statement in each set above?

Answer: A couple of years, give or take.

By now, you recognize the theme. We’re talking about relationships and how they can flip-flop from love to hate. The pattern is best-known in primary relationships like love affairs. But it doesn’t stop there. You can find the same pattern in all kinds of relationships—parent/child, friend/friend, student/teacher, peer/peer. It happens the way it does because of something that is built into the emotions themselves, a kind of bipolarity that is inherent in emotion.

Think of a teeter totter. You can make one out of a long plank balanced on a big rock. You sit on one end of the plank, your playmate sits on the other, and you can seesaw up and down. But both ends of the seesaw can’t be up at the same time or down at the same time; being on a teeter totter is a bipolar situation. Emotions are like that. You can be happy or sad, angry or loving, anxious or calm. This bipolarity is inherent, both to teeter totters and to emotions. If there is stability to be found, it must lie beyond the extremes.

Now look at the rock that serves as the fulcrum for the seesaw. It’s just sitting there peacefully, holding up the whole affair without having a stake in it one way or another. Your mind has a place like that too, a place that is calm, complete, accepting, and stable. If there is peace to be found in your life (and there is) it will be found not at the edges, but at the heart.

Feel your body now, all at once. Notice that you can feel anxiety or calm, fear or safety, irritation or acceptance, impatience or patience, agitation or tranquility, boredom or interest, aversion or desire. Notice that these mind states, each of which can be paired with its opposite, has a signature constellation of body sensations. In fact, that is how you can tell them apart; fear hurts the body in a particular way, while safety feels like a soothing balm. You could never mistake one for the other, because they are so firmly rooted in body sensations.

You can also look at what underlies the fear or safety. Look at the rock that holds it all up. There is a part of the mind that is not afraid and therefore does not require safety. It doesn’t get bored, so it doesn’t rely on interest. Whether the body is reacting with irritation or acceptance, this deeper place in the mind has no problems; it’s just OK. This is equanimity.

Equanimity is not an emotion as we usually think of emotions. It has no opposite. Emotions are bipolar, always coming in pairs, but equanimity is just OK. Notice that when you are in touch with this deeper, more fundamental aspect of yourself that is just OK with things as they are, you can accept yourself and others. This is lovingkindness. When you are not distracted by your need for things to be other than they are, you can truly see another person; you can feel what it might be like to be them. This is compassion. And when you are tuned in to another person, you can share in his or her triumphs. This is sympathetic joy for the good fortune of another.

The four Brahma Viharas or Divine Abodes of Buddhism are all aspects of the same, simple, subjectless emotion: the sense of well-being. The bipolar emotions that see-saw back and forth over the rock of contentment will never be at rest and will never bring peace. That’s okay, because all the while they are riding on this great unshakeable mountain of equanimity.

By the way, why are you able to see your loved ones through the constantly flip-flopping lenses of love and hate? Because in either case, you are not looking at them at all. You are looking at your projection, a composite of sensations and mental impressions in your body and mind. You have invented your loved ones just as you have invented yourself. If you want to see your loved ones clearly, you must see yourself clearly...in which case you will find no one at all.

When you look at yourself and find no one, when you look at your mind and find only contentment, you are enlightened, which is another way of saying that you have found the happiness that does not depend on conditions. In order to find enlightenment, you must make your mind and body transparent in realtime. To make your mind and body transparent in realtime, you must feel your body and watch your mind.

Start with your body. Start now. Feel your body, all at once. Notice the way it is constantly contracting and releasing, holding you up, holding you steady. Notice all the little sensations that let you know you are anxious or afraid or hopeful or excited. You don’t have to fix any of this; this is your body and it knows better than you. Feel it as it is. Now see that underlying all of this is a part of the mind that doesn’t have a stake in the outcome. You don’t have to choose; it’s all here at once, the teeter totter of emotions, the body sensations, the ideas, and the equanimity. None of this is up to you. Let it be as it is.

It’s not bad that you see-saw between love and hate, happiness and unhappiness, anger and good will; it’s built into the system. You didn’t create the system and you don’t have to fix it. But you can see through it. To see through it is to be free. Feel your body now, all at once. Let it be as it is.

Explore more of Kenneth Folk's work at his web site.

The Noble Ninefold Path? The Complex Ethics of Right Consumption

2010-12-08T19:49:00.003-04:00

Cross-posted yesterday at The Interdependence Project.

John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century thinker most closely associated with the moral philosophy called Utilitarianism, wrote: "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."

Roughly two-and-a-half millennia before Mill, Shakyamuni Buddha said more or less the same thing. The system of ethics taught by the Buddha, one of the pillars of Buddhist spiritual practice, is based not upon a rigid moral code handed down by a god or authority figure, but upon the principle that actions that bring about a positive effect and result in well-being are inherently virtuous and worthy of being cultivated, and actions that bring about a negative result and lead to suffering or harm are inherently unvirtuous and worthy of being abandoned.

The noble eightfold path, part of the Buddha's earliest teachings, is a step-by-step plan for bringing all aspects of one's life into alignment with the ethical goal of harmlessness -- living in a way that doesn't create harm in the world, but only brings benefit. Living in this way creates the conditions and the good karma that will not only make oneself and others happy, but will support one's path to liberation.

The Buddha's prescription for an ethical life did not shy away from the nitty-gritty: for example, right livelihood, one of the eight parts of the noble eightfold path, includes specific suggestions on which careers it would be best to avoid due to the amount of harm they typically involve. Many butchers and prostitutes are really very decent people, but the Buddha taught that being a butcher or a prostitute probably isn't the best career choice for someone who wants to follow the spiritual path as he taught it.

In the time of the Buddha, people's lives were harder in some ways, but also much simpler. The brutal facts of life and death were on display in a more harsh light -- but by the same token, the choices one could make on a day-to-day basis were also more straightforward. As our lives have become more comfortable and secure, they have also become more complicated. Ours is a highly globalized and interdependent world where the simple choices we make in the supermarket or on the street or in our homes have ethical implications that stretch thousands of miles and impact thousands of lives.

Peel a banana and eat it, and you create ripples that go outward and circle the planet. You cannot divorce the enjoyment of that banana from the realities of economic oppression in the banana republics of Latin America, or the environmental costs of industrial-scale monocropping and toxic pesticides and preservatives and petroleum-based transport. Through something as seemingly simple and even innocent as growing, selling, buying and eating bananas, we are all complicit together in a system of production and consumption whose ethical implications boggle the mind.

And this is not to single out bananas for journalistic abuse. Pretty much anything and everything we enjoy is steeped in the suffering of other beings. Patrul Rinpoche, in "Words of My Perfect Teacher," wrote at length about the unfathomable amount of suffering that goes into producing a simple cup of tea. Want something more complex to chew on? Pick up your iPhone, if you have one, and contemplate the recent string of suicides among iPhone factory workers in China (or AT&T's massive contributions to Tea Party candidates in the recent midterm elections).

If the Buddha were living in today's era of global commerce, I suspect we would have a noble ninefold path, and the ninth aspect of the path would be Right Consumption. Surely how and where you spend your money is just as important as how and where you make it. If you're contributing your dollars or euros or yen to a product or a system or a company that does more harm in the world than good, that's something the Buddha would probably advise you to look at.

Yet, making the right choices in today's world is not always an easy or straightforward proposition. When there are conflicting interests, how do you judge whether the harm outweighs the good or vice versa? Much of the time, it's difficult for us to even know what impact our consumer choices might have. The facts are not always available to us -- and even when they are, many consumers prefer not to know the facts.

The ethics of consumption in today's world is not something on which I pretend to be any kind of an expert at all. I find it incredibly difficult, and I think the Buddha would find it difficult too, if he were living today. Even by withdrawing to a monastery and living in relative seclusion from the world, you can no longer extract yourself from the global matrix of consumption. (You can trust me on this one, as I'm currently living in a very remote monastery, miles and miles away from anything.) Your carpets are still made of petroleum products, your tea and coffee and bananas still come from impoverished countries on other continents, your stove still runs on natural gas, even your Internet service uses the same orbiting satellites as people all over North America. The days when you could get most of what you needed from your neighbors, or you could build it or grow it with your own hands, are gone. Some people are trying to get those days back, or at least minimize the damage, but it's not a simple proposition to put the genie of global commerce and industrialization back in the bottle when we are all enjoying the genie's magic conjuring tricks.

We sentient beings were never truly independent of one another, or of our global environment. The Buddha knew that almost 2,600 years ago. But the real fact of our interdependence is now more plain to see for anyone who cares to look. And when we see the extent of our interdependence, we realize that the ethical repercussions of even simple, everyday actions and choices stretch further in space and time than we could have previously imagined. Edward Hubbell Chapin said, "Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity."

When we begin to realize how much harm is created through everyday consumer choices we ordinarily take for granted, we might feel a sense of paralysis. How can we do anything or consume anything without creating harm? On the other hand, we might become very self-righteous and think that we've got the correct moral choices figured out, and everyone else should just get with our program and the world would be a better place. Both of those extremes are crazy-making. We either become despondent about our ability to bring about any positive outcome and therefore give up caring , or we go to war to save the world, determined to convert everyone to our way of thinking and our particular ideas about right consumption.

The Buddha, as always, would probably advise us to follow a middle way, avoiding both extremes.

Every Day Is Thanksgiving

2010-11-29T18:57:00.003-04:00

This Thanksgiving, I enjoyed seeing how many of my friends and family posted a statement of gratitude on Facebook or Twitter, mentioning the things for which they are thankful -- or simply acknowledging that they are thankful. It seems we now post on social networks the things people used to say at the dinner table with their hands joined in prayer. Praying around the dinner table is so last-century, but at least public displays of gratitude are still in.

Wouldn't it be nice if every day was like Thanksgiving? Imagine how different our world would look if we spent every day being thankful for what we have, rather than complaining about what we don't have, worrying about losing what we do have, feeling jealous and bitter about what other people have, or scheming to get something else.

If you're like me, you grew up with the folk wisdom that advised you to "count your blessings" and "be thankful for what you've got." If you didn't like your food, you were encouraged to think of the orphans who must eat gruel, or the poor children in Africa who don't have any food at all. If you didn't like to exercise, you were encouraged to think about the paraplegics or the people who must live through tubes and machines.

But now that you're all grown up, answer this question: If you put on one side of a scale all the time that you, as an adult, spend feeling content and grateful for what you have, and on the other side you put all the time you spend feeling restless and discontent and complaining irritably about what's wrong or scheming to make things better, to which side would the scale tip? Be honest.

The Buddha taught that the restless mind of discontent and craving for something better is the very cause of our suffering. He called it tanha, which means thirst or craving. When we are caught in the grip of our own thirst for something better, then it is impossible to feel contentment and gratitude for what we have. Unable to experience the basic okayness of contentment and gratitude, we constantly search for something outside ourselves to make things okay. We feel we have to get something, ingest something, go somewhere, do something, get involved with someone, have some kind of experience, become something -- always, always looking for something other and something better than what we have and what we are right now. This is the wellspring of what the Buddha called dukkha, which is usually translated as suffering but is more accurately described as a kind of persistent, aching feeling that life is out of balance and something is missing. Our craving is like a hole inside us that needs to be filled, but nothing we put into it seems to fill the hole in a reliable or lasting way.

The Buddha also taught that underlying our craving or thirst is another, deeper problem: avidya, or ignorance, which is the cause of craving in the first place. We misunderstand the nature of our own being and the nature of the world in which we live, and this misunderstanding traps us in the endless cycle of thirst and aching. We believe we truly are this separate, pathetic little self, and so we are always looking outside our selves for something to prop up the fiction of the person we imagine ourselves to be. But since nothing can really prop up a fiction, we are on a fool's quest.

Here is a truth that ought to be self-evident by now: No amount of material wealth or political power or emotional abundance or pleasurable experiences or even spiritual richness obtained from the outside can bring us contentment if, on the inside, we are determined to be discontent. If you haven't seen sufficient proof of this, you either haven't lived long enough, or you haven't been paying close enough attention.

Isn't it futile to hope for world peace when nearly everyone's mind is locked in habitual patterns of discontentment and unrest, and everyone is hoping for a change in the outer circumstances to secure their happiness? Now bring it closer to home: how could you hope to be at peace with your own life, and to find peace in your marriage or other relationships, if your own mind is habituated to focusing on what's wrong and what needs to change in order for you to feel okay?

The Tree of Contentment

Question: How could you escape from the sound of footsteps chasing you when the sound is really coming from your own running feet? How could you escape the spectre chasing you when it's really just your own shadow?

Answer: Stop running, and sit down in the shade of a tree. Both footsteps and shadow instantly disappear.

The tree, in this case, is the tree of contentment, and the cooling shade it provides is called gratitude. Take a moment today, if you haven't already, to stop and sit beneath it. The good news is that this tree is always somewhere in our vicinity; it may sometimes look far away on the horizon, and we may have to walk towards it, but we always have the opportunity to sit down beneath it if we choose. The bad news is simply how well-programmed we are to keep running, and to ignore this tree -- except, maybe, once a year on Thanksgiving.

And the ironic news is that there is really nowhere we can run to, no matter how fast or long we may run. We are always strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage, and mistaking it for real life. We are consummate method actors who seem to have forgotten that we are playing a role at all. This is why we are so often shocked and appalled when the curtain falls unexpectedly.

This much is certain: the curtain will fall, and unless we grab the curtain and bring it down ourselves, it will fall in a way for which we didn't plan -- and probably too soon. "Life," said Suzuki Roshi, "is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink." Every boat -- that is to say, every sentient being -- that ever has been or ever can be built will sink. No one gets out of here alive. If life were a casino, every table would be rigged against us from the very start. We might win a hand here and there, but if we think we're going to beat the house consistently or permanently, we are leading ourselves down a road to emotional ruin. When we get lost in the cycle of discontentment and ingratitude, we are just hoping for better cards.

Trees and boats and runners and actors and casinos: by now, this is an awful mess of mixed metaphors, but you get the point. Most of us are, as the old country song goes, "Lookin' for love in all the wrong places." We are searching for contentment everywhere except the only place it really awaits us, which is in the mysterious and uncharted depths of our own being.

None of this is to say that we should always just accept the status quo and be grateful. There is nothing wrong with trying to make the best of our situation or bringing improvement where it is needed. But we play the cards we are dealt by life, and much of our neurosis comes from wishing our cards were different.

Some cards are easier to play than others, of course. The hardest thing of all is to rest in the shade of gratitude and contentment when the casino deals us a particularly shitty hand. Our bodies break down and get sick, or our sanity comes into question, or the market collapses, or the lover who we thought was so reliable and who was going to make us and keep us happy suddenly leaves. The royal flush becomes a toilet flush.

I remember being with my friend Charlie in the hospital several years ago, as he was battling lymphoma. During one of my visits, the nurse came into the room with a bag of chemotherapy chemicals for Charlie. She wore safety gear that resembled a hazmat suit just to handle the bag; the bag itself was marked with large biohazard symbols to indicate its extreme toxicity to humans and other living things. With horror and fear and the most awful hope, Charlie watched the nurse connect the bag to his IV line. He stared at the industrial markings on the bag and at the dark-yellow liquid inside, and he began to cry. Putting the nightmare inside that bag into his body was the only hope he had for fighting the nightmare that was already inside him. In the end, it didn't work -- the lymphoma was too aggressive, and Charlie lost the fight within a few months of his first diagnosis.

A few weeks ago I was in the only supermarket in the small town of a few hundred people near the Abbey where I'm living. A man and a woman who knew each other from the town stopped in the aisle near me to exchange greetings. "How are you?" the cheerful woman asked.

"I just had my right lung taken out," the man replied.

My eyes bugged out as I passed by, and I couldn't stop myself from shooting a curious glance at the man. He caught my eye and looked back at me matter-of-factly. There was no tone of complaint or self-pity in his statement, and his look was not a plea for sympathy. It was simply the blunt truth. "How are you?" "I just had my right lung taken out."

There is nothing that I could possibly have taught Charlie, or the man with one lung in the grocery store, about gratitude or contentment. Anything I could say about the subject would sound glib -- or, worse, condescending, like a slap in the face. Rather, they were the ones who ended up teaching me about it, although neither of them was trying to teach me anything. I walked away from both of them feeling a little bit more grateful for the cards I have been dealt so far, and a little bit wiser to the fact that -- good cards or bad cards -- it's all quite temporary.

Gratitude is the key that unlocks the treasure chest of contentment within our own hearts. And what lies within that chest is really the only thing that can make us feel rich -- or even okay. The sooner we learn to stop looking outside ourselves for the love and the wisdom and the richness that we already carry within us, the sooner we'll be able to get on with the business of living properly and peacefully as human beings. For a limited time only.

"If you say only one prayer today," said Rumi, "make it: Thank you."

Be Here Now

2010-11-09T10:41:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted today at The Interdependence Project.

Be here now. Those three simple words are the title of a classic 1971 spiritual book by Ram Dass -- which, for some reason, has haunted my mind for about 25 years. I haven't looked at a copy of Dass's book since I was a teenager -- but it made a strong enough impression on my mind at that tender age that I still clearly remember the design of the book's cover.

It's not so much the content of Ram Dass's book that has haunted my mind all these years, but its title. And lately that title has been haunting me more than ever. I've been thinking a lot about those three simple words, and how they capture the entire practice of meditation. This line, in my opinion, would be a top contender for the prize of "greatest meditation instruction of all time" -- if there were prizes for such things.

After all, isn't that what meditation comes down to -- the practice of just being here now? Reduced to those three naked words, it sounds so incredibly simple -- and it is -- and yet there is so much depth hidden within that simplicity, waiting to be unpacked and explored.

Be.
Meditation is about coming back to basic being. Ordinarily we are caught up in the compulsion to do. We are always doing something -- or several somethings at once -- whether it's with our bodies or our speech or our minds. The way kids study these days is a good example: they'll have a textbook open in front of them, but they'll also have a reality show playing on TV, and a favorite album playing on the iPod, and several chats going with friends on the computer. Sometimes our compulsion to do takes the form of constant mental chatter, a rushing current of thoughts and commentary that sweeps us along and keeps our minds churning and busy. But what is it like to just be in this present moment, without doing anything extra? What's actually happening? We are just sitting here, being alive, breathing, just existing. Why do we think something else needs to be added to this? Can't we just be? In those moments when we allow ourselves to just be, we feel like we've come home after a long day at work. In reality, we are always being, but when we are just being, we discover a deep and abiding sense of peace and contentment that forever eludes us when we are caught up in grasping and doing.

Here.
Being here means, first of all, being here as opposed to somewhere else. Much of the time, in our minds, we are off in the jungles of the Amazon, or walking the streets of the East Village, or on a ship at sea in a storm -- in short, anywhere but here. The fantasies that take us elsewhere can be much more interesting than the seemingly dull reality of just being here, sitting on a chair in a room, staring at the wall or the floor or the back of the person sitting in front of us. The boredom of just being here can drive us to imagine ourselves in a million other places, doing a million other things. But not one of those million other places is where we actually are right now. In reality, we are always here, but when we are just here -- when we stop struggling to pretend we are somewhere else -- we step into a more open and trusting relationship with our world. We awaken to the vividness of our sense perceptions, and we realize that until now we were sleep-walking through life, only half-aware of the world that was always right in front of our faces.

Being here also means more fully inhabiting the body, the locus of our being here. The body is dense with layers of felt experience that are always happening right here, within our very being -- yet most of the time we are barely aware of a fraction of what is happening in the body at any given moment. Training in mindfulness means coming back, again and again, to the lived experience that is always unfolding here, right here, in our very own flesh and blood.

Now.
Being here now means staying present with what is happening in this moment -- neither reviewing the past nor speculating on the future, but simply staying here in the now. Now is a razor-thin moment of being that is always cleaving time into past and future. Training in mindfulness is learning to ride that razor, to stay upright on its edge without falling off to either side. But how much of the time do we normally spend riding the blade of the present moment? Ordinarily, we spend much of our time replaying old conversations, imagining new outcomes if we had said something different; or anticipating what we'll be eating for dinner or what we'll say when we see that person again -- planning out the coming weeks or years and dancing in hope and fear about things that have not yet happened, future moments that don't yet exist. In reality, it is always now -- past and future are merely memories and dreams, and the razor-thin edge of the present moment is all we ever have. Even when we are lost in memories and dreams, our memories and dreams are still happening now. But when we learn to recognize how our minds stray from the present, and we practice being here just now, we discover the magic of authentic presence and the richness of being alive now.

"Be" is the element of relaxation, letting go of everything except that which already is -- and then letting that go, too, realizing that what is is always turning into what was. "Now" is the element of precision and alertness, staying connected to that which is constantly changing, constantly unfolding in the present moment. "Here" is the experience that connects the two.

"Be here now" is the guru's whispered instruction, a key that unlocks the door of experience and realization on the spiritual path. Let go of the compulsion to do something, realize that nothing need be added to or taken away from this moment, and simply be; come back to your lived experience here, in this body, in this room, in this environment, and remember that life is not happening somewhere else; abandon your nostalgia and regrets about the past and your hope and fear about the future, and just be here, now, surfing the always-cresting wave of the present moment. Later, if you wish, you can plan and scheme and dream, and build and destroy, do other things and go other places. But for this moment, there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Just be here now. Life is an exclusive offer, non-transferrable, available for a limited time only, and valid only at this location. Use it or lose it.

The paradox is that whatever we do, we're always being; wherever we go in body or mind, we're always here (as the old saying goes, "Wherever you go, there you are"); and whether we're tuned in to the present moment or lost in memories and dreams, it's always now. So why do we find it so challenging to just be here now? Isn't it really the simplest thing in the world?

Concepts about Enlightenment Are Like Books about Dancing

2010-10-28T11:58:00.007-03:00

There is a certain stereotype about Western students of Buddhism, which holds at least a kernel of truth: we tend to be really strong in the area of study and acquiring textbook knowledge about the Buddhist teachings, but not always as strong in the area of practice and realizing the meaning of those teachings in our own experience.

It's possible there is something in our culture that tilts us in this direction. Comparative studies in cognitive psychology have shown that Westerners do tend to have a more analytical mind than more holistically-minded East Asians. Although all stereotypes are suspect, the image of a Westerner whose primary relationship to the Dharma is through reading (or writing) books about it is not without some basis in reality.

Or maybe it's not really a Western thing -- just a human thing. Every religion has its adherents who have studied the founder's teachings in great depth but still seem to be clueless about their basic meaning. Fundamentalist Christians can quote the Bible chapter and verse while holding signs saying "God Hates Fags," but they seem to forget that Jesus primarily taught tolerance, understanding, forgiveness and love of one's neighbor. Jihadists can memorize the whole Koran, but use its words of wisdom to rationalize mass murder. And Buddhist scholars can debate absolute and relative truth and quote Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti and the Buddha on the subtle meaning of emptiness, but their personal lives might remain a mess and their relationships can be as devoid of compassion as any drunk on the street.

Of course, studying the Dharma and developing conceptual knowledge of it is an essential element of the path. In Tibetan Buddhism, it is often depicted as one of the three wheels: study, meditation, and action. Yet it seems that study is frequently overemphasized at the expense of the other two wheels. When we fall into this trap, we might develop a lot of very refined concepts about enlightenment, yet we may not understand what it means to actually live in an enlightened way. Scholars of Buddhism can, and often do, have an intimidating level of erudite and sophisticated knowledge about the Dharma, and yet they can, in some cases, remain apparently clueless about what it means to actually live the Dharma.

Recently I said to a friend: "Concepts about enlightenment are like books about dancing." (I was paraphrasing this line from a Buddhist teaching I saw somewhere, but I can no longer recall where.) No matter how well-written or well-researched a book about dancing might be -- even if it is written by the most accomplished dancer -- by itself it can never convey or bring about the actual experience of dancing. For a professional dancer, there is a certain value in studying the history and theory of dance, but no amount of theory alone can actually make one a good dancer. Only practice and action can do that.

Naropa, one of the Indian mahasiddhas revered by Vajrayana Buddhists, was a great, accomplished scholar at Nalanda University in ancient India. One day as he was poring over one of his texts in the library, a shadow fell over the page. He looked up to see an old hag standing next to him. In her croaking voice, she asked him, "What are you reading, Naropa? Do you understand the words or the meaning?"

Naropa replied, "I understand the words I am reading." At this, the old hag became gleeful, and danced around laughing. Naropa wasn't sure why his response had made her so happy, and so he added, "I understand the meaning too." At this, the hag stopped dancing and grew morose, and began to cry. Confused by this schizoid behavior, Naropa asked, "Why are you crying? And why were you so happy when I said I understood the words?"

"When you said you understood the words, you were telling the truth," said the old hag, "and that made me very happy. But when you said you understood the meaning, you were lying. You and I both know you don't understand the meaning. And that made me very sad." With this, the hag vanished, but this encounter was said to be the spark that led Naropa to seek out his guru Tilopa and attain genuine realization of the teachings rather than mere intellectual understanding of them.

Like most stories about the mahasiddhas and saints, the story of Naropa and the hag is perhaps best regarded not as a historical account but as hagiography (pun intended) -- a teaching tool in symbolic or narrative form that contains a valuable lesson for each of us. The story of Naropa and the hag is a cautionary tale, a reminder that academic study of the Dharma, like books about dancing, is useful up to a certain point, but useless beyond that point. There comes a time in the life of every spiritual aspirant when you simply need to set the books aside and step out on the dance floor, and live the Dharma. That is the only way to realize the meaning of what you're studying.

The Cloud of Unknowing

2010-10-16T18:32:00.003-03:00

Cross-posted earlier this week at The Interdependence Project.

I have only read, so far, bits of Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel's book, The Power of an Open Question -- but I've been thinking a lot lately about its title, and about the power of questions. I've been thinking, especially, about the power of sitting with difficult, open questions, rather than clutching at easy answers.

Pablo Picasso once said, "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." That is, perhaps, as good a way as any other of explaining the gulf that still exists between computers and human beings. The most advanced artificial intelligence projects have, so far, been able to produce computers that can provide very sophisticated answers, but they have not been able to produce a computer that will, of its own free will and out of sheer curiosity, and with self-awareness, ask a real question. The moment when a computer finally asks its first unprompted question -- especially if it's one of the Big Questions, like "Who am I?" or "Why do I exist?" -- will probably be the moment that AI is truly born.

If questions are what separate us from computers, which increasingly are created in our own image, they are also what separate us from our fellow creatures in the animal realm. Without a doubt, animals have varying degrees of intelligence that can sometimes be quite sharp and sophisticated. But it's difficult to imagine that animals really concern themselves very much with questions like "how?" or "why?" As long as the given conditions meet their basic needs, or can be manipulated to do so, most animals appear to be pretty content. They see no need, and perhaps lack the intellectual capacity, to ask questions about meaning.

Human beings, on the other hand, seem born to ask questions -- as every parent of a three-year-old child knows. We are the species that continually asks "What is this?" and "Why?"

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche has said that religion often begins with answers, whereas genuine spirituality begins with questions. I suspect that Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, focusing as she does on the power of open questions, might agree with that. The key to following a genuine spiritual path is the capacity to rest in the fertile space of a question -- the space of not-knowing, not closing the question, not grasping at the illusion of certainty but growing (as Pema Chodron says) "comfortable with uncertainty."

At some point, I think, most people stop asking meaningful questions. Some stop asking because they settle for easy answers -- which might come from traditional religion or, just as often these days, from scientific materialism (which is in some ways the new religion). Others stop asking because they conclude that there are no answers possible to such open-ended questions, and so they give up caring -- settling into a life of just getting by, just trying to be as secure and happy as possible on a material and social level. And some people go to war because they believe the answers they have found are better than the answers others have found. One way or another, most people find some means to short-circuit the spiritual process of questioning, and to wrap themselves up in a cozy blanket of certainty. The space of uncertainty is not an inherently comfortable place to be, and people have all kinds of tricks for getting themselves out of it.

In his classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi famously wrote: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." The crucial Zen idea of "beginner's mind," according to Wikipedia, means holding "an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions" -- even when studying at a so-called advanced level. "Only don't know," the Zen master Seung Sahn used to tell his students, "only don't know." Without the attitude of openness, the basic mind of not-knowing, we cannot be receptive to new possibilities: no new information can get through the filter of our preconceptions. This is not to say that we cannot learn things and develop confidence and faith on the spiritual path. But anytime we begin to think of ourselves as experts, or to think that we hold the definitive answers that are going to apply in every situation, we are in trouble.

The 14th-century Christian mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, perhaps says it best. The anonymous author of that book wrote that God cannot be approached through intellectual knowledge or seeking answers, but only through open, heartfelt devotion and love:

Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God.

Change the word "God" to "Dharmakaya" or "Ultimate Reality" or "Buddha Nature," and you've got the Buddhist view there, too. None of our concepts or ideas or artifacts of knowledge, rooted as they are in the illusory duality of one who knows and something separate that is known, can ever truly touch the unconditioned, unfabricated nature of reality as it truly is, the naked truth of suchness. For suchness is not something that can ever be "known" in a conceptual way -- only experienced.

At least, that's what they say. But how would I know?

A Difficult Pill: New Article at Buddhist Geeks

2010-10-14T05:21:00.005-03:00

Yesterday Buddhist Geeks published my article, "A Difficult Pill: The Problem with Stephen Batchelor and Buddhism's New Rationalists." Within minutes, the heated comments started flying. Here's a short excerpt from the article:

There is admittedly, in what Batchelor is doing, something noble and admirable. He is providing a valuable service to the Buddhist community by asking us to set aside centuries of enshrined orthodoxy and cultural bias and our own unquestioned assumptions and beliefs and wishful thinking, and to look at what we are doing on the Buddhist spiritual path with fresh, more practical eyes. To this end, his stance echoes the Buddha’s instruction in the Kalama Sutta (which Batchelor uses as a colophon in the first part of Buddhism without Beliefs): do not accept any idea or belief simply because it is commonly accepted or handed down in the tradition, or because it’s written in holy texts, or because someone you venerate stated it to be so. Instead, the Buddha advised followers to use their own prajna or discriminating wisdom to see what really makes sense and accords with reason and leads to happiness, and only then to accept it.

From a certain point of view, Batchelor’s teachings are a skillful means to address a particular psychographic segment of Buddhist practitioners: those grounded in Western, rationalist philosophy and empirical science, whose natural inclination is towards a materialist explanation of phenomena. Students belonging to this psychographic are riding high on the hog these days, with advances in neuroscience now providing a material basis for studying the effects of meditation and other “spiritual” practices in a laboratory setting. To such ears, Batchelor’s spirited war cry against the foul and outdated superstition of rebirth must come as a clarion call.

And yet….

There is also, in what Batchelor is doing, a seeming fixity of opinion that weakens his arguments. He seems bizarrely convinced that two-and-a-half millennia of realized Buddhist practitioners have been deceiving and distracting themselves with the red herring of rebirth, and that anyone who has recourse to logic and reason in these matters must draw the same skeptical conclusions as he does. In a scathing review of Batchelor’s work in Mandala magazine, B. Alan Wallace wrote: “Although Batchelor declared himself to be an agnostic, [his] proclamations about the true teachings of the Buddha and about the nature of the human mind, the universe, and ultimate reality all suggest that he has assumed for himself the role of a gnostic of the highest order. Rather than presenting Buddhism without beliefs, his version is saturated with his own beliefs, many of them based upon nothing more than his own imagination.”

Many of the comments posted in response to the article muddied the waters by mixing up the terms "reincarnation" and "rebirth," prompting me to post the following clarification:

I want to point out that I never used the word "reincarnation," which is getting thrown around a lot in these comments -- I used the word "rebirth" (which, by the way, Batchelor also predominantly uses). To my mind, they are philosophically distinct notions. Reincarnation, as I understand the term, has come to signify -- in many people's minds, anyway -- what Julian characterizes as the transmigration of a truly existing soul from one body to another -- a very un-Buddhist idea, indeed.

Rebirth, on the other hand (as I see it) encompasses a process of becoming and rebecoming that is far more subtle and difficult to understand or express in a conceptual way. It is interdependent with the essential Buddhist view of anatta or no-self (which is also subtle and difficult to understand) and teachings on the nature of mind (which, guess what, is also subtle and difficult to understand -- in fact, "it" can't be "understood" at all conceptually -- it can only be experienced).

If there is not a truly existing, separate, independent self to begin with, then how could it jump from one body to another? Yet the non-existence of a little homunculus who travels from body to body does not imply that no aspect of mind continues. For those who want to seriously study Buddhist views on rebirth, this is an important distinction to make, and it opens into a much deeper level of inquiry.

Another thing I find odd about Batchelor's objections to rebirth is that he characterizes it as "offering consoling assurances of a better afterlife" (Buddhism without Beliefs, page 114). To the contrary, it seems to me that if you truly grasp the meaning of interdependence, karma, and no-self, then the prospect of rebirth (as I have characterized it above) offers very little in the way of ego-consolation indeed. The aspect of mind that continues might be very subtle and impersonal, and have little or nothing to do with what we ordinarily think of, in our deluded ways, as the "self." So, whoever might be reborn, it wouldn't be "me" -- it would, in every practical sense, be someone else. Frankly, I don't see much consolation for my ego in that.

Check out the whole article and the intense discussion in the comments it prompted.

Buddhism's Love Affair with Science

2010-10-05T11:44:00.002-03:00

Cross-posted today at The Interdependence Project.

Buddhism and Western science are happy in bed together these days. From the Dalai Lama's high-profile Mind & Life Institute dialogues with Western scientists to the many neuroscience research projects studying the effects of Buddhist meditation techniques on the brain, Buddhism and science are in the throes of an extended love affair. But will it last? Will Buddhism and science break up when they realize that, despite their common interests, maybe they don't actually share the same fundamental values and goals in life? Are they perhaps less compatible than they originally thought?

Many Buddhist teachers in the West are fond of saying that Buddhism is not a religion, but a "science of the mind," a set of tools and methods for conducting research and making profound discoveries in the laboratory of your own mind and experience. This positioning appeals to Western rationalists who like to bring a scientific approach to spiritual practice, and it neatly does away with the mystique of "religion" that clings to Buddhism. "Religion" has become something of a dirty word. The "spiritual but not religious" crowd – and roughly one-in-five Americans wears that description – eagerly embrace Buddhism as a "science of the mind."

Often, though, the "spiritual but not religious" folks grow uncomfortable once they get deeper into Buddhist studies and find out – surprise! – that they're being asked to entertain ideas that many Western, rationalistic people find utterly repugnant: things like life after death, rebirth, hidden realms of existence, gods and spirit beings, telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, psychic healing, prayer, and much more. Some Buddhist traditions talk about such things more openly than others, but there is nowhere that you can entirely escape mention of them: they appear, in various ways, in many Buddhist scriptures and canonical texts. You can turn a blind eye to the metaphysical elephant in the room, but you can't really be unaware that it's there.

The general sense of discomfort with these things among Western, scientifically-minded Buddhists has lately reached such a crescendo that some (Stephen Batchelor, for example, who is leading the charge of "atheist Buddhists") are now calling for a complete reboot of the system: a return to what they perceive as more fundamental, no-frills aspects of the Buddhist teachings. For these folks, Buddhism as existential psychology and as therapeutic praxis is fine for the rational, scientific mind – but Buddhism as metaphysics or "religion" has got to go.

Not many figures in the scientific community acknowledge the possible limitations of the materialistic view of consciousness, including its apparent inability to explain many common aspects of human experience. "We seem to be realizing," the scholar of religion Huston Smith once wrote, "that materialism, secularism, reductionism, and consumerism are inadequate premises on which to lead our lives – that they drain the wonder and the mystery out of life and experience and are dead ends." James Le Fanu, in a recent article in Prospect magazine titled Science's Dead End, lamented that despite ever-increasing amounts of funding and ever-more voluminous research being produced, modern genetics and neuroscience – two hard sciences whose view of human consciousness and experience is by nature deeply materialistic – have actually told us precious little about the real life of human beings:

The implications are obvious enough. While it might be possible to know everything about the physical materiality of the brain down to the last atom, its “product,” the five cardinal mysteries of the non-material mind, are still unaccounted for: subjective awareness; free will; how memories are stored and retrieved; the “higher” faculties of reason and imagination; and that unique sense of personal identity that changes and matures over time but remains the same.

...

The further reason why the recent findings of genetics and neuroscience should have proved so perplexing is the assumption that the phenomena of life and the mind are ultimately explicable in the materialist terms of respectively the workings of the genes and the brain that give rise to them. This is a reasonable supposition, for the whole scientific enterprise for the past 150 years is itself predicated on there being nothing in principle that cannot ultimately be explained in materialist terms. But it remains an assumption, and the distinctive feature of both the form and “organisation” of life (as opposed to its materiality) and the thoughts, beliefs and ideas of the mind is that they are unequivocally non-material in that they cannot be quantified, weighed or measured. And thus, strictly speaking, they fall outside the domain of the methods of science to investigate and explain.

This then is the paradox of the best and worst of times. Science, the dominant way of knowing of our age, now finds itself caught between the rock of the supreme intellectual achievement of delineating the history of the universe and the (very) hard place of the apparent inscrutability to its investigations of the phenomena of life and the mind.

In his 2009 book The End of Materialism, Dr. Charles Tart went further. Tart alleged that much of what passes for genuine inquiry in mainstream Western science is actually "scientism," a closed belief system founded on the unproven assumption that mind and life are entirely reducible to material phenomena. In order to maintain this belief system, Tart argued, scientism must willfully close its eyes and ignore a great deal of empirical data demonstrating the existence of non-material aspects of mind and experiences that cannot be explained in conventional scientific terms.

Tart, who for five decades has been conducting serious scientific research into a variety of 'paranormal' phenomena, is quite familiar with the closed-minded, dismissive view towards such research held by true believers of the prevailing scientistic paradigm. Tart alleges that such dogmatic scientists consistently ignore actual data that challenge their assumptions, breaking one of the cardinal rules of scientific inquiry: the data always come first. No assumption or point of view is to be held sacred if the data contradict it. The common reaction among materialists to the parapsychological research of someone like Tart is to assume that, if he is not a complete wacko to begin with, there must be something wrong with his experimental set-up or his analysis of the data, because we "know" that the things his research has demonstrated couldn't possibly be true. But a kneejerk reaction by any other name is still a kneejerk reaction, and it warrants serious investigation.

So where does this leave Buddhism and science? Clearly, a great deal of mutual benefit has come from their recent co-mingling. Science has advanced its understanding of how meditation affects the brain and nervous system, and meditation has thereby been legitimized as something even rational people can practice. It is no longer seen (entirely) as a delusional religious vocation for people who are probably borderline schizophrenics – which is, in itself, a huge step forward for scientific understanding. Buddhism, for its part, has gained insights into the physical correlates of mind states it has been exploring for two-and-a-half millennia. But as Buddhist meditation masters and scientists study one another in the laboratory and the lecture hall, are they being completely honest about what they want from each other? And how meaningful, really, is the common ground they are finding? For Buddhist practitioners, many of the recent, dramatic "discoveries" of neuroscience in regards to the effects of meditation and the brain provoke a general reaction of: "Well, that's nice. Meditation changes your brain? Tell us something we didn't know 2,500 years ago."

Maybe, at the end of the day, Western materialist science is from Mars, and Buddhism is from Venus. Despite the search for common ground, they are still looking at the mind – and the mind's possibilities – in radically different ways. It is doubtful that most Buddhists (with the possible exception of hardcore “atheist Buddhists”) will ever be able to accept the completely materialistic philosophy of mind espoused by mainstream Western science. And it remains equally doubtful that Western science – or 'scientism,' to use Tart's name for it – is really all that keen about having its sacred cow of materialism fundamentally questioned. It's not hard to imagine that as Buddhism and science grow more intimate, the tension between these different points of view will become more obvious.

Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that Buddhism's encounter with the West "may well prove to be the most important event of the 20th century." Here we are now in the 21st century, and that defining event is still unfolding. Among its most important dimensions is this newfound love affair between Buddhism and the Western scientific enterprise. It's still too early for these lovers to move in together. They are in the dating stage, when you're just learning your lover's ways and everything she does is fascinating. But there are already signs of trouble ahead. If one partner expects the other to change and accommodate his views, but is unwilling to have his own assumptions challenged in return, that could signal the start of an abusive relationship.

Spiritual But Not Religious

2010-10-02T16:21:00.003-03:00

I was on silent retreat last week, and staying out of the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, and the Facebook realm. But while I was on retreat, my article “Spiritual But Not Religious” was published in two parts on the Rebel Buddha site.

Part One: The Spiritual Lone Ranger looks at the love/hate relationship many people in our culture have with religion. Does being religious mean you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid? Can you be religious and keep your autonomy? Is there anything wrong with walking the spiritual path alone?

Part Two: The True Heart of Religion goes further into some of the same questions. Is it possible to find meaning through religion and still harbor questions? How can we follow a spiritual path without blindly accepting someone else's answers?

Check out these posts and join the discussion if you have comments to share.

East Mind / West Mind

2010-09-21T20:48:00.004-03:00

Today was a rare double-post day. My weekly 21st-Century Buddhism feature at the ID Project went up this morning with "The F-Word: Forgiveness." Check it out to learn why I think forgiveness is one of the most essential, and often overlooked, qualities on the spiritual path. In this article, I look at the 12-step model of spiritual practice, which places a strong emphasis on recognizing our crippling (and sometimes hidden) resentments and cultivating forgiveness. Have you had an experience of forgiveness that changed you? Post a comment to the article and share your insights.

Also, "East Mind/West Mind" appeared today at Buddhist Geeks. In this article, I look at the cognitive and psychological differences between "Asians" and "Westerners," and how these differences might shape our experience of Buddhism and spirituality.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

The very labels “Western” and “Asian” are fuzzy, finger-painting language—maddeningly imprecise in what and who they refer to—and they fall apart on closer inspection. How similar, really, are all the distinct cultural and linguistic groups that get lumped under those two umbrellas? Are we to assume that Swedes and Americans and Brazilians and Croatians all think the same way because they live in the same “Western” hemisphere? What about people from China, India, and Indonesia? Labels such as “Western” and “Asian” are generalities, and when speaking in generalities it’s probably inevitable that someone will feel excluded or misrepresented. So the conservative approach would be to avoid discussing these things at all.

Still, in spite of that, here we are, with what we all acknowledge is the more or less “Asian” spiritual tradition of Buddhism being transplanted into a more or less “Western” cultural matrix. While those labels raise a number of questions, they seem to retain some usefulness for describing the situation we are in today.

In the past decade a number of studies have demonstrated significant differences in how East Asians and Westerners perceive, cognize and think. One such study conducted by Richard Nisbett and colleagues at the University of Michigan used computerized eye-tracking technology to measure the ways European-American and Chinese subjects related to simple pictures of animals or other focal objects set against a complex background — such as a picture of a fish in an aquarium. Almost invariably, the Americans’ eyes zeroed in on the fish first, perceiving it as the most important object, and only then did their eyes take in the rest of the aquarium as the context in which the fish appears. The Chinese participants, on the other hand, generally perceived the context — the aquarium — first, and only then did they zero in on the fish and locate it within that context. Similar studies have suggested that such differences translate into unique ways of processing and committing information to memory, as well as different ways of making sense of what is perceived.

...

If something as seemingly innocuous as the way East Asians and Westerners receive and prioritize visual information in a picture is measurably different in the laboratory, could there be other significant differences in our ways of perceiving and knowing? If, as Nisbett suggests, East Asians have a more “holistic” way of looking at phenomena and interpreting their experience, and Westerners have a more linear, object-oriented, “analytic” mind, could this help to explain other more commonly observed cultural differences? Why, for example, has Western medicine excelled at treating specific, isolated problems with very direct remedies, whereas Chinese and Tibetan medicine take a more holistic view of mind and body and focus on treating imbalances within an interdependent network of systems?

And how do such different cognitive styles — which go largely unnoticed much of the time because they are so deeply embedded in our individual and collective psychology — impact the way we relate to something like spirituality or religion?

In looking at these differences, I reference not only Nisbett's studies in cognitive psychology but also some very interesting recent work in linguistics. Check out the full article at Buddhist Geeks and share your thoughts.

Five Western Buddhist Teachers to Watch

2010-09-19T15:52:00.010-03:00

Western Buddhism is at a turning point in its history. I recently heard one teacher compare where we are at now to the stage of adolescence: the rebellious years, when kids are not kids anymore but they're not yet full-grown adults either. It's a time of bold questioning, even rowdiness, and of rapid and sometimes disorienting growth and change. And it is the time when children begin to assert their own identity and their own understanding of the world. They begin to demand -- to require -- space to explore things for themselves, to find the answers that make sense to them. Certainly, if you look around at the Buddhist scene these days, you see the signs of this adolescence unfolding all around us.

A number of significant Buddhist teachers are leading this adolescent rebellion, and helping to forge the identity that Western Buddhism will carry into adulthood. Here are my picks for the five Western Buddhist teachers to watch. These teachers may not be widely known yet, but I suspect that will change. Each of them is doing something unique and compelling that will shape the way we study and practice Buddhism in years to come. Observing these five will give you a sense of what Western Buddhism's emerging identity may look like.

Ethan Nichtern
Usually when someone is called a "charismatic" teacher, as I saw Ethan Nichtern called in print recently, it's a euphemism that secretly means he's good-looking. Ethan is that too, but he's also charismatic in the old sense of the word -- which used to refer to a certain breed of Protestant preachers who had a power to captivate audiences with impassioned sermons. Founder of the Interdependence Project and author of One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, Ethan is a second-generation American Buddhist (his father is the Shambhala Buddhist teacher and Huffington Post columnist, David Nichtern).

With the ID Project, Ethan is building a new kind of Dharma community: one modeled primarily around the interests and perspectives of young people. The group includes students of all ages, but most of all it embraces the 20-something and 30-something demographics, who often feel disempowered and under-recognized in more long-established Buddhist institutions. Under Ethan's guidance, members of the ID Project are shaking things up and manifesting a new vision of socially and politically engaged Buddhism. At the recent demonstrations for and against the Islamic center near Ground Zero, ID Project members sat in silent meditation, "bearing witness" and conveying a startling message of peace while angry mobs on opposing sides shouted insults at each other. Last year, the group staged Sit Down Rise Up, a 24-hour meditation marathon in the windows of Manhattan's trendy ABC Carpet store. Instead of mannequins or displays of merchandise, the store's windows featured, for one full day, live human beings meditating.

The other compelling thing about the ID Project is its non-sectarian approach. The group's lineage mentors include Zen Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, Shambhala Acharya Eric Spiegel, and Insight teacher Sharon Salzberg -- representing Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Ethan, who was recently named a Shastri (senior teacher) within the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, has skillfully brought together these diverse streams of Buddhist study and practice into a single, harmonious sangha that represents a new model for Dharma communities in the West.

On November 14th, Ethan will join Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, Mitra Mark Power and Gina Sharpe at NYC's Great Hall at Cooper Union for a "a multimedia day of discovery around key questions of spiritual life, religion and culture — what Western Buddhism is and what it can be." Ethan's voice in this conversation will be one to listen to.

Links
The Interdependence Project
Rebel Buddha NYC event on Nov 14
Ethan Nichtern on Twitter

Hokai Sobol
I first encountered Hokai Sobol when listening to a Buddhist Geeks podcast called Vajrayana in Plain English. At first I was struck by his deep voice and his Eastern European accent, but as I listened I was struck more and more deeply by what he had to say. Since then, I've listened to that podcast about 10 more times, and I continue to be inspired by it.

Hokai is a scholar and teacher in the Shingon tradition, Japan's little-known tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. Most of the Japanese Buddhism we see in the West is Zen; some people don't realize that Japan also has a Vajrayana lineage. So far, the Shingon tradition has been largely invisible in Western circles, but Hokai just might change that. Hokai is also Croatian. The seeming oddity of a Croatian teaching in English about a Japanese form of Vajrayana Buddhism says something promising about the emerging global and pluralistic nature of Buddhism in the 21st century.

Hokai's depth of knowledge about a variety of Buddhist traditions and practices, and his respect for those traditions, is matched by his commitment to innovation and to finding authentic (sometimes dramatically new) ways to express the meaning of the Dharma in a Western cultural context. His recent, four-part series of interviews at Buddhist Geeks (Episodes 180-183) addresses "the invisible, and rarely discussed, forces that shape Western Buddhism. In particular what we call "culture" shapes our institutions and communities in ways that we rarely see with clarity." Hokai is another teacher who contributes an important voice to the current discussion of Buddhism in the West.

Links
Hokai Sobol's Website
BG Episode 180: The Invisible Forces that Shape Western Buddhism
BG Episode 112: Vajrayana in Plain English
Hokai Sobol on Twitter

Khenpo Karl Brunnhoelzl
Dr. Karl Brunnhoelzl is infamous for two things: having a name that most Americans can't pronounce or spell properly, and writing intimidatingly long and in-depth commentaries on Buddhist philosophy. He is also, in my experience, one of the most lucid, direct and humorous teachers you'll find anywhere in the Tibetan tradition.

Karl is a Buddhist scholar of the first magnitude, and translator of some of the most profound treatises in the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. His book Center of the Sunlit Sky laid out the Kagyu view of Madhyamaka philosophy, while other books dive deep into the topic of Buddha Nature. Karl's authoritative scholarship was recently recognized when he received the title of "Khenpo," a Tibetan designation for a master scholar that is roughly equivalent to a doctorate degree in Buddhist philosophy. As one of very few Westerners who hold the title of Khenpo, Karl represents an emerging class of Western Buddhist teachers whose depth of understanding of the Dharma is being recognized by Tibetan masters. Karl is also a Mitra (senior teacher) in Nalandabodhi, the lineage of Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and one of the main teachers at Nitartha Institute.

Despite all that, Karl is also incredibly humble and down-to-earth, and totally funny. At the most recent Nalandabodhi Sangha Retreat where he gave a series of teachings on Buddha Nature, Karl showed up one night and delivered his entire talk wearing a Spider-Man costume (it was an inside joke that would require too much explanation). Like Hokai Sobol, Karl's depth of scholarship gives him the authority to legitimately question and play with tradition, parsing out the genuine Dharma from its cultural container -- and he does it without taking himself too seriously or losing his sense of humor.

Links
Karl's books at Snow Lion Publications
Heretic Buddhists: Karl's article on Rebel Buddha

Kenneth Folk
Kenneth Folk is part of what some people have called the "hardcore Dharma" movement, but which Kenneth and others are now calling the "pragmatic Dharma" movement. The movement, and its most visible teachers such as Kenneth Folk and Daniel Ingram, are controversial and outspoken; I wrote about the movement here recently. What makes the movement controversial is the fact that Folk, Ingram and others are breaking with tradition and speaking openly about their levels of realization. Some, such as Ingram, are even publicly calling themselves "arahants," or "enlightened." Whatever you think of that, it is difficult to deny (unless you are totally cynical) that many students who are studying with Folk and others in this movement are making progress in their practice that they were never able to attain with other teachers.

Folk comes largely from a background of practice in the Vipassana tradition. The stages of practice and fruition he describes are those of the Theravada path, and they differ in some important ways from the stages and paths of the Mahayana and Vajrayana vehicles that I'm more familiar with. Folk, however, excels at finding ways to show that the realization attained in all three traditions is really not as different as it might appear. His own vision of enlightenment and the nature of mind has been influenced by threads from the Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions, making him another Western teacher who is breaking down traditional sectarian walls between Buddhist schools. He also has a knack for using simple metaphors and jargon-free language to explain the mechanics of awakening. He most often describes the stages of practice using the image of a 3-speed transmission, showing students how they can shift through progressively higher or more refined gears of consciousness. Kenneth Folk's frank and direct voice, which comes not from theory but from experience, will be increasingly important in American Buddhism in the coming years.

Links
Kenneth Folk's Website
Coming Out of the Closet About Enlightenment: A look at the hardcore Dharma movement
Kenneth Folk on Twitter

Clark Strand
I first came across Clark Strand when Tricycle magazine published a cover story on "Green Meditation." Strand's article talked about his years-long struggle with insomniac episodes of awakening in the middle of the night, and his eventual epiphany when he began to realize that these episodes might actually be not the dysfunction that he had always believed them to be, but part of a human being's natural rhythm. Strand's research into this phenomenon suggested that this rhythm of "divided sleep" was recognized and utilized by many spiritual traditions for thousands of years -- until the industrial age and the invention of light bulbs. At that point, our natural rhythms were disturbed and we lost touch with the fertility of darkness and twilight states of consciousness; we developed the expectation that we are supposed to sleep through the night without awakening. As someone who has struggled against divided sleep and insomnia, I found Strand's hypothesis compelling.

Strand is also one of the few Buddhist teachers who is openly exploring the territory where Buddhism overlaps with the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In my article "Christian Buddhism?" published on Buddhist Geeks last month, I profiled Strand's work in this area, which included founding the Woodstock Buddhist Bible Study and the Green Meditation Society where he teaches frequently on "Biblical koans." Given the depth at which our Judaeo-Christian roots are planted in our collective and individual psyches in the West, it makes tremendous sense to search for ways to tap into the wisdom of those roots in conjunction with our study and practice of the Buddhadharma -- rather than trying to dig up and replace our familiar roots with something culturally exotic and foreign. As Buddhism unfolds in the West, this kind of interfaith inquiry will be increasingly important and essential to the tradition's survival here. Strand stands out among Buddhist teachers as someone who has not only the inspiration to pursue such an inquiry, but the breadth of knowledge of multiple traditions to pursue it effectively. Strand's book, How to Believe in God: Whether You Believe in Religion or Not, his columns on religion and spirituality for the Washington Post, and his ongoing "Green Koans" column for Tricyle testify to this breadth.

Strand is also in the process of articulating his vision of a "Green" spirituality that returns to a pre-industrial sense of humanity's benevolent interdependence with the planet, the seasons, the elements, and the cosmos. A Dharma that does not include such a vision for our future, and practical steps towards implementing that vision, is no Dharma at all. At this pivotal time when we see so much man-made environmental catastrophe unfolding before our eyes (with warnings of greater catastrophes in the making), there could be no more important message for us to hear than this one.

Links
Clark Strand's Facebook Page
Christian Buddhism? An article that profiles Clark Strand
Clark Strand on Twitter

Rebel Buddha: Don't Meditate

2010-09-17T19:56:00.005-03:00

My post "Don't Meditate" now appears on RebelBuddha.com, a cool new site developed in conjunction with the launch of Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche's forthcoming book, "Rebel Buddha." The site is turning into a lively forum for exploring Buddhism and spirituality in the West today. Check it out and add your point of view to the conversation.

Another post of mine, "Cultural Theism," also appears in the blog section of the site. Enjoy!

Nattering Nabobs of Negativity

2010-09-16T10:45:00.005-03:00

Having spent the last year-and-a-half living in a monastery in a very remote corner of Canada, I often feel somewhat isolated and removed from events unfolding in the world outside. I'm online a lot more than you might think a monk would be, but most days, I don't look at the news. And each time I do, I'm reminded of why. What passes for "the news" in most media today is an endless wave of fear- and worry-inducing reports of tragedy, scandal, warfare, catastrophe, threats, discord, disease, terror, death, ruin, and danger.

I can't escape the feeling of guilt that comes from being largely disengaged from the news -- as if I'm willfully turning a blind eye to something that needs to be looked at, scoffing my responsibility. And yet I also cannot deny the reality that largely avoiding the news has made me a happier person.

When I do look at the news these days, I get the feeling that I picked a very interesting time to go spend two years living in a monastery in Canada. Things back home in America aren't looking so good. From oil rigs exploding and poisoning the seas to Sarah Palin's Tea Party exploding and poisoning the political seas, it looks more and more like the world I once knew is going to hell in a handbasket.

Perhaps this only proves the old saying that "Ignorance is bliss," but I think it proves something more than that. I'm not completely ignorant about what's going on in the world outside -- I pick up enough of it by osmosis, without seeking it out. I followed the Gulf oil spill story like a hawk. Within two hours, I (and everyone else in the monastery, and probably on the planet) was aware that Michael Jackson had died. And yet by turning down the volume on my media exposure, I have largely silenced the chorus of what Spiro Agnew called the "nattering nabobs of negativity." This has given me more breathing space in my own mind, and more ability to see how easily hooked and hypnotized I am by the trance of negativity and pessimism that dominates mainstream media today.

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is the world really going to hell in a handbasket, or is that just the way the media makes it look? Surely everyone realizes that newspapers and TV news programs and other media boost their ratings (and their advertising revenues) by painting a dire picture and dramatizing the news to lure more eyeballs. People want to know what they should be afraid of. This fits with what neuropsychologists refer to as the human brain's built-in "negativity bias." We have evolved to pay much more attention to danger and discomfort than to more positive circumstances (because it's more important, for survival purposes, to dodge a stick than it is to find a carrot). That's part of the reason why we dominate life on earth. As a species, we excel at manipulating our environment, and ourselves, to eliminate unpleasant circumstances and maximize our own comfort. In fact, we are so hell-bent on ensuring our own comfort that we are in the process of not only dominating but also destroying much of life on earth. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

On a more personal level, too, the past year-and-a-half has brought what seems like an unusual degree of tragedy and suffering. Just in my own circle of friends and acquaintances back in the outside world, it is heart-breaking to stand back and look at what has been going on. Three friends have died of drug overdoses, one of them probably a suicide and another under extremely ignominious circumstances that made his death into tabloid news. Another very sweet friend died with his throat slashed by his boyfriend. One friend went in for surgery and received irreversible brain damage from the anaesthesia. Another recently began to suffer psychotic episodes and has been in and out of institutions. In the most high-profile episode, one of my acquaintances went berserk in his role as a flight attendant and cursed out the passengers over the intercom before grabbing two beers and fleeing the plane via the inflatable emergency slide. (In true Andy Warhol fashion, he immediately became world-famous and acquired 200,000 fans on Facebook, and is now in discussions for his own talk show and perhaps a Hollywood movie.)

It's hard to take these things in without getting the sense that there is a wildfire raging through people's lives, and the fire has come a little bit closer to me now. Or has this fire always been raging close by, and I just never noticed? Did I have to come up here to this isolated, little monastery at the end of the continent to wake up and realize how much suffering is going on in people's lives back home?

These personal tragedies pull at my heart more acutely than what I see in the news, because they hit closer to home. But my circumstances require me to relate to both of them in pretty much the same way. There's not much I can do to make the Tea Party disappear, or to dispel the horror of BP's Gulf oil spill. And there's not much I can do for my friends, from up here, other than send them an email to say I'm thinking of them -- and to keep practicing so that, hopefully, when I return to their world I'll be better equipped to help.

It is an interesting practice, and a fine line to walk: taking in the suffering of others, and the relentless negativity and fear-mongering of the media, and extending a heart of compassion -- without getting totally swept away. Maybe this curious situation of being physically removed from it all -- relating to the dramas and the tragedies in a somewhat calmer way, from a distance -- is exactly how I need to train right now.

What Is Enlightenment?

2010-09-15T05:08:00.002-03:00

Cross-posted yesterday at The Interdependence Project.

Recently I was having lunch with an 86-year-old Buddhist nun, and we were talking about enlightenment. (If that sounds like the opening of a stand-up comedy routine, it's not. I live in a monastery, and this is an everyday occurrence.)

"You see, the problem," she said, "is that we don't really know what enlightenment is."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," I replied. "It seems like everyone is always flapping their gums about enlightenment this, enlightenment that, but what is it? Nobody seems to know."

"Or everybody thinks they know but they all have a different idea."

"And often we make it into this big, mystical production, like a number from a Bollywood musical. You know, like when you attain enlightenment the earth trembles and the animals all bow down and the choirs of heavenly beings sing your praises and do line dancing. All that hyperbolic stuff in the books."

We both laughed. "Maybe enlightenment," she said, "is actually something very simple."

"And we're looking for something complicated. I can't remember the name of that Tibetan teacher who said, about the nature of mind, 'Because it is so close, no one sees it. Because it is so simple, no one trusts it.' Maybe enlightenment is like that."

"Yes. If we're looking for an enlightenment that's far away, some big thing in the future, we're never going to find it," she said, placing her palm against the tip of her nose, "because it's always right here."

"Ponlop Rinpoche has talked about that too. I remember once at a talk he gave, he was remarking about how we always like to be perceived as sophisticated people. If someone calls us sophisticated, we take that as a wonderful compliment -- but if they call us simple, well, that's a huge insult. I guess that's sort of how we build up our expectations about enlightenment, too."

We both nodded, and went back to chewing our lettuce.

The Continuing Saga of Christian Buddhism

2010-09-09T19:55:00.005-03:00

Reader comments on my recent articles "Christian Buddhism?" and "The Koan of Christian Buddhism" continue to be posted. Check them out for a very interesting, often deep, and sometimes heated discussion.

Here's a fresh assault from a disturbed reader identified as Asa, posted early this morning in response to the first article:

A deeply disturbing post.. the blind leading the blind..
Someone who has REALIZATION in Buddhism and Christianity, actual deep, permanent spiritual development, would have the ability to synthesize the two.. Though I cant conceive why he/she would.
But for just intellectualization, smug philosophizing.. it is truly dangerous.
Not knowing what you dont know, but plunging ahead anyway, is truly the Western scientific reductionist materialistic approach.. even to religion. To say "it doesnt matter an iota" who one prays to, is the cry of a lost soul.. staying in his comfort zone with clever sophistry. Seek a teacher, one far superior to you in understanding, and follow his/her lead. Then learn what you dont know. Then there might be a chance...

My response:

Well, Asa....I guess now I will have to tell Clark Strand that his years of training as a Buddhist monk and senior student of Eido Roshi, and the years he spent as senior editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, were all in vain -- he needs to go back to school, and stop all this nonsense about combining different traditions. Come to think of it, I should also write to Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh and explain to him how misguided he was for writing the book Living Buddha, Living Christ and for drawing parallels between the teachings of Buddha and Jesus. Same goes for the Dalai Lama, and Rev. John Lundin, and everyone engaging in Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue -- misguided! And Bernadette Roberts? I'll tell her that from now on, despite her realization, she can no longer write about the Christian mystical experience of "no-self," because Buddhists have an exclusive copyright on that idea. And Father Thomas Keating? A heretic! Burn all his books. ;-)

What I and others have described in these articles and the comments on them is not smug philosophizing or intellectualization, but a deeply informed and very personal spiritual inquiry that is unfolding right now in many individuals' lives and practice. You can agree with it or not, but the fact is that there is a growing number of people out there exploring some version of a combined Christian/Buddhist practice and faith. People are finding many ways of approaching that -- but, clearly, none of those ways involve staying in one's comfort zone. If people really wanted to stay comfortable and follow the status quo, I doubt that they would bother with such a deep and iconoclastic form of inquiry.

Asa, as I like to imagine my teacher might say (I've heard him say it in response to many other things): if you're feeling disturbed, "that's good!" It means your ego is being challenged. Look directly at that. Investigate it. Be curious about it. Find out what is beneath the surface. The greater the disturbance, the more there is for you to look at. Whether you will see what is there or not, and how you will respond to it if you do, is up to you. But -- although I don't claim to have any particular "realization" -- I can assure you that projecting your judgments onto other people's spiritual experience isn't going to lead you towards the realization you seek. That leads in the completely opposite direction.

If you missed "Christian Buddhism?" or "The Koan of Christian Buddhism," find out why they polarized readers so strongly.

Meanwhile, a 70-year-old woman with whom I've been in email correspondence about these articles said this:

What I realized in reading your articles is that I have struggled through my life with a sense that mystical awareness although possible is elusive: it keeps falling apart in my hands.... The Cherokee rose story in the first article is very helpful in giving me an insight into how to proceed. It turns out that the 'program' that I first experimented with to do my meditations, is the most useful after all: first, meditation to approach calmness, second, reading in Buddhist texts and reflecting on them, and third, my Christian prayers and readings. During the day, I try to identify and work through my 'kleshas' and also to keep my focus. This gives priority to Buddhist teachings, and that is just how I need to work it at the moment.

Love or Wisdom?

2010-09-07T22:16:00.002-03:00

(Cross-posted today at The Interdependence Project.)

If you had to choose, would you rather be loved or respected?

So goes an old parlor game question. It's something of a trick question, for hidden within it there is another question: Are you the type of person who thinks the best feature of human beings is the head, or the heart? In other words, do you think intellect is the most important thing, or emotion? Wisdom or love?

In "The World's Religions," Huston Smith -- in his chapter on Buddhism -- wrote that this question, along with a couple of others, has divided people into two camps since time immemorial. He even implied that division over this question is one of the reasons why Buddhism, early in its development, split roughly into two major schools. Theravada, according to Smith, largely emphasized wisdom and insight into selflessness (anatta) as the means to personal liberation, while Mahayana emphasized love and compassion as the means to collective liberation.

Those are gross over-simplifications of both schools' views and practices. Theravada practitioners spend lots of time developing love and compassion, and Mahayana practitioners spend lots of time developing wisdom and insight into emptiness and the nature of mind. But Huston Smith argued that in terms of how the two schools differentiated themselves and what they considered to be the most important aspect to emphasize on the spiritual path, that is roughly how the chips fell.

The validity of Huston Smith's theory about Buddhism's split into two major schools is doubtful, but contemplating it does raise another interesting point. Within both schools today you can see plenty of examples of both types of people: those who consider love to be the most important thing, and those who consider wisdom to be the most important thing. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this distinction can often be seen to fall along gender lines. A quick glance around the Buddhist scene these days reveals a lot of female teachers who heavily emphasize loving-kindness and compassion and other emotional qualities of the awakened heart, and a lot of male teachers who heavily emphasize non-dual wisdom and realization of emptiness and other cognitive qualities of the awakened mind.

That is, of course, another stereotype -- for which you can find plenty of exceptions. Some female Buddhist teachers talk quite a lot about wisdom and emptiness, and some male Buddhist teachers talk quite a lot about love and compassion. Maybe a few Buddhist teachers, of either gender, even talk about both in equal measure. But stereotypes exist for a reason, and the exceptions don't necessarily disprove the rule of thumb.

Here is an experiment that would be interesting to conduct, to test whether the gender-difference theory holds water: Pick a certain number of high-profile Western Buddhist teachers from each gender -- let's say, for example, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, and Sharon Salzberg, versus Stephen Batchelor, Robert Thurman, and B. Alan Wallace. Listen to a range of their Dharma talks and evaluate their books, scoring each one on a 10-point left/right "flavor" scale (all the way to the left being a predominantly "heart" flavor and all the way to the right being a predominantly "intellect" flavor). The scoring would naturally be subjective, but if you got enough people to participate, and factored out gender bias in the scorers by having a balance of men and women participating, I would expect that the data would reliably demonstrate a flavor difference along gender lines. (Maybe this would only prove that we perceive the teachings according to gender expectations, but that would also be an interesting finding, and worth contemplating.)

I wonder to what degree this is a Western phenomenon. In English and most Western languages, we make a very clear linguistic separation between "heart" and "mind" (and by "mind" we usually mean "head"). The Sanskrit word "citta," on the other hand, covers both aspects: "bodhicitta" is translated into English as either "awakened heart" or "awakened mind." (And which of those translations you adopt already says something about your inclinations.) That a single word could represent both of those human dimensions may seem odd to us, for we are accustomed to thinking of heart and mind as being quite distinct.

But the cultural differences don't stop there. Tibetans, when indicating the "mind," touch the chest, but touch the forehead to indicate "body." English speakers, by contrast, touch the chest to indicate "heart" (or sometimes "body") but touch the forehead (or the cranial cavity in general) to indicate "mind." Thus, the fact that English speakers see "mind" as being so distinct from "heart" arises partly from the fact that we think of "heart" (the emotional dimension of human experience) as being down in the chest but "mind" (the intellectual, cognitive dimension of human experience) as being up in the brain.

Maybe that helps to explain why we see a lot of Buddhist teachers in the West specializing primarily in one dimension or the other. Depending on which side of human nature they identify with most strongly -- the heart or the head -- they naturally emphasize those aspects of the Buddhist teachings that resonate with that dimension. That this split so often falls along gender lines, with a lot of seemingly "emotional" female teachers and a lot of seemingly "intellectual" male teachers, seems like a stereotype, but it often operates according to expectation.

There is evidence to suggest that these tendencies are hard-wired into our biology. A significant body of research has examined the differences between "male brains" and "female brains." Most men tend to have a very male brain and most women tend to have a very female brain, but everyone falls somewhere along a spectrum of brain gender. A few men tend to have a more female brain, and a few women tend to have a more male brain -- but those are the exceptions to the norm. "Aside from external anatomical and primary and secondary sexual differences," says Renato Sabbatini, "scientists know also that there are many other subtle differences in the way the brains from men and women process language, information, emotion, cognition, etc."

The male brain, it turns out, is very good at doing certain things that the female brain isn't -- and vice versa. People with very male brains excel at tasks involving a high degree of spatial awareness, motor activity, hand-eye coordination, and so on, while people with very female brains perform, by comparison, rather poorly on those tasks: thus, for instance, you almost never see any female crane operators or airline pilots. People with very female brains, on the other hand, excel at tasks involving a high degree of empathy, communication and language skills. The female brain processes information using more parts of the brain, while male brain activity tends to be more concentrated.

Thus, neuroscience suggests there are biological reasons why men tend to be more analytical and single-minded and women tend to be more emotional and communicative and oriented towards multi-tasking. It should therefore come as no surprise if a lot of male Buddhists are attracted to teachings that have a sharp, analytical flavor, and a lot of female Buddhists are drawn to teachings that have an open, emotional flavor. (I recently heard one prominent, male Buddhist teacher say that all those teachings about love and compassion are nice, and they're good to practice so that we can all get along better, but they have nothing to do with enlightenment. This struck me as a very male way of looking at it.)

As Buddhists, though, we aren't usually satisfied with just accepting what is dictated by biology and social convention. The Buddhist vision of enlightenment is often depicted as the union of masculine and feminine principles, the inseparability of wisdom and compassion or love. (Side note: oddly enough, in Tantric Buddhist iconography, the compassion aspect is represented by the male figure, while the wisdom aspect is represented by the female figure -- the reverse of what we might expect to see.) At the end of the day, we are left with the sense that this habitual separation between "head" and "heart," "intellect" and "emotion," "wisdom" and "love," is a false dichotomy. It seems to operate on the relative level, but ultimately it has no true existence. Wisdom is the space of love and compassion, and compassion and love are the expression of wisdom.

Enlightenment, in other words, involves recognizing and fully embracing within ourselves both aspects of our being: heart and mind, compassion and wisdom, masculine and feminine. We may have been born within a body -- a prepackaged biological and cultural and karmic situation -- that leads us to emphasize one over the other, but we intuitively know that our truest nature lies beyond the limitations of body and biology and culture and karma. At the level of our deepest nature, we sense that we are not only capable of fully manifesting both dimensions of experience -- we must manifest both, because we are both.

Too much emphasis on cognitive wisdom, realizing emptiness, and non-duality, without love and compassion, makes the mind too hard; our approach to enlightenment becomes overly intellectual, dry and cracked. And too much emphasis on love and compassion, without the wisdom of emptiness, makes the mind too soft; our approach to enlightenment becomes overly emotional, moldy and sticky. Just as in the classic children's story about Goldilocks, we need a path to enlightenment that is not too hard, not too soft, but just right.

But here we've run up against that old "middle way" thing once again. You just can't get away from it in Buddhism. Any time you stray to one extreme or the other, you will be called back to the middle.

Buddha at the Intersection

2010-09-01T10:58:00.005-03:00

This article appeared yesterday at The Interdependence Project. The editors of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review wrote a commentary on the article (as they also did on my other recent article, "Christian Buddhism?").

When people talk about the establishment of Buddhism in Western countries, they often draw parallels with previous examples of Buddhism coming to a new land and taking root in the culture. While those examples are useful for illustration, I think it's time for us to admit that there are no precedents for what's happening this time around. Many conditions are converging to make this a totally unique moment in the history of Buddhism.

In the past, it was more of a one-to-one cultural exchange: Indian Vajrayana Buddhism came to Tibet, Chinese Mahayana Buddhism came to Japan and Korea, and so on. In the West (a convenient label that actually covers a conglomeration of dozens of different languages and distinct national and regional cultures), we are not receiving just a single tradition of Buddhism into one country, in a one-to-one cultural exchange. We are receiving *all* of the traditions of Buddhism in the West, all at once, and they are all mixing with all of the various cultures and languages in Europe and the Americas and Australasia. Nothing even remotely similar to that has ever happened to Buddhism before.

In the past, people lived in agrarian societies, and information traveled at the speed of horses. In the West, most people live in densely populated cities, and information travels through the Internet, television, radio and other media at the speed of light. Buddhist teachers are using Facebook and Twitter and webcasting to reach thousands of students around the world, all at once. People often say it takes hundreds of years for Buddhism to be established in a new culture, but that old rule of thumb was based on the spread of information in feudal cultures that don't exist anymore. Given the speed at which everything happens today, it's not unreasonable to think that whatever is going to happen with Buddhism in the West will happen much more rapidly than it ever has before.

As it enters the West, Buddhism is also meeting, for the first time, a formidable colleague in the form of Western science and secular values. At the moment, these colleagues are on friendly terms and mutually curious about one another, and Buddhism is finding common ground with neuroscience, psychology and other Western scientific endeavors. But just as Buddhism is bringing fresh insights to science, it is also being challenged to rethink many of its ancient ideas.

Urbanization and global travel and the Internet make it possible for people to actually study and practice with teachers from more than one Buddhist tradition -- creating a mash-up of influences from, say, Tibetan and Theravadan lineages. This is something that happened only to a very limited degree in the past. The fertile cross-pollination between traditions that is occurring among Western Buddhist practitioners today is unprecedented. People reading this blog run the gamut from Tibetan Buddhists to Shingon Buddhists to Zen Buddhists to Theravadan Buddhists to Jewish Buddhists to Christian Buddhists to people who don't call themselves Buddhists at all. Through our near-instantaneous conversations, we are all interacting and influencing one another's spiritual lives and sharing radically different perspectives on the meaning of the Buddhist teachings.

This kind of mutual influence across sects (or what I like to call "inter-section") can be tremendously fruitful, but also challenging. It can bring fresh insights and ways of looking at the teachings of one's own tradition, but it can also create cognitive dissonance. The Theravada and Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, to take one example, have very different ways of conceptualizing what enlightenment is, and this gives rise to different emphases in teaching and approaches to practice. Personally speaking, although I'm practicing in the Mahayana/Vajrayana tradition, I have often benefited from hearing the Theravadan perspective on things. It helps me take a larger view and better discern what is most essential about the practices and teachings I'm working with.

The many schools of Buddhism might be compared to various drugs that are used to treat the same spectral illness. Prozac works well for some folks, while Effexor works better for others -- and a select few with intense problems will need something like Haldol. At heart, we're all just suffering and trying to get well. What is different today, in the West, is that we suddenly have the entire range of drug options from the Buddhist pharmacy placed in front of us, and we -- the patients -- are free to take some of this drug and supplement it with a little of that one. Whether we end up curing our suffering through this experimentation, or only further heightening our neurosis, depends on how we go about it.

Buddhism has always melded with aspects of the dominant religious tradition in a new culture, but it is doubtful that such a pluralistic and cacaphonous hodge-podge of spiritual and temporal perspectives has ever before come together to shape the establishment of Buddhism in one place. As Buddhism stands today at the intersection where all these various influences converge, no one can predict what the fruit of such cross-pollination will look like in a hundred years, or even twenty, or even ten.

One thing seems certain: Western Buddhism in the 21st century is not going to look like the Asian Buddhism of centuries past. And that's okay. I just hope it doesn't end up looking like this:

Western Gurus?

2010-08-30T12:08:00.004-03:00

This post appeared last week as part of the new, weekly 21st-Century Buddhism feature at the Interdependence Project.

A recent article on Huffington Post by David Nichtern -- one of my earliest Buddhist teachers and father of the notorious Ethan Nichtern -- asked some hard-hitting questions about The Future of Buddhism in the West. David and I are apparently sharing brainwaves, because I've been chewing on many of the same questions recently.

Nichtern points out the puzzling shortage of Westerners being fully empowered as teachers in the Vajrayana tradition, commonly known as Tibetan Buddhism. He says: "Either the time has not yet come for Western Buddhist gurus to manifest fully, or we have a major culture clash on our hands here." I'm thinking that it may actually be a little of both.

Clearly, Vajrayana is lagging behind other Buddhist traditions in the process of empowering Westerners as full-blown lineage holders. In the Zen and Vipassana traditions, Western teachers are now fully empowered and passing the torch from one Westerner to another. But high-level Vajrayana teachers who are not culturally and ethnically Tibetan (or Nepali or Bhutanese) are, today, few and far between. The reasons for this are complex and multifaceted, including:

Guru principle. The guru-student relationship is a particularly intense kind of bond that is unique to the Vajrayana tradition. It remains to be seen if Western Buddhists can relate to one another as gurus and students -- or if we're only comfortable having gurus from another culture.

The politics of reincarnation. In Tibetan Buddhism, lineage transmission is bound up with the institution of tulkus (reincarnated teachers) and recognition across multiple lifetimes. How this will play out as Western teachers begin to hold the lineage also remains to be seen.

The Tibetan diaspora. Tibetan culture is threatened with extinction in its native land. At the same time as Tibetan teachers living in exile are transmitting the dharma, they are also struggling to preserve their culture -- a culture that is, itself, intimately fused with the dharma. It is understandable if this makes Tibetan teachers reluctant to pass the lineage to Westerners who have little investment in preserving their endangered culture.

Bad examples. It doesn't help our case that in several of the rare instances when full lineage transmission has been given to Westerners, the subsequent conduct of those new lineage holders has blown up into scandal and embarrassment. Just this past week, we've seen scandalous articles in the New York Times and the New York Post about two high-profile Buddhist teachers, Eido Shimano Roshi and Geshe Michael Roach. Perhaps this kind of thing, which is all too common, signals to Tibetan teachers that we're not quite ready to hold the Vajrayana lineage fully, in the way gurus do.

Those are all legitimate factors to consider in assessing why the Vajrayana is lagging behind the Zen and Vipassana traditions in terms of giving lineage transmission to Westerners. You could say there are good reasons for it.

What concerns me in this is the disempowering effect it might have on Western students. Given the widely acknowledged fact that we tend to have rather low self-esteem in the first place, we might come to believe that genuine wisdom and realization is something foreign and relatively inaccessible, and that we have to make ourselves more like Tibetans in order to hopefully get a little bit of their wisdom to rub off on us. There is a common tendency to idolize and mystify the Asian teacher and believe that wisdom exists "out there" somewhere, embodied predominantly in representatives from another (exotic) culture -- when, really, those very teachers are always reminding us that wisdom exists right here, right now, in the palm of our own hand.

In a recent article on One Human Journey, I called this tendency "cultural theism." Under the spell of cultural theism, Western students may -- consciously or not -- come to regard wisdom and genuine realization as something culturally foreign and therefore relatively unattainable. Because the power differential between teachers and students in the Vajrayana tradition falls more consistently along cultural and ethnic lines, Westerners may feel they are not capable of holding the lineage or manifesting the same degree of wisdom as their Tibetan teachers.

Cultural theism probably won't begin to go away until we start seeing more fully empowered Western teachers holding lineages in the Vajrayana tradition. But then, as David Nichtern hinted at in his article, will people really be ready to accept that when it does finally happen? Will Westerners feel the same respect and devotion for a realized and empowered Westerner as they do for a more culturally exotic Tibetan teacher?

If you assume the answer is yes, take a look at how many people show up when a Tibetan lama who's barely out of high school gives a talk, versus how many show up to hear a Western teacher who's been studying and practicing for 30 or 40 years. In some cases there may be reasons for the disparity -- maybe the young Tibetan lama is recognized as a tulku, and his previous incarnation was an important teacher -- but when this sort of thing manifests as a consistent pattern, it suggests that cultural theism may also be at work.

Are we ready for Western gurus? Share your thoughts.

Don't Meditate

2010-08-27T16:39:00.002-03:00

Often when I meditate I'm involved in some kind of subtle (or really obvious) form of manipulation. I want to be more settled, more focused on the object of meditation -- less distracted and discursive. I want to be more contented and peaceful, more compassionate, more blissful. I want to have more profound insights into emptiness, a deeper experience of the nature of mind.

Those are all nice things to aspire to, and most of us on the spiritual path (at least the Buddhist one) share those goals. The only problem is that when you're sitting there wishing you were experiencing something other than you are right now, you're not really meditating.

Some Buddhist teacher or other once said that "Hope is poison." By definition, hope involves projecting into the future, wishing for something to be different. When we bring hope into our meditation practice, it can turn meditation into a self-defeating cycle. We sit down with the intention to remain anchored in the present moment, but we end up spending a lot of our time subtly thinking about what we hope to become in the future.

A famous Tibetan Buddhist proverb says: "Abandon all hope of fruition." That might sound like bleak advice, but it's actually very practical. Abandon your hope of becoming something better than you are right now (and your fear of becoming something worse), because that hope (and that fear) keeps you trapped in fantasies about the future.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, who is quite the Twitter aficionado, recently tweeted: "Don't think about NEXT, think about NOW!"

That is a profound meditation instruction, and proof that Twitter isn't all bad. How often, when we meditate, are we thinking about NEXT -- whether it's the next breath, the next hour, the next few years, the next stage on our path, the next item on our spiritual agenda? How often are we really staying with NOW? What makes us think we're going to find enlightenment up ahead somewhere, always lurking in the NEXT moment, the NEXT one, the NEXT one? Isn't it always right here, right now?

"This moment is the perfect teacher," said Pema Chodron. Surprisingly, though, its perfection has nothing to do with whether we like it or not, whether it's pleasant or not, whether we're happy or not, whether we've accomplished the things we think we need to accomplish or become what we think we need to become. Whatever is happening now, in this very moment, is just what it is. When we can open to that and stay present with it, without glomming onto it or trying to manipulate it to become something else, we are seeing its perfection. Whatever arises in this moment is fresh, the essence of realization. It might be fresh like dog poop, but it's fresh.

One way of getting into this space, and one of my favorite meditation instructions of all time, is this: Don't meditate.

Seriously, try it. Sit down on your cushion or your chair and take your meditation posture. Give it your best shot. Do a few minutes of meditating on the breath if it makes you feel better. And then just drop it. Break the cycle. Don't meditate. Don't do anything that looks or feels like meditation. Don't try to hold your mind to an object, don't try to shew away thoughts if they come. Just look at whatever you're experiencing in this moment, with no agenda and no attachment or aversion. Don't think about NEXT. Think about NOW. And don't meditate.

Where else are you hoping to find enlightenment, if not right here, right now? And how much of your so-called meditation practice is actually keeping you from being here now?

In the Mahamudra tradition they say that the highest form of meditation is non-meditation: when you've completely gone beyond the idea that there's a difference between meditating and not meditating. In the state of non-meditation, you're just completely here, completely now. It requires no particular effort, and there's no longer any need to crank it up through some contrived idea of "meditation." At that point, there is something artificial about the whole notion of meditating, because it's a subtle way of trying to manipulate the present moment.

The supreme state of non-meditation. Sounds like something to aspire to. Oh, wait -- there I go again! Drop it. Abandon all hope of fruition. Don't think about NEXT, think about NOW.

The Koan of Christian Buddhism

2010-08-25T21:43:00.006-03:00

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Now on Buddhist Geeks: "The Koan of Christian Buddhism," my follow-up to last week's controversial article, "Christian Buddhism?" In this second piece, I look at the range of reactions people have had to the suggestion of "Christian Buddhism" -- from people who identify with that label and feel it describes their spiritual experience, to people who gruffly denounce the very idea as madness. It is, without a doubt, a charged topic.

But as I suggest in this second article, it's also a bit more than that. That very charge is an invitation for us to look within and discover something about ourselves.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

A number of readers commented that they, too, were actively exploring how to bring together their Christian and Buddhist beliefs and practices. One remarked that as a Quaker and a Buddhist, she often gets criticized by both Quakers and Buddhists for combining the two faiths in her own life. Others expressed a sense of relief at seeing someone talking about this under-explored issue openly—like a taboo was broken.

Even more surprising were some of the reactions that didn’t appear online. A former Buddhist nun from Vancouver confided in me that when she was struggling with depression last year, she found her Buddhist practice wasn’t helping at all; she realized she “really needed to talk to God.” For her, returning for a time to the prayer of her Christian childhood, not sitting in shamatha or doing sadhana practice, was what relieved her suffering. And a Buddhist monk from Eastern Europe, practicing in the Tibetan tradition, confessed that he connects more deeply to his sadhana practice when he visualizes Jesus than he does when he visualizes Padmasambhava. These personal stories—both from Western monastics in the Buddhist tradition—suggest once again that, for many of us, our Christian roots are deeply embedded in the ground of our psyche, and it can sometimes be profoundly healing to reconnect with those roots even in the context of identifying as a practicing Buddhist.

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Another way of saying this is that people who deny that one could meaningfully practice both Christianity and Buddhism are probably looking myopically at the exoteric or outer aspects of the two traditions: their dogmas, creeds, rituals, myths, institutions, and so on. But those who proceed to the esoteric or inner dimension of these wisdom traditions find little or no conflict between them. As Louis Claude de St. Martin famously said, “All mystics speak the same language, for they come from the same country.”

Check out the full article at Buddhist Geeks, and add your thoughts to the discussion.

21st-Century Buddhism Blog Launches at IDP

2010-08-24T18:09:00.003-03:00

Today I launched a new weekly feature on the Interdependence Project's cool new blog platform, with an article exploring the question of why there aren't more qualified and empowered Western gurus in the Vajrayana tradition.

The weekly column is called "21st-Century Buddhism" and will look at the issues that face practitioners of Buddhism and other spiritual traditions in our postmodern, Western culture. Next week I'll share the first article -- "Western Gurus?" -- here, but in the meantime you can read it at the ID Project. Check it out and share your comments.

Christian Buddhism?

2010-08-18T20:49:00.007-03:00

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My article "Christian Buddhism?" -- which appeared today on Buddhist Geeks -- looks at how some people are bringing together Buddhist practice with elements of the more familiar Judaeo-Christian traditions most of us grew up with. In the article I profile a teacher named Clark Strand who is exploring this ground in Woodstock, NY, and I explain Strand's view on why it makes sense to utilize our Judaeo-Christian roots to plant Buddhism more firmly in our culture.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Our Judaeo-Christian roots are indigenous to the soil of American culture in a way that the exotic flowers of Asian Buddhism simply are not. According to Strand, the best way to help Buddhism truly flourish here is to graft it to those roots, not to try to dig them up and replace them.

I left behind the Southern Baptist faith of my childhood nearly three decades ago. But despite all that distance from my earliest roots, and despite having embraced Buddhism as the spiritual path that makes the most sense to me, the stories and iconography and teachings of Christianity and Judaism are still more familiar and often more resonant for me than the culturally foreign imagery and metaphors of Buddhism. Like the Cherokee rose, they have been growing in me longer, and they are better adapted to the soil of my mind.

That core of our earliest exposures to Christian or Jewish beliefs and practices might lie deeply buried in us, so deeply that we can be unaware of its presence—especially if we buried it there intentionally, out of rebellion against our upbringing. But the fact that we don’t often look at it doesn’t mean it’s not still there.

As Strand and I each found, in some cases all it takes to penetrate those outer layers and bring that long-buried core to the surface is a single moment of sheer existential terror, which sweeps away all other considerations. In that surge of naked fear, when it’s all you can do not to soil your underpants, who will you instinctively call on? Shakyamuni? Amitabha? Amitayus? Akshobhya? Avalokiteshvara? Kuan Yin? Padmakara? The Rigden King? Vajrasattva? Vajradhara? Vajrayogini? Vajratopa? Yeshe Tsogyal? Green Tara? Black Mahakala? White Manjushri? Samantabhadra? Kuntuzangpo? Or maybe just plain, old, fuzzy, formless, nameless God—the one you grew up with?

And let’s be honest: in that moment of total helplessness, when you are praying for mercy, will all the elaborate conceptual and philosophical distinctions you’ve made between these different traditions really matter one iota?

The article sparked quite a few comments from both sides of the aisle. In response to some of those comments, I posted this observation (among numerous other comments):

It's interesting to see the mix of reactions to this story. Seems like most of the positive comments are coming from people who share this kind of experience, and appreciate seeing it talked about openly. And it seems like the negative comments are coming from sort of judgmental-sounding Buddhists who don't share this experience and think other people shouldn't be having it either. Judgmental and opinionated Buddhists probably have a lot in common with the Religious Right folks who have given Christianity such a bad name.

There's much more in the full article, along with many good comments that provide food for thought.

Western Eyes

2010-08-17T21:48:00.003-03:00

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The most recent post on One Human Journey, "Coming Out of the Closet About Enlightenment," sparked a lot of conversation. The question of whether, and how, people who attain some level of realization should talk openly about it is hotly contested. Check out the comments stream on that post for some great thoughts from readers (including a response from Kenneth Folk).

One reader who commented on Facebook prefaced his comment with this remark: "We could only be having this conversation in the West...." While the thoughts that follow were sparked by that comment, they are not a response to that particular reader. But his remark did get me thinking about a larger set of related issues.

The implication of such a statement seems to be that this conversation could only arise out of ignorance, because we (in the West) are new at Buddhism and we haven't figured out what Buddhists in Asia know from 2,500 years of experience. We have a lot of catching up to do. When we finally do catch up, we'll understand why Buddhists have traditionally been so reticent to speak openly about enlightenment or attainments on the path.

And of course, in some ways, it's true: we do have a lot of catching up to do. Buddhism is new in our culture, and we are only beginning to understand the ways Buddhism will change us, and the ways we will change Buddhism. The debate over people "coming out" and speaking openly about their level of realization -- whatever you think of that issue -- is just one illustration of where we are with that process.

Cultural Theism

It seems to me, in general, that a lot of Buddhists in the West carry some kind of self-deprecating, anti-Western sentiment inside. We hold up our Asian teachers and their cultures as the embodiments of wisdom -- and, of course, in many ways they are. But while we are holding them up with one hand, we are often putting down our own culture and denigrating our capacity for wisdom with the other hand.

Speaking from personal observation, I suspect this tendency may be particularly acute in the Tibetan Buddhist world, where relatively little has been done in the way of transfer of power and lineage to Western students, compared to the Zen or Theravada traditions. While many Westerners in those traditions are now fully empowered and passing on the lineage from one Westerner to another, most Tibetan Buddhists in the West are still studying with Tibetans; Western lineage holders in the Tibetan tradition are few and far between.

The reasons for this are complex and beyond the scope of this commentary. What I'm concerned with here is the disempowering effect this has upon Western students, who may -- consciously or not -- come to regard wisdom and genuine realization as something culturally foreign and therefore relatively unattainable. Because the power differential between teachers and students in that tradition falls more consistently along cultural and ethnic lines, Westerners may feel they are not capable of holding the lineage or manifesting the same degree of wisdom as their Tibetan teachers. Wisdom is out there somewhere, separate from us, embodied in representatives from another culture, and the best we can hope for is to model ourselves after that culture and hope that some of the wisdom rubs off on us. This kind of cultural theism can be especially acute in sanghas where all the practice liturgies are in Tibetan and embedded with intensely foreign cultural references and iconography. In some quarters, one finds Western students dressing like Tibetans and studying the Tibetan language and following Tibetan customs and eating Tibetan food, all in the belief that growing in the wisdom of the dharma somehow requires one to become more like a Tibetan.

With western eyes and serpent's breath
We lay our own conscience to rest
But I'm aching at the view
Yes I'm breaking at the seams just like you.

-- Portishead, "Western Eyes"

It is beautiful and proper to recognize wisdom in those who hold it, and to express devotion and respect for the lineages they represent -- lineages that have been holding that wisdom for two-and-a-half millennia. But everything in the light also has its shadow side. When we idolize the way Asian cultures have practiced the dharma and try to imitate them unquestioningly, we risk losing sight of the wisdom that is already in our own back yard. Even worse, when we put on rose-colored glasses and see only the bright and shiny side of those exotic cultures and traditions, we are not seeing the whole picture.

The wisdom that is held within the embrace of the cultural forms and traditions of Asian Buddhism is not the same thing as those forms and traditions. And those forms and traditions, themselves, are not faultless or immutable. As Buddhism goes west, it is being asked to change in profound ways -- and some of those changes are definitely for the better. The misogyny that has been enshrined in Asian Buddhist institutions for 2,500 years is being confronted by Western feminism, and the traditional subservient role of women in the dharma is increasingly recognized as unacceptable. So, too, is Buddhism's traditional homophobia being deconstructed as it encounters Western sexual mores. The Dalai Lama has been embroiled in controversy for certain remarks that were perceived by Western students as homophobic, yet a few progressive Tibetan teachers who live in the West, such as Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, are now reaching out to LGBT Buddhists and being more inclusive. And just as Western science is exploring new frontiers by studying ancient Buddhist practices in the laboratory, so too is Buddhism being forced to rethink old, outdated views in its encounter with modern science (like admitting, for starters, that the world is round, not flat -- an admission that didn't come easily to Tibetan monks, even in the 20th century).

Think for Yourself

In the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha taught that we should not accept anything simply because it is handed down in tradition, or because someone in authority said it is so, or because it is written in holy books. Rather, we should use our own prajna, our intelligence, our eye of wisdom, to analyze what we receive. If it accords with reason and leads to benefit -- then, and only then, should we accept it. As Buddhism takes root in the West, we are engaged in precisely this process of analyzing and testing the teachings we are receiving from the source cultures in Asia. Inevitably, some aspects of the Asian presentation of Buddhism will be rejected in the West, and new forms will evolve. This is only natural, and is no doubt what has happened in every other instance of Buddhism transmigrating to a new culture. The exchange of wisdom is a sword that cuts both ways. Yet some will cry that the sky is falling when they see Westerners thinking for themselves and engaging with the dharma in a different way than their Asian forebears.

Many conditions are converging to make this a very unique moment in the history of Buddhism. In the West, we are not (as has happened in probably every other case throughout history) receiving just a single tradition of Buddhism, in a one-to-one cultural exchange. We are receiving *all* of the traditions of Buddhism in the West, all at once, and they are all mixing with all of the various cultures and languages in Europe and the Americas and Australasia. Urbanization and global travel and the Internet make it possible for people to study and practice more than one Buddhist tradition, and the degree of fertile cross-pollination that is occurring among Western Buddhist practitioners today is unprecedented. People reading this blog run the gamut from Tibetan Buddhists to Zen Buddhists to Theravadan Buddhists to non-Buddhists, and we are all sharing radically different perspectives on the dharma. No one can predict what the fruit of such cross-pollination will look like in a hundred years, or even twenty.

If our goal is to transform ourselves into little Tibetans or Japanese or whatever the case may be, then it's fine to create a Western Buddhism that is a carbon copy of its Asian predecessors. But if we are to have an expression of the dharma that is more suited to our place and time, more capable of taking root and flourishing in the soil of our minds, then we must apply our own discerning intelligence and work with the dharma in the context of our own cultural situation. Obviously, we are children at this, and we risk mistakes and misunderstandings. But those are nothing to fear; every child learns by making mistakes. What is to be feared is that we might never have a chance to grow up and find our own way because we're too busy trying to be just like our new adoptive Buddhist parents.

Coming Out of the Closet About Enlightenment

2010-08-14T11:56:00.003-03:00

Imagine that you're a baker, and that you've trained for years as an apprentice under a master baker from some faraway land where baking is an ancient and venerated art. You've studied and practiced the old craft and learned all the recipes by heart. You now produce authentic baked goods that nourish and delight countless people. You have, in fact, emerged from this training with a level of experience and skill and -- bear with the metaphor here -- "realization" that qualifies you, in turn, as a freshly minted master baker.

But you have also become part of a strange culture of bakers where talking about your skill and experience is strictly forbidden. You are, in fact, discouraged from thinking that you have attained anything, much less from talking to others about it. "There is no attainment and no non-attainment," says one of the classic, mystifying baking manuals taught at your school. You are allowed to bake, and to take on students in order to transmit what you have learned as a baker, but at the same time you are required to follow a bizarre policy of denying, if you say anything about it at all, that you have attained any particular skill as a baker. You see even the most accomplished and wise bakers, from whom you have learned everything you know, feigning a kind of false humility and calling themselves mere beginners. To do otherwise would be considered a display of sheer arrogance and ego and attachment.

This is, roughly speaking, the culture that exists in Buddhism today on the question of enlightenment or spiritual realization. In the Tibetan tradition, for example, even the most senior teachers -- the Dalai Lama and the Gyalwang Karmapa, who are acknowledged by all of their followers as being at least hugely realized, and maybe totally enlightened -- downplay their own attainments and make no claims to having accomplished much of anything. "I am just a simple monk," the Dalai Lama famously said.

But in one corner of the Buddhist world there are a growing number of Western practitioners who are breaking with tradition and talking openly and plainly about their attainments. Teachers like Kenneth Folk and Daniel Ingram, emerging largely from the Theravada Buddhist tradition, are experimenting with "coming out the closet" about enlightenment. They are part of what some are calling the new "hardcore dharma movement," and they are using technologies like the Internet to talk frankly about the steps towards enlightenment and their own experience of each of those steps.

Daniel Ingram's book, "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha," heralds its author on the book's front cover as "The Arahat Daniel M. Ingram," and his biographical page on his website makes no bones about it:

"I am an arahat with mastery of the formed jhanas, formless realms, Nirodha Samapatti, and a few other traditional attainments. I am one of the few teachers I know of who will talk about high-level practice directly and unambiguously without relying on dogma, making things taboo or coating simple truths in mystery. I assume that most practitioners are mature enough to handle straight-forward and honest answers. My fundamental assumption is that many more people will be empowered to realize that they can master these things if they are out in the open."

To note that such bold statements and personal claims to realization are controversial would be stating the obvious. Critics holding the traditional line have decried Ingram, Folk and others for making such claims and even accused them of being deluded and misguiding students. Some have noted the particular dangers, which also seem fairly obvious, of making claims to enlightenment on the Internet -- where pretty much anyone can claim pretty much anything and find someone to believe it. Aside from that, they ask, even when you meet someone in person, how do you really judge whether they have realized what they say they have realized? Yet many others regard Ingram's and Folk's claims as being credible, and have welcomed this emerging counterculture of straight-talk with open arms.

Kenneth Folk acknowledges the danger of people, intentionally or not, making false claims to enlightenment, but says that is not the real problem -- and, moreover, that it's not very difficult for him to spot someone making false claims. "The real problem, in my opinion," he says, "is the lack of disclosure. When you do not have disclosure, you have this weird situation where nobody can even tell who the competent teachers are because you’ve got competent teachers who are saying, 'Oh I’m not enlightened. I would never claim enlightenment.' They sometimes do this even if they are enlightened because they believe it is somehow virtuous to pretend they are not. This to me is just absolutely asinine."

The Birth of a Taboo

This belief in the virtue of pretending not to be enlightened or realized is something that may not have existed at the time of the Buddha. Some of the Buddha's early discourses from the Pali canon include explicit declarations of how many people listened to the teaching and what level of attainment they realized as a result. It was, arguably, only later that monastic institutions codified the belief that openly speaking about one's level of attainment should be considered taboo. Maybe part of why it is such a taboo in the monastic code is that misleading others by making false claims of realization that you don't actually have is considered one of the most vile and karmically destructive ethical downfalls possible, because of its negative impact on the students. The danger of making such a misstep, whether intentionally or through one's own ignorance, is perhaps seen as so great that it's better to avoid talking about attainment altogether.

Folk calls this consensus policy of silence about enlightenment "the mushroom culture" -- because, like mushrooms, people are "kept in the dark and fed shit." One of the dangers, says Folk, is that "because of the mushroom culture and because of the darkness, we’ve got teachers who frankly have no idea what they’re talking about who are very popular and have all kinds of students, and they are just leading students down the primrose path because, after all, we don’t talk about these things. So I ask, what kind of legitimate pedagogy would allow for that?"

Another issue that comes up is that different traditions and teachers have different concepts of what enlightenment is. The "progress of insight" path described by Folk that culminates in becoming an "arahat" is based largely on the Theravadan model of practice and fruition, familiar to many students in our culture as "Insight" or "Vipassana" meditation. That model of enlightenment is radically different from the Mahayana model put forward in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism; the Mahayana, to put it bluntly, sees becoming an arahat as, at best, a temporary pit-stop and, at worst, a bog in which to get stuck on the path to becoming a full-blown Buddha. Students steeped in the Mahayana vision of paths and bhumis culminating in Buddhahood may be especially ill-equipped to judge the claims of people like Folk and Ingram, who are following an altogether different model of enlightenment and working with a different set of paths and fruitions.

At the end of the day, though, the same benefits and risks apply to every model. Whether you're looking at Theravada or Mahayana or Vajrayana, you can find bogus teachers making false claims and leading students, as Folk says, "down the primrose path" that goes nowhere. You can also find, if you look in the right places, legitimately realized teachers who are guiding sincere students to their own realization. Folk and Ingram are part of a new wave of teachers who are breaking ranks and speaking openly, for perhaps the first time in the West, about exactly what that realization consists of and how they experienced it and how their students have experienced it -- how, in fact, anyone can experience it. Whether you believe this new revolution of straight-talk about enlightenment will prove beneficial or destructive probably depends which side of the traditional line you stand on.

So where do you stand? Are Folk and Ingram and other "hardcore dharma" practitioners doing the right thing by talking openly about their enlightenment? Share your thoughts with other readers on One Human Journey.

Related Links:

Daniel Ingram
Kenneth Folk
You Can’t Script Enlightenment: Moving Beyond Magical Thinking - A conversation between Kenneth Folk and Joel Groover

Kept in the Dark and Fed Sh*t

2010-08-11T10:48:00.007-03:00

Guest Blogger: Ron Crouch

The movie Eat, Pray, Love will be coming out soon and will likely get a lot of people interested in, for lack of a better phrase, the “spiritual lifestyle.” For those who don’t know, it’s the story of a woman who goes to India in search of enlightenment but instead of enlightenment, she finds - love. Yeah, pretty silly. But, then again, most of what people think of when they think of spirituality is pretty damn silly.

I’ve run into a lot of seekers like the one portrayed by Julia Roberts in the movie. They are searching for something that will help them transcend their worries: a mystical experience that will finally transform them into the kind of person they have always wanted to be. They believe that being a “spiritual” person will finally make them a happy person. They really need therapy.

There are a lot of people seeking self-improvement or self-transformation on the spiritual path. Deep down they believe that if they can just improve themselves, become more spiritual in some way, then their suffering will vanish. And since this is America, the route to self-improvement is done mostly through the power of the purchase. These are men and women who literally wear their spirituality on their sleeves, on their shirts, on their pants, around their necks, and tattooed on their skin. They take expensive trips to exotic Ashrams. They buy Buddha statue souvenirs, incense, bells, cushions, prayer flags and literally hundreds, thousands, of products that cater to a lifestyle centered around their spiritual journey. There is, and this is not a joke, an entire industry dedicated to nothing but manufacturing products for a lifestyle based on “letting go.” I call the target market for this industry the “spiritual lifestylers.”

What the spiritual lifestylers don’t know, and what no one ever tells them, is that the self-improvement they want has nothing to do with the very thing that spirituality is all about - enlightenment. Why? Because enlightenment is the exact opposite of what most people in the spiritual lifestyle scene are seeking. Hell, it’s the exact opposite of what almost everyone on Earth is seeking! Enlightenment is the end of the whole project of seeking, because it is the end of taking your “self” seriously – literally. And no one takes themselves more seriously than spiritual lifestylers.

What many people in spiritual scenes are really seeking is not enlightenment, but a new and better version of themselves. A happier, wiser, more balanced version of themselves. And this makes sense. Almost every thing we do in life is in the service of a "self." All our projects, our work, our dreams, everything – our lives are chained to who we think we are, or should be. So it is no wonder that the spiritual lifestylers have approached the spiritual path with the same self-improvement ethic.

But the spiritual path is the opposite of self-improvement. It is the only thing I know of that can finally break the chain and liberate us from the little tyrant we call "me." And it does this by showing us that that little tyrant was never real in the first place. There is just no self important enough to improve or transform, so there was never any need to be happier, wiser or more balanced. Sound weird? Bizarre? Strange? It absolutely should. The truth of our lives is utterly baffling until we finally get the insights we need to enter the stream of enlightenment. Until then, our job is to work against the little tyrant by exposing it as false as many times as we can. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what is happening in the spiritual lifestyle.

All of this spiritual self-improvement stuff is harmless and even ironically funny to a point. But what has led me, and many others, to be so concerned with movies like Eat, Pray, Love is that they support a whole subculture that distracts, confuses and misleads people who are sincerely searching for liberation and enlightenment.

For a person honestly seeking liberation there are very slim pickings out there. The bookstores are filled with feel-good-about-yourself books that cater to the spiritual lifestyle but have no actual instructions how to get enlightened. Meditation centers make their teachings less direct and more about lifestyle, retreats become more like spas, and teachers never even present the idea that enlightenment is something real and do-able, because it flies in the face of what many people actually want. The little tyrant never gets challenged -- instead, the spiritual path just becomes another ego trip. Really, everyone loses.

Bill Hamilton, a great American pioneer in opening up the practical spiritual path to westerners, the guy who taught my teacher (Kenneth Folk), called this whole mess the “mushroom culture.” Because just like mushrooms, lifestyle seekers are “kept in the dark and fed shit.” And I would add, that as long as they are on a self-improvement project, then they will want it that way. Real spiritual discovery would scare them off.

So, because of the mushroom culture, the rest of us have to work our way out of the shit-filled darkness to figure out what is really going on. I suspect many of us never make it out.

Some of you reading this may be trapped in the mushroom culture and may be looking for a way out. The good news is that you can relax and stop spending your hard-earned money. There are teachers out there who teach the real thing. Just look and you’ll find them. In the meantime you can truly “let go” of those things that are part of the spiritual lifestyle but which will absolutely not get you enlightened. For those of you looking for a way out of the mushroom patch, you can start with this declaration of independence:

You are hereby relieved from buying dharma-themed clothes (even yoga clothes), bells, jewelry (even handmade Tibetan jewelry), books (even spiritual books – lots of them are BS anyway), new cushions, incense, prayer flags and Buddha statues. You no longer have to put so much effort into having a warm and loving “aura,” or knowing the Suttas, the Gita, the Bible, the Kabbala or the teachings of any high mucky-mucks by heart. You do not have to burn sage, chant, smile, or follow rules intended for monastics from an entirely different time and culture. You do not have to have a guru, or get close to someone who is a guru. You do not have to travel to far-off places to seek the perfect place to get enlightened. You do not have to sit in meditation longer than anyone else or attend expensive retreats. You have nothing to prove. You are fine. You already have everything you need to become enlightened, because all you need to do is see that “you” don’t really exist.

So what does get you enlightened? Following the instructions for meditation (or other methods) as they are described. Not daydreaming. Not spacing out. Not "letting go" or "being with your stuff." That just feeds the little tyrant. But actually following the directions. They are incredibly simple. So why not give it a try?

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Ron Crouch has been meditating seriously for about eight years and spent much of that time trying to find a way out of the “mushroom culture.” He is now engaged in what he calls “pragmatic dharma” and what some have called the “hardcore dharma movement.” He maintains a practice journal at his teacher’s website, and welcomes comments and readers’ thoughts. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Clinical/Community Psychology in Chicago.

Buddhism Beyond Religion?

2010-08-07T19:08:00.007-03:00

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche stirred up American Buddhists this week with an article at Huffington Post posing the question: "Is Buddhism a religion?" The question touched a nerve, prompting more than 1,000 reader comments in just over a day.

In the article, Ponlop Rinpoche cautioned readers against equating religion with the path to enlightenment:

Siddhartha was a truth seeker, nothing more. He wasn't looking for religion, as such -- he wasn't particularly interested in religion. He was searching for the truth. He was looking for a genuine path to freedom from suffering. Aren't all of us searching for the same thing? If we look at the life of Siddhartha, we can see that he found the truth and freedom he was seeking only after he abandoned religious practices. Isn't that significant? The one who became the Buddha, the "Awakened One," didn't find enlightenment through religion -- he found it when he began to leave religion behind.

Ponlop Rinpoche went on to describe what he called "Buddhism beyond religion," an authentic spiritual path free from the hangups of religiosity. "Like Siddhartha," he wrote, "if we really want spiritual enlightenment we have to go beyond religiosity. We have to let go of clinging to preconceived religious forms and ideas and practices."

Tricycle senior editor James Shaheen, posting on Tricycle's blog, wondered whether Ponlop Rinpoche's proposed Buddhism beyond religion "would include rebirth, let alone reincarnation, and other elements based on belief rather than science."

In a subsequent exchange of comments (edited here for brevity), One Human Journey's Dennis Hunter took on Shaheen's question. Hunter wondered if the question itself might contain a misleading assumption that science and belief are diametrically opposed:

...Not everyone who “believes” in reincarnation/rebirth is just blindly accepting it because it’s traditional, or because they haven’t thought it through carefully. Some very reasonable and well-trained Western scientists (Dr. Charles Tart, for example; and Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia) have looked at all the evidence available and done their own analysis and come to the conclusion that you can’t just dismiss rebirth as pure fantasy. I think it’s good to hold a balanced perspective on these things and not to fall to either the extreme of blind faith or the extreme of blind skepticism....

I think Ponlop Rinpoche’s main point in that article is not that Buddhism isn’t a religion, which seems to be the way a lot of people are taking it.... It’s that the essence of the Buddhist path is not about the religious trappings, or being a good religious person: all of that stuff is secondary to what really matters, which is your own open heart and open mind searching for truth and freedom.

Shaheen replied:

I did not say everyone who believes in rebirth is blindly accepting it because it’s traditional. And yes, intelligent people can believe in it, just as intelligent people can believe in transubstantiation. I’m just saying there is no scientific basis for it (it’s not in the same league with, say, natural selection). That’s just a fact....

I would agree with you about what’s important though, and it’s notable that you do not include rebirth or reincarnation. I would also be interested in knowing what “religious trappings” you refer to.

Hunter responded:

...Of course, you are right — rebirth is not included in science’s commonly accepted set of theories about reality, the way natural selection is. But when you jump from there to saying “there is no scientific basis for it,” it sounds like you are dismissing the scientific research that *is* being done on rebirth (which, granted, isn’t a lot, because this isn’t a popular topic of research in Western science — in fact, the bias against it is so strong that it might be perceived as something of a career-killer). Dr. Stevenson at U.Va has analyzed thousands of cases and found many whose particulars cannot be adequately explained except through a theory of rebirth. Is it still a theory, that requires some degree of faith to accept? Yes, but in the same way as having faith that consciousness is purely a material function of the brain. Both are theories. In our society, one of those theories is commonly lauded as The Truth, and the other is most often dismissed as irrational superstition. It concerns me to see many Buddhists falling into that same pattern....

As for what qualifies as “religious trappings,” this is another very interesting question. I suspect it’s very personal: what works for one person as a way to really connect with meaning is a religious trapping to someone else. And it’s cultural: what works for Tibetans doesn’t necessarily work for Americans. DPR’s teachings and writings seem increasingly geared towards finding the expression of genuine dharma (truth) that is most suited to Western minds, as opposed to the expression of dharma that is most suited to Tibetan minds. In his sangha, a lot of what Westerners would commonly regard as Tibetan “religious trappings” are largely absent. He doesn’t encourage traditionally Tibetan religious displays such as being greeted in anjali by his students, or sitting on brocades or high thrones (unless it’s appropriate to the occasion). Instead, he looks for ways to relate to his Western students on their own terms, with less of the cultural baggage of the religion as it was traditionally practiced by Tibetans.

As he suggests, we can even relate to statues of the Buddha as religious trappings. It depends on whether we regard them as icons of something holy and far-removed from us (and nearly impossible to attain), or examples of something that we ourselves can manifest. The former, it seems to me, is religious — and the latter is spiritual.

Read the entire exchange, including Shaheen's follow-up response, and add your thoughts.

Texas Airplane Conversation

2010-08-05T11:40:00.006-03:00

March 2005. I'm on a plane to San Antonio, TX. Sitting beside me is a young soldier on his way home from Iraq for a two-week leave, dressed in his desert-camouflage fatigues. With little knowledge of the war aside from what I see in the media, I jump at the chance to talk to someone who is actually there and find out his perspective. He, on the other hand, seems much more interested in chatting up the stewardess....but I do manage to get him to talk to me whenever she isn't around.

He takes out a piece of twisted, coppery metal from his pocket and offers it for me to hold. I hesitate, not knowing what it is, but after holding it and examining it for a moment I realize it is a bullet, or at least it used to be. Clearly, it impacted something with great violence. "They pulled that out of my chest," he explains, "out of my vest." He points to his abdomen and traces the 10-inch square of armor that (sort of) protects his heart and lungs.

"Was it an insurgent who shot you?" I ask. It's a stupid question, but if it irks him he doesn't show it. He nods. "He shot me once, and I shot him eight times." He puts the bullet into a little pouch of talismans that he wears around his neck.

I'm speechless for a moment after that, adjusting to the knowledge that the person I'm sitting next to has shot another human being eight times. Abruptly, I feel closer to the reality of war than I was just a moment ago. I know this is the sort of thing my father must have done in Vietnam and Korea -- I'm sure lots of people I know have done it. But somehow those other events have faded into the background, become remote and abstract. They're not sitting beside me.

We're in the very last row of seats in the back of the 737. "He was about as far away from me as the cockpit," the soldier explains, and then he repeats himself. "He got me once, and I got him eight times." There's a curious mixture of pride and sadness in his tone.

Later in the conversation it emerges that the insurgent who shot him wasn't his only casualty in Iraq. He has shot and killed about six people since he was stationed in Iraq seven months ago. "I have a hard time living with that on my conscience," he says. "But I do that for you guys. I hope that you don't ever have to see what I've seen."

"Kicking in doors and killing people, that's my job," he says at one point. Again, I am speechless. For a moment, all my personal beliefs and opinions about the injustice of the war seem pale, sitting next to someone whose average day consists of shooting people and getting shot at, someone for whom the carnage is not abstract or far-removed.

Digging for a political angle on the conversation, I ask him, "So what's your perspective on this whole thing?" He has been waiting for this question. "It's really stupid," he says without hesitating. "You know what? I get paid about a dollar a day, and I have the most dangerous job in Iraq. I have health coverage, but it sucks. I broke my finger," and he holds out his hand for me to see his finger, which is clearly swollen, "and you know what they told me? Take Motrin and drink lots of water. There's something wrong with my lungs, and they told me to take another pill." His list of grudges against the Army goes on, and gradually morphs into a litany of the atrocities he has witnessed in the past seven months: the friends whose heads were blown to bits or whose abdomens were torn in half. How do I respond to any of these things? For the most part I shake my head and simply try to show him that I'm listening. He explains that the fighting is much worse than what you see on TV, that the insurgents are coming right up to the fences of their camps and shooting at them; they regularly engage in firefights right in the middle of their camps. It's all going "very badly," he says.

"You want to know the stupidest thing? You see this uniform I'm wearing? I had to buy it myself. The soldiers who are coming in now, they get their uniforms paid for, but when I signed up, we had to buy our own uniforms. And these things are not cheap. The pants alone were $80." I try to imagine having to pay for several expensive uniforms -- clothes that I'm required to wear -- on the kind of salary he just described to me, but it doesn't make sense. I wonder if he was exaggerating about the salary, to make his point, but I don't ask.

Periodically during our conversation he turns away to pursue more interesting conversation with the stewardess in the nearby jumpseat, excitedly showing her pictures on his digital camera of his camp and his armored vehicle. At the end of the flight the stewardess stops in the aisle, next to his seat. She has a puzzled expression on her face, and seems to be hesitating about whether or not to say something. Then she makes up her mind, puts her hand firmly on his shoulder, and says it, with a note of urgency in her voice.

"Now listen. You take care of yourself over there. And don't forget what I told you before, about accepting Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. It's the most important decision you can make in your life."

The soldier seems almost as flabbergasted as I am by this unabashedly prosletyzing airline stewardess, but he nods his head politely and thanks her and she goes on her way. “Ah,” I say to myself, “welcome to Texas.” The implication of her statement -- that she knows he will go back to Iraq in two weeks and that she suspects his chances for surviving the next year are perhaps less than average -- hangs like a cloud in the dry, recycled air of the plane cabin. I feel suddenly overwhelmed with irrational affection and tenderness for this young soldier, and I wish I could put my arms around him. I want to recklessly open my wallet and hand him all my cash and tell him to buy something nice for himself while he's on leave. But neither of these impetuous gestures would be understood correctly, or necessarily welcomed, and it seems the only thing I can do is to wish him well and wave goodbye as we part ways in the airport.

I notice his last name on the shirt pocket of his uniform and realize then that we didn't even exchange names. I know that he has killed six people, I know about his broken finger, and his lung problem, and assorted other details of his life -- but I don't know his first name. At that moment, I decide that I will remember his last name for the rest of my life. It seems the least I can do.

Castles in the Air

2010-07-27T21:00:00.006-03:00

One Human Journey turns 100....

This marks the 100th post on One Human Journey. As the site approaches its second anniversary, its mission is expanding to include an exciting line-up of guest bloggers who'll be contributing in the coming months. Stay tuned for more.

Also, One Human Journey has a new Facebook fan page where you can stay on top of the latest posts and see what we're reading and liking these days. Check it out.

Cheeseburger.

Chances are, I just evoked an image of a cheeseburger in your mind. Depending on your personal views about cheeseburgers, this mental image might bring along -- in the wake of its appearance in your mind -- a subtle or not-so-subtle reaction of either attraction or repulsion. Maybe you love and crave cheeseburgers, or maybe you are a strict vegan, animal-rights activist and you regard cheeseburgers as the symbol of a dire problem with our society's dietary habits; maybe you even feel slightly judgmental about people who eat them. Whatever your personal reaction, all I had to do to evoke it was say the word: "Cheeseburger." It wasn't difficult at all.

This may not be on the same level of mental espionage practiced by the characters in the movie "Inception" -- but nevertheless, it shows how powerful and instantaneous is our capacity for mentation and conceptuality. In relating to something as simple as the word "cheeseburger," we are immediately caught in a web of memories and associations, opinions and ideas, emotional patterns and judgments that stretches back further than we can see. Within that web are intangible traces of every cheeseburger we've ever seen or tasted, every advertisement for cheeseburgers we've been exposed to, every article we've ever read about the dangers of cheeseburgers, every view we've held about the rights of animals. All of those experiences have conditioned us to have a particular reaction when we are asked to think about a cheeseburger. And all those conditioned reaction patterns are just there in our minds, lying dormant, waiting for some small stimulus -- like the simple word "cheeseburger" -- to bring them to life.

Most of the time we don't relate directly to the things in our world; rather, we relate mainly to our mental image of things. We see things and people and experiences through the filter of our concepts about them. We look at another person and most of what we see is not the mystery of the human presence in front of us, but the cloud of our own ideas and preconceptions about who they are: friend or enemy, desired object or despised one. The more fixed our ideas and images are, the less we are able to allow other people to be anything other than what we think they are, or what we think they ought to be.

Taking Ourselves Too Seriously

The problem is not that we have concepts -- it would be difficult to function in the world without them. It's that we mix up our concepts with the things they refer to; we forget there is a difference between reality and what we think about it. Blurring the objects of our world with the qualities we project onto them, we believe too blindly in the stories we tell ourselves. We think David REALLY IS a jerk because of what he said the other day; we think Susan REALLY IS a dear because she was so kind to us that one time; we think "Inception" REALLY IS a good or bad movie, depending on whether we enjoyed it or not; we think cheeseburgers REALLY ARE, categorically, good or bad, depending on our own habits and views.

As long as we don't examine the contents of our projections too closely, they appear to be very real. Our mental images of things seem sharp and concrete, and our concepts and opinions seem justified and true. But when we actually try (as in Mahamudra meditation) to look at our mental images in detail, to see what they are made of, we learn that they are fuzzy and insubstantial: ghostly holograms in our minds that dissolve when we shine the spotlight of awareness directly at them.

Go ahead: look more closely at that cheeseburger in your mind right now. Try to pin it down, to examine its details, to fix the image and hold onto it. What happens? Try the same thing with your fixed ideas about someone else. What are your concepts about that person actually made of? How solid and reliable are they when you really look at them?

The emotional dramas we enact around these phantom images in our minds are like castles in the air -- built on sheer fancy. The clinging and passion we feel towards what we interpret as friendly and desirable; the aversion and aggression we feel towards what we interpret as hostile or offensive; the indifference we feel towards what we interpret as being of no interest -- all these are tales "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

When we recognize the insubstantiality of our mental images and concepts, we have more breathing room, more space to relate to the world with an open mind and heart. Not confusing external appearances with internal ones, we are less likely to get caught up in taking ourselves and our projections too seriously. And that freedom from the bondage of our own projections -- even if it is only momentary, and we revert right back to our patterns -- is like a breath of fresh air. Once we know what freedom smells like, once we have its scent, then we have a trail to follow.

Idiot Devotion

2010-06-24T11:13:00.005-03:00

Devotion is one of those mysterious things Buddhists are always talking about; but when pressed to explain what it is, nobody really seems to know. In Vajrayana Buddhism, the experience and practice of devotion towards the guru or teacher is regarded as one of the main qualities that brings the student to awakening. As one famous chant in the Kagyu lineage puts it, "devotion is the head of meditation" -- the guiding and driving force behind the student's movement towards awakening. The expression of devotion opens the door for the teacher to transmit the full blessings and instructions of a lineage of enlightened beings that reaches all the way back to the Buddha himself.

Devotion is essentially a quality of longing or desire; and like all forms of desire, it has the potential to be either wise or neurotic. In its wisdom form, this longing or desire is for enlightenment itself -- our own and that of others -- which we see reflected in the teacher and the lineage of awakening he or she holds. In its neurotic form, devotion might manifest as a baser emotional longing and desire for the person, or for some kind of validating intimacy and relationship with the teacher. With time and the proper conditions, the student's devotion may grow from its early, clinging, neurotic and instable form into a more refined, unconditional and open type of trust and commitment.

The expression of devotion takes as many forms as there are students who feel it; it is an intensely personal and individual path. It is expressed in our commitment to meditation practice and following the instructions of our teachers. It is expressed in the diligent study and contemplation of teachings and texts that describe awakened mind and the path to its realization. And it is expressed in doing various kinds of work that support the teacher and his or her mandala of activity.

In an ideal world, these three "wheels" -- the wheels of study, practice, and activity -- are kept in harmonious balance in each devoted student's life and path. Through study one gains knowledge and understanding, which deepens one's experience of practice, which in turn supports one's activity and efforts on behalf of others.

In the imperfection of real life, on the other hand, the three wheels often get out of balance. We might fall into a pattern of wanting only to study the Dharma, underemphasizing the importance of practice and activity, which leads to a dry and academic understanding of the teachings with little experiential realization. Or we might become practice addicts, avoiding study and activity like the plague, just wanting to sit quietly with our minds all the time. Or we might become activity junkies, keeping ourselves so constantly preoccupied with Dharma-related projects and work that we rarely have time for formal practice and study.

A Cultural Frame of Mind

This latter type of dysfunctional devotion -- the neurosis of activity junkies -- is common among Western students of Buddhism. Maybe it's because we tend to have very busy minds to begin with, and we naturally bring that same mindset onto the spiritual path. Our predominant tendency is to always be doing, planning, scheming, dreaming, acting -- and quiescence does not come easily to us. It's much more familiar, and perhaps more comfortable, to get caught up in a lot of activity that seems to be for a good cause and keeps us busy all the time.

Our Judaeo-Christian cultural heritage has instilled us with a strong work ethic, which can play into our tendency to overemphasize the wheel of activity. "The devil," we've been told, "will find work for idle hands to do" -- and so we dare not let our hands (or our minds) be still for long. We also measure ourselves against the higher standards set by others, and sometimes we even guilt-trip ourselves when we come up short in comparison. Look at So-and-So, we might think. He's more devoted than I am, that's why he's able to do so much more than I am and to have his finger in so many different pies. How does he do it? In our efforts to be more like So-and-So, we might fail to notice that So-and-So is so chronically overextended and stressed out with all his activity that he is suffering migraines and catching a cold nine times a year.

We might even feel a compulsion to say yes to everything we are asked to do on behalf of others -- because we feel that's what devotion to our guru means, or what being a bodhisattva means. "I say yes whenever I can," says Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. But if we're listening with our habitual mindset we might conveniently fail to hear those last three words: "whenever I can." Automatically saying "yes" to every invitation and request that comes our way is what might be called "idiot devotion." Sometimes the more skillful and compassionate thing to do is to say "no" to involvement in one project in order to be able to properly focus our energy and attention on another -- or to simply have enough space to deal with our other obligations in life. But if we have that Judaeo-Christian guilt trip going on, saying "no" to involvement in any project that has a beneficial, spiritual aim can feel scary and even humiliating. And pity the Dharma student who has underlying control issues and wants to do everything, or be involved in managing everything, herself. There are myriad factors like these that can subtly color our expression of devotion in a neurotic tone.

An Organizational Neurosis

Dharma organizations, like all nonprofits, are in perpetual need of skilled and enthusiastic volunteers. Once word of our talents and energies spreads within the organization, we begin to find ourselves pulled this way and that way. Drip by drip, we become involved in one project on top of another, one committee after another, until we may find ourselves having fallen completely overboard with activity -- struggling to keep our heads above the water and meet all our obligations to family, career, and life while juggling the many balls of our Dharma projects. We might be working a full-time job (with overtime), rushing from work to the Dharma center for local sangha leadership meetings and classes in the evenings, spending the better part of the weekend on conference calls and planning sessions for national committees -- and wondering how to find time to do our laundry and cook meals and visit with friends. Having failed to make discerning choices and set appropriate priorities and boundaries around our involvement in the wheel of activity, we slide gradually but inexorably towards total burnout. Inevitably, we arrive at a moment of panic and have no choice but to withdraw from some of our activities -- or continue pressing forward and making ourselves mentally and physically ill.

Perhaps I should be speaking in the first-person voice rather than "we," because this crash-and-burn, boom-and-bust cycle of involvement in the wheel of activity is something I've personally experienced several times -- and maybe, at bottom, it is just my own neurotic pattern. But I've observed the same patterns enough in other people to suspect that I'm far from alone in having suffered from it. I've even known people who withdrew altogether from their involvement in particular Dharma organizations because of this type of burnout on the wheel of activity. It is, of course, up to each of us as individuals to manage our own time and commitments; in most cases, there is no one else who is watching out for us and will tell us when we're about to go overboard. But from an organizational management perspective, overtapping people and burning them out and driving them away altogether is not, to say the least, a skillful or compassionate use of human resources -- and in order to mature as Dharma organizations, we need to confront that. Learning to hold the three wheels of practice, study and activity in proper balance is a challenge we must face both as individual Dharma students and as communities.

Learning from Our Mistakes

"It is really important to have love for yourself," said Mitra Tyler Dewar at a recent retreat I attended at Nalanda West in Seattle. "It will bite you in the ass if you try to have devotion to a teacher without love for yourself." Similarly, the historical Buddha Shakyamuni said in one of the sutras that you could search the entire universe and you wouldn't find anyone more worthy of your love and compassion than you yourself.

One of the ways we need to show this love and compassion for ourselves is through understanding and respecting our own limits. When we bite off more than we can chew, we burn ourselves out on the spinning wheel of activity. For each of us, finding the balance and walking that line is a personal journey; what is skillful and balanced for you might be crazy-making for me, and vice-versa. To make matters slightly more complicated, that line, for each of us, is not a straight and narrow one; it is always shifting and changing course as our life circumstances evolve and as we progress along the path as students. We always have to intelligently consider all the variables and determine what we are able to do skillfully now, which may be more or may be less than what we were able to do last year or last week.

As Mitra Lee Worley said at the same retreat in Seattle, compassion and devotion seem to share a common root. We feel devotion towards those who are enlightened, and compassion towards those who are suffering -- but at bottom, it is the same energy of mind expressed in different directions. Wise compassion and wise devotion (unlike idiot compassion and idiot devotion) should not be a drain on our energy. When we nurture and work with these noble qualities of mind skillfully, they are the very sparks of energy and inspiration that will carry us to enlightenment.

Our devotion, the wellspring of our enthusiasm and commitment to everything we do on the path, is a beautiful and sacred quality of awakened heart and mind. But like compassion, generosity, and other noble qualities, we must learn to apply our devotion with discriminating wisdom. The blind, forward rush of idiot compassion, idiot generosity, and idiot devotion all create stumbling blocks to our progress on the path. Then again, it's also true that we sometimes learn the most from our mistakes -- as long as we don't keep repeating them.

Audio: The Unconscious in Buddhism and Jung

2010-06-08T22:01:00.006-03:00

Two days ago I posted a PDF file of a presentation I gave last week in Shedra class, comparing the theories of the Buddhist alaya-vijnana and the Jungian unconscious.

I'm now sharing the audio file of an abridged (15 mins) and streamlined version of this talk that I gave today to a larger audience at the Abbey.

To listen in streaming audio, use the embedded player applet below. To download the talk as an MP3 file, click on the DivShare logo.

Enjoy!

The Unconscious in Buddhism and Jung

2010-06-06T10:14:00.007-03:00

For the past four weeks, I've been immersed in a Shedra course at the Abbey on Yogacara ("Mind-Only") philosophy. In the 5th Century CE, Yogacara Buddhist philosophers asserted the existence of an unconscious dimension of mind called the "alaya-vijñāna," or the "storehouse" consciousness. This famous "eighth consciousness" has many features in common with the modern, Western psychological view of the unconscious as first developed by Sigmund Freud and clarified by Carl Jung.

My final presentation for the class looks at the similarities and differences between these two systems (ancient and modern) and their respective views of the unconscious mind -- particularly where Jung's psychology overlaps with the 1,500-year-old schematics of the Yogacara philosophers. For source material and analysis, I'm deeply indebted to William Waldron's scholarly paper on this topic.

Those Buddhist geeks who are interested in viewing a PDF of the presentation can download it here. Enjoy!

Crazy Like Me

2010-06-02T07:54:00.010-03:00

I'll admit it. I don't like meditating.

But I do it for much the same reasons as I brush my teeth, and exercise, and go to work: if I didn't do those things, I would be weak and unhealthy, living on the street, with my teeth falling out.

I meditate because if I didn't I would be crazy. I would be, in the eloquent words of Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels, barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless."

I don't think it's just me, actually. It is a fairly common experience to discover through meditation just how crazy you really are. This shock comes in several phases. In phase one, you simply realize that you're a monkey. Try as you might, you cannot keep your mind settled on any one thing for more than a few breaths; peeling away the controlled, civilized mask you try to present to yourself and others, you discover a "shrieking, gibbering" primate who resists any attempts at being trained or coerced. That shock, alone, is enough to make the faint-of-heart give up -- and give up they do. I can't count the number of people I've seen flee in terror from the meditation cushion after one or two trial sessions, simply because they couldn't sit down and immediately be totally thought-free and at peace. Tenzin Palmo compares this to someone who takes their first piano lesson and gives up in frustration because they can't immediately play a Beethoven concerto.

But if you are one of the few, one of the brave, who has the temerity to stick with it and not turn away from the monkey, then you can enter phase two, which -- I'm sorry to tell you, sweetheart -- holds an even greater shock. Peeling away the first layer of the monkey, you begin to uncover the bloody pulp that the monkey is made of -- and, so far, I've never heard of anyone discovering that the monkey is made of sugar and spice and everything nice. The monkey, invariably, is made of slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails and other horrors. What happens, very simply, is that you start to see, with newfound clarity, the patterns of bullshit in your own mind.

You might discover, to your deep chagrin, that although you thought you were self-confident and well-adjusted in your relationships to others you're actually seething with insecurity and vanity and constantly seeking validation. Or you might discover that although you thought you were a "nice" person, you're actually pissed off most of the time -- as full of concealed malice and resentment and aggression as a writhing ball of snakes. Or you might discover that although you thought you were tolerant and open-minded, every other thought you have is judgmental and prejudiced and critical. Or you might begin to lean over the well of your mind and peer into a bottomless abyss of loneliness and sadness that you didn't know was there. Or you might, to your everlasting horror, discover each of these things, one by one.

To put this in terms of Jungian psychology, through meditation you begin to see your own Shadow: that secret closet in your mind where you have stuffed all the skeletons that seemed unflattering and incompatible with your consciously contrived personality. And seeing your Shadow is, universally, an embarrassing and uncomfortable experience. The skeletons that come floating out of that closet are unacceptable, and they reek like corpses: that is why you locked them away in the first place.

But for the brave of heart, there is something strangely satisfying in this. It is satisfying because you know that, finally, you are getting down to something true. "The truth?" screamed Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men. "You can't handle the truth!" And yet, you begin to realize, you can handle it. It may not be flattering, it may be uncomfortable and embarrassing to admit to yourself what you find (forget about admitting it to someone else) -- but it is okay, because it is true. This stuff in you has been there all along, and now you finally have a chance to come to terms with it. Like the young man in the old fable who runs in fear from the sight of his own shadow and the sound of his own footsteps, you eventually realize that all you need to do is stop running and the sound of footsteps chasing you will disappear; sit down in the shade of a tree and your menacing shadow will vanish.

"The truth? You can't handle the truth!"
-- Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men

Here's the dangling carrot: as you let these aspects of the Shadow come up into the light of consciousness, holding them in awareness with simple curiosity and openness, the Shadow begins to loosen its grip on you. The Shadow is the Shadow, ultimately, only because you've been hiding it from yourself. Perhaps meditation gives you, for the first time in your life, the courage to begin to look nakedly at what has been inside you all along. And by looking, and knowing, you begin to grow in wisdom.

And yet, to your disappointment, it doesn't all dissolve into bliss when you shine your little flashlight on it. It's a big Shadow -- really big, stretching back into the recesses of your mind further than you can fathom -- and your little flashlight only illuminates the few feet of ground right in front of you. One nasty spider might emerge into the beam of your flashlight and dissolve in awareness, but you can rest assured there are other spiders and creepy-crawlies there in the darkness, all around you.

The spiritual path, said Chogyam Trungpa, is just "one insult after another." No wonder I don't like meditating. And yet, I keep going -- not because I'm a masochist, but because I have seen enough to know that I must keep going. I must keep peeling away the layers of the monkey -- until I get to the bone, and then I must peel away the bone and get to the marrow, and then I must peel away the marrow and get to -- what? I don't know. But each time I peel away a new layer, I'm confronted with a fresh insult, a fresh whiff of whatever reeking corpse I've been hiding from myself. And that's how I know I'm headed in the right direction.

The further you go into meditation, the more you descend into the charnel ground that is your own mind. But that's the path, sweetheart. If you seek to re-discover what Trungpa called "the sanity you were born with," you must first recognize how insane you have been ever since birth. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. And, sweetie, you've got a big problem. You're crazy, just like me.

Shock the Monkey

2010-05-19T11:17:00.005-03:00

The Triumph of the Monkey

"All of man's misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room alone," said the French philosopher Pascal. Anyone who has ever practiced meditation knows exactly what Pascal was talking about. In meditation we discover our own inability or unwillingness -- or simply that we don't know how -- to sit quietly in a room, whether alone or with others. Instead, the "monkey mind" jumps and screeches and demands that we direct our attention this way and that way: daydreaming about the past and future, drifting off into faraway lands, imagining conversations or working out our salvation by thinking it through conceptually. "Anywhere but here," the monkey seems to say; "anything but sitting here quietly, in a room, alone, with nothing to entertain me."

We hear a lot these days about people with so-called Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, who are unable to hold their attention on any one thing for very long. But perhaps all of us humans have ADHD to one degree or another, and the people who've been diagnosed with this disorder are just the canaries in the coal-mine, displaying more acute symptoms of a condition that afflicts us all.

Monkey mind is a universal human condition, and it's nothing new. It was around at the time of the Buddha, and long before that. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that it's built right into our biology. Animals whose attention is skittery, who are always looking around anxiously for predators, tend to have better survival rates; whereas animals that become absorbed in attention to any one thing for too long tend to get eaten by those same predators.

Human beings no longer have very many predators, but over the course of evolution we certainly did; and monkey mind served us well by keeping us alive in those conditions. It is, however, a habit of mind that has outlived its usefulness, and now brings us grief and frustration rather than protecting us. Today our way of living and our social and personal ambitions demand an unprecedented level of sustained attention. Whether it's studying for 14 hours at a stretch and doing well on 3-hour exams in order to succeed in school, or staying awake through interminable business meetings and conferences in order to do well in business, or being engaged in day after day of intensive meditation in order to realize the true nature of mind and attain spiritual awakening -- whatever our ambitions may be, monkey mind is our enemy. (The exception: if our ambition is to be a channel-surfing couch potato, then we should feel right at home with monkey mind.)

There is good reason to believe, too, that our modern culture of information overload and instant gratification has recently turned up the volume on monkey mind. We humans live out our lives today constantly adrift in a turbulent sea of news, images, stories, songs, jingles, advertisements, programs; our attention is splintered and pulled between newspapers and magazines and television and radio and movies and the Internet and billboards and computer games -- an endless parade of glittering media that tantalize our eyes and ears and lure away our minds like the sirens that call men to shipwreck. It's no wonder, then, that we find it so agonizingly difficult to sit quietly in a room, alone. We have been conditioned, through biology and culture, nature and nurture, to do anything but that.

But despite all our genetic and cultural conditioning, the Buddhist teachings say that with practice and effort we can find within ourselves a deeper dimension of mind, one that isn't enslaved to the monkey's continual parade of distractions. "Our problem is that this busy mind can lose its connection to its real nature," says the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. "When we take time to look beneath all this activity, we discover a sense of spaciousness and awareness, peace and happiness, that doesn’t change from moment to moment."

The Carrot or the Stick?

Buddhist meditators spend a lot of time trying to learn to "sit quietly in a room." We sit on our cushions and keep our bodies more or less still, and try -- frequently in vain -- to keep our minds on an object in order to develop the muscle of mindfulness. Sometimes, we spend a whole session just doing battle or engaging in diplomatic negotiations with the monkey, who demands that we redirect our attention elsewhere. In any case, our approach to working with mindfulness is predominantly the carrot approach: dangling before us, and spurring us to keep moving forward and keep trying, is the promise that we will attain some good result from practice, or from practicing well. Maybe we chase after the greatest carrot of all, the elusive maha-carrot known as Enlightenment -- or maybe we chase after baby carrots, relative benefits like being more calm and relaxed, not being so caught up in our emotional dramas, not being controlled by our addictions. In any case, while we outwardly train in sitting there quietly in a room, secretly, on the inside, we are all chasing after some kind of carrot.

Recently we had a full work-day at the Abbey, and I was assigned to a crew working outside in the woods. I spent the whole morning using a chainsaw, clearing dead spruce trees that had fallen or were in danger of falling. Having lived the first half of my life in the suburbs and the second half in New York City, it was my first time using a chainsaw -- which I found both intimidating and exhilarating. It was dirty, noisy, physically demanding and dangerous work, but strangely satisfying.

It was only later, when the morning's work was done, that I realized the profound effects it had on me. At lunchtime, all through the afternoon, and until I went to bed that evening, I noticed that my monkey mind had simply curled up quietly in a corner and was not making any noise at all; I felt that abiding "sense of spaciousness and awareness, peace and happiness" described by Dzogchen Ponlop. It was, in fact, a far more noticeable and lasting mental effect than anything I'd been able to concoct in all my deliberate meditation sessions on the cushion. I found myself wondering why and how a morning spent chainsawing trees could produce a greater degree of mindfulness and awareness, a deeper sense of calm abiding, than a morning spent sitting in front of a statue of the Buddha in a meditation hall.

There is, for one thing, the physical component: any physical activity that brings us down out of the ethereal realm of thought and into the earthy realm of the body promotes greater presence. Too often we sit there in the meditation hall with very little sense of the body, lost in the idea that meditation is something that happens primarily or only in the mind, and the body is merely a vehicle that gets us to the cushion and then causes us lots of distraction and pain once we are there. But Chogyam Trungpa equated mindfulness-awareness with synchronized mind and body, which is something that can only happen when we are fully grounded and present in the physical body. And maybe there is something to be said, too, for exhausting the body's surplus of nervous energy through hard physical labor, which leaves us nothing to do but relax and let go when the work is done.

But in addition to the physical aspect, there was another element in my morning practice of chainsaw meditation that is notably absent from my usual cushion practice: the element of danger. Using a chainsaw is dangerous business, demanding a very high degree of undistracted attention. The penalty for letting your attention wander off into a fantasy or becoming distracted by something else in the environment could be extreme: the loss of a hand or a foot, or worse. Total one-pointedness is required at all times, under threat of a gory punishment for non-compliance.

This, one might say, is the ultimate stick approach: the opposite of the carrot. The dangling carrot sweetly promises a good result if you just keep trying to bring your attention back to the object of meditation: so you spent the last 20 minutes lost in a fantasy, that's okay sweetheart, it doesn't matter, don't beat yourself up, just keep coming back, you'll get there eventually, and even if you don't it's still okay, just be friendly to yourself. But the chainsaw, the ultimate stick approach, brooks no stupidity, and is unforgiving; it threatens you with a terrible consequence if you let your attention wander for even a few seconds. And as a result, you are highly motivated to do one simple thing: you damn well pay attention, and you do not let your mind wander from the task. Period.

In some Zen temples they have a person called a geko who wanders through the meditation hall with a stick and whacks people who appear to be drifting off or fidgeting. Imagine if the geko, instead, carried a chainsaw and would cut off one of your beloved appendages as a penalty for letting your attention wander. In such a horror-movie scenario, one of two things would happen: you would either very quickly develop total, one-pointed mindfulness and say goodbye to monkey mind, or you would say goodbye to one body part after another (or, a third alternative: you would simply drop dead from terror).

Truth and Consequences

This is, of course, just an extreme metaphor meant to illustrate a point: when we believe we face no consequences for letting our attention wander, then we have little motivation for resisting the deeply ingrained habits of monkey mind. We can wander endlessly in distraction and think we're getting away with something. But when there are obvious consequences for doing so, then we have a strong motivation to disengage from the monkey's nonsense. If the consequences are so drastically manifest as when working with a dangerous power tool, then our motivation to pay single-pointed attention can be so strong that the monkey is literally shocked into submission. This is what I experienced for the remainder of the day after my morning chainsaw meditation.

In reality, there are always consequences to our actions. The trouble is, we usually don't see the consequences so clearly or vividly. Whatever we do repeatedly becomes a habit -- a groove in our neural circuitry that grows deeper with each repetition, from which it becomes harder and harder to redirect our minds and do something different. This is one of the aspects of what Buddhists call "karma." When we indulge in the habit of distraction and wandering mind, then we become more and more inclined towards that state, and it becomes more and more difficult to hold our attention on any one chosen object -- we are less able to stay present and more prone to drift willy-nilly, wherever the monkey wishes to lead us. The consequence, in other words, is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: we become trapped in our own personal version of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, a mental prison of our own creation.

There is an old legend about a Buddhist practitioner who couldn't stop his mind from wandering and was always falling asleep on his cushion. Finally, one day he climbed high into a tree and set up his meditation seat there. The danger of falling out of that tree and crashing to the ground if he drifted off was the motivation he needed in order to stay awake and present.

If we were to apply less dangling carrot and more threatening stick to taming and training the mind, then maybe we would have more realized and accomplished meditation practitioners in the West. I'm not at all sure that the Buddha really meant for us to practice for 30 or 40 years and still remain hopelessly enslaved to monkey mind; his vision of the spiritual path seems to have been a little more ambitious than that.

Perhaps it is time for us (in the words of the old Peter Gabriel song) to shock the monkey.

Sympathy for the Devil

2010-05-08T12:12:00.006-03:00

Unbiased Compassion

The love and compassion of a buddha, they say, is like the sun: it shines impartially and unceasingly on all beings. There is no picking and choosing involved, no personal preferences, no hope or fear. A buddha doesn't shine the light of his compassion only on those beings he likes or who please him, and withhold it vengefully from those who fail to meet his standards. "The great Way is not difficult," said the Third Zen Patriarch, "for those who have no preferences."

Most people have no trouble extending love and compassion to the people they like, and to the people whose behavior pleases them. It's easy to love someone who's lovable. But what about someone whose behavior is unethical, or whose personality is offensive? How is it possible to extend love and compassion to someone who is, by any reasonable standard, acting like an idiot, or a poseur, or just a plain, old jerk?

I find this incredibly challenging. I can give lip service to compassion and loving-kindness, but when I'm faced with someone who's a thief and a liar, or someone who's delusional and in denial, or someone who's aggressive and abusive, it's not so easy to find the love and compassion within myself. Instead, everything in me wants to shut down and say "No!" to the offending person.

One thing that helps is to look within myself and remember that there have been times in my life when I, too, have acted selfishly -- when I was almost certainly perceived by others as a jerk (difficult as that may be for me to imagine). There have been times, too, when I was a poseur, trying to impress other people and gain social advantage. And there have been times when I acted like an idiot, when I was in denial, when I shot myself in the foot through my own stupidity.

With pretty much any quality I might find offensive in others, I can discover at least a trace of that same odious quality within myself if I look closely, and honestly. And I have first-hand experience of the fear and insecurity that drive people to behave in such ways. From there, it's not such a great leap to feel empathy for someone who has gotten so stuck in those familiar traps that they just live that way all the time.

Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

It seems that America, my home country, has grown into a nation divided against itself. The never-ending power struggle between progressives and convervatives, left and right, has reached a crescendo of bitterness and animosity that I've never seen before, and that has perhaps not been seen since the Civil War. Citizens of the same country are pitted against each other, determined to fight for their values and defining themselves in opposition to the enemy. It seems more difficult than ever for people on either side of the divide to be compassionate and respectful and tolerant towards those on the other side.

Politically speaking, I know which side of the divide I stand on, and it's not with the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. But when I look at such people, and at the whole conservative backlash that's now taking place against Obama's rise to power, I can infer the fear and pain that they must be in to make them behave as they do. After all, I suffered the same kind of fear and pain and anguish throughout all eight years of the most recent Republican administration.

It is sad that the vitriolic, "Drill, baby, drill!" nonsense being passed off as public discourse by so many Republicans and Tea Partiers could actually garner so much national attention, and stir up so much animosity and ill-will in people on both sides of the political spectrum. And it is nauseating when individuals who are visibly bloated with prejudice and aggression and greed, masquerading cynically in the name of family values and patriotism -- "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," to borrow a phrase from Al Franken -- are placed in positions of power and influence.

The past week has brought us several outrageous examples (as if more proof were needed) of the widespread hypocrisy of conservatives. Now that BP's catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening the U.S. coastline from Texas to Florida, suddenly we don't hear them chanting "Drill, baby, drill!" anymore. And yet another prominent Republican and anti-gay activist, the Baptist minister George Alan Rekers, has been caught and exposed with his hand in a male prostitute's cookie jar. How many of these right-wing homophobes have now been outed as closeted homosexuals? I hope someone is keeping a list of these guys -- I've lost count. Rekers cynically claims that he hired the RentBoy.com hooker, and took him on a European vacation, only in order to share the gospel of Jesus with him and save him from his sinner's lifestyle -- but the prostitute affirms to the Miami New Times that they shared a lot more than that.

Sympathy for the Devil

Even as I oppose, on general principle, the entire conservative movement and most of the things for which it claims to stand, it is still possible (admittedly, with great effort) to feel compassion and kindness towards the human beings who comprise that movement. To borrow a phrase from their own playbook: "Love the sinner, hate the sin." The internalized homophobia and loneliness of people like George Alan Rekers is profoundly sad, and having experienced the pain of those feelings myself, I know that as a human being he is worthy of compassion, not mockery. The pain that drove Rush Limbaugh to become a pill-popping drug addict is also not completely foreign to me. To allow my moral outrage at such people's hypocritical actions and deeply misguided political views to make me hate them would be playing right into their hands. It would be stooping to their level. In spite of my outrage, somewhere inside I know exactly where these people are coming from. Their pain is my pain. But it's so easy to forget that.

This doesn't mean that we should agree with anything that Sarah Palin, for example, has said or might conceivably say, or that -- Heaven forbid -- we should ever allow her to be voted into a national office. But the similarities between us are greater than the differences. Not only are we citizens of the same struggling country, facing the same set of problems, but we are both human beings -- citizens of the same struggling planet. We both feel pain and fear; we both want to have happiness and want to avoid suffering. In the larger scheme of things, the distinctions between us are negligible, almost non-existent. Deep inside, beneath our differences, I am Sarah Palin -- and so are you.

Last week, President Obama addressed the University of Michigan's graduating class and urged them to maintain "civility" in political discourse -- even as a shrill cabal of Republicans and Tea Partiers protested outside and accused him of being a "socialist." Obama's call for civility -- for simple human courtesy and reasonable, respectful dialogue in politics -- sounds almost quaint, a throwback to an earlier, more innocent time in American life when civility was a value that meant something to most people. Listen for five minutes to one of today's conservative shock-jock radio shows and you'll know that civility doesn't mean a damn thing anymore.

But the virtue of civility is precisely what is most needed today; it is the only thing that will de-escalate the bitter, bipartisan stalemate and hateful, internecine struggle that have become the hallmarks of American politics. Civility would be a step towards real patriotism. We can all agree to disagree, and we can work towards solutions to our problems. But it would be a lot less painful for everyone if, in the process, we were to maintain some degree of respect and compassion towards one another. The unbiased compassion of a buddha shines impartially on all beings, even on hypocrites and liars and hate-mongers and shock-jocks and spin-doctors and greedy, thieving rogues.

The Gift of Desperation

2010-05-05T20:25:00.004-03:00

Idle curiosity is not what brings us to the genuine spiritual path. Most of us step onto the path after something -- or a series of somethings -- has driven us to it. Life's pressures and irritations have gotten to be too much; or something cherished -- often a relationship -- has fallen apart or been taken away, or is in danger of doing so. We might feel a slight but chronic sense of discomfort and restlessness, or we might feel an acute and urgent sense of panic. In either case, we come to the spiritual path looking for a better way to live, a way out of our suffering. Desperation drives us to finally seek out wisdom and freedom.

Desperation gets a bad rap in our society. We are supposed to be cool, calm, collected, and in control -- and someone who is desperate has lost all those qualities. He is pathetic, his life is out of control, he's a mess, he's losing it, he's desperate. Keep away from him, it might be contagious.

Desperation is not a sign of failure -- it is actually a gift. It is only from desperation that the genuine motivation to change -- the key to all spiritual growth -- can arise. Only by passing through the dark night of the soul can one experience the miracle of the dawn. If things are just peachy-keen and there's no sense of desperation at all on our path, then why bother with all this spiritual crap anyway? Wouldn't it be easier and more fun to just go shopping?

Without desperation, we have no sense of urgency, no compelling desire to grow or change, no commitment to step outside our habitual patterns. We are lukewarm, and our spiritual path is half-hearted and half-assed. "So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth," said Jesus. We might dabble in studying or practicing spiritual teachings out of intellectual curiosity, but we have no real idea why we're doing it. Desperation brings things into sharp focus.

When someone is addicted to drugs, he lives in denial of his problem -- until things get bad enough that reality begins to pierce through the bubble of delusion. At some point, slowly or suddenly, it becomes impossible to go on living in denial. But he has to hit bottom, and be desperate, in order to be jarred into seeking a way back up, a way out. His sense of desperation gives rise to a genuine and strong motivation to change, and that is the point at which recovery becomes possible -- the point at which he admits his problem and asks for help. Until he has that strong motivation to change from within, he can talk about recovery all he wants but he'll just be blowing hot air.

There are a lot of people blowing hot air on the spiritual path, just as there are in other realms of human endeavor. There are a lot of people acting cool, calm, collected, and in control. But beware of people who pretend to know too much. Someone who shows a little bit of desperation, a little bit of struggle, and a little bit of doubt, someone who bears a few scars from his journey through the dark night of the soul, is a more reliable friend in spiritual matters.

"I’m quite desperate. A lot of other teachers must have experienced this desperation. I am so desperate. You can help the world. You, you, you, you, and you – all of you – can help the world. You know what the problems are. You know the difficulties. Let us do something. Let us not chicken out. Let us actually do it properly. Please, please, please!"

-- Chogyam Trungpa, Great Eastern Sun

The Buddha was desperate. Why else would he have done what he did? The Buddha left behind his royal family and his comfortable, luxurious palace life, giving up sex and romance and money and power and fame, and setting out as a penniless beggar on a lonely and difficult quest for spiritual realization. But why? A person would only take such a radical, almost unthinkable leap if he was desperate. Suffering had penetrated through the delusional bubble of luxury and comfort in which he had lived, and it had pierced his heart. His desperation drove him to leave behind the pampered life he had known and seek out the way to go beyond suffering.

Most of us, if we reflect back to the time when we first set out on the spiritual path, can make the connection between that impulse and some kind of suffering we were experiencing in our lives, some subtle or acute sense of desperation that led us to that breaking point. The trouble is that once we have been on the spiritual path for a while we tend to forget our original motivation. We no longer feel that same sense of desperation. Our circumstances may have improved, our minds may have gotten a little calmer, we may be more at peace with ourselves -- and so we no longer feel the same strong motivation to change that we felt when we set out on this path. As we move further and further away from that original spark of desperation, it becomes easy to drift into a state of complacency.

If you feel desperate, count your lucky stars. Let that feeling be the fuel that lights your motivation to change and grow, and take whatever steps you need to make that happen. Let it be the force that propels you forward into action, into growth, into change, into enlightenment. If you've forgotten what it was like to feel desperate, try to get that old feeling back. If you've slipped into complacency about your spiritual growth, remember why you started on this journey in the first place.

Whatever you do, don't be half-hearted and half-assed in your practice. Don't be lukewarm. Be a little bit desperate. Meditate like your hair is on fire.

Enlightenment in the Present Moment

2010-04-18T10:40:00.001-03:00

All of Mahayana Buddhism is built upon the idea of bodhicitta. ‘Bodhi’ means ‘awake’ or ‘awakening’ and ‘citta’ can mean either heart or mind. So bodhicitta literally means ‘awakened heart’ or ‘the mind of awakening.’ But this is a case where knowing the word’s literal meaning and translation doesn’t really tell you very much.

The classic definition of bodhicitta is: the wish to attain complete enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. It’s an altruistic vision that asks us to put the welfare of others ahead of our own individual concerns. In a recent blog post, I described this Mahayana motivation of bodhicitta as The Megabus to Enlightenment:

The spirit of Mahayana is that we travel the path of awakening not just for ourselves and our own liberation, but for the sake of all beings. It’s a view that places compassion front and center, and emphasizes our interconnectedness — that fact that we need each other to do this work of waking up. When you embrace the Mahayana path, helping others becomes your primary goal, an end in itself — and attaining your own enlightenment is seen as merely a means to that end. When you, yourself, wake up, then you will know best how to help others wake up. Developing the strong intention to become enlightened for the benefit of all sentient beings, and then putting that intention into practice, is the way of Mahayana.

The trouble is that this idealistic vision of enlightenment is off in the distant future, and enlightenment in the future is an abstract concept that is not very practical or applicable in the present moment. Someday, we think, when we attain the fundamental enlightenment – perhaps three or four incalculable aeons from now – then we’ll be able to benefit beings. Holding that kind of vision of enlightenment, and that kind of aspiration of bodhicitta, is pretty useless.

A few days ago, Pema Chodron gave a teaching at the Abbey in which she defined the aspiration of bodhicitta in much more practical, immediate terms: it is the wish to keep your heart open in all situations, not to close down and harden against other beings even when they challenge or upset you. Bodhicitta is a fundamental openness and warmth of the heart, our connectedness to other beings, which can manifest as loving-kindness or as compassion.

This is, as Ani Pema would say, news you can use. When we practice keeping our hearts open to other beings – even the ones who really piss us off or scare us – then we are practicing bodhicitta-in-action. When we close our hearts to others and harden against them in anger or judgment, then we are taking a step away from bodhicitta. We can sit there and flap our gums about attaining enlightenment to benefit all sentient beings until we’re blue in the face, but if our hearts are actually closed towards another being in the present moment, then we’re not really practicing bodhicitta -- and we're not moving towards enlightenment.

The future doesn’t exist, and it never will. When the future arrives, it will be the present moment. The present moment is all we ever have, and it is in each fleeting, present moment that we must practice enlightenment. We will never find it anywhere else.

Dreams, Part Four: Working with Dreams

2010-04-15T05:03:00.006-03:00

This is Part Four of a four-part series on dreams. Part One looks at the meaning of dreams, and dream interpretation. Part Two explores how Buddhism uses dreaming as a metaphor for life itself. Part Three describes several types of spiritually significant dreams. Part Four offers practical methods for working with dreams and the sleeping state.

Here are a few practical ways to work with your dreams, and with the sleeping state:

Keep a dream journal.
Many people have difficulty remembering their dreams. Although it might sound paradoxical, keeping a dream journal is one way to overcome this. It is also an essential step in unlocking the richness of your dream life and beginning to interpret your dreams.

Julia Cameron's "morning pages" practice (from her book The Artist's Way), although she doesn't teach it specifically as a method for working with dreams, is useful here; it offers a way of opening the door to pay more attention and remember more of your dreams. The practice is simple: every morning when you wake up, before you do anything else, sit down (or sit up) and write three pages of whatever comes into your head. Don't get up and brush your teeth or make the coffee, just write first and do those things afterwards. It doesn't matter what it's about or how dumb it sounds, just fill up three pages.

When I did the morning pages practice for several months, I found that what most often came to mind and emerged onto my three pages were the dreams from which I had just awakened. As I wrote about my dreams in those pages, I was constantly amazed to discover how much detail and depth I could recall through the act of writing. While writing, I would often remember significant aspects, and even entire dreams, that had been forgotten the instant I woke up -- and would be forgotten permanently if I did not evoke them through writing and put them on paper.

Often the only thing that would be left of a dream in my memory, by the time I sat up and grabbed my pen and notebook and started writing, would be an isolated fragment, or even a single image. But sometimes, as I held that fragment in my mind and wrote it down in my notebook, it would trigger other associated memories and more of the dream would reveal itself spontaneously.

A dream journal does not have to be a permanent undertaking. Try it for a few months, and see what happens. If your dreams continue to evade your recollection, be patient and write about whatever comes into your head -- that's the point of the "morning pages" exercise anyway. Eventually, your daily practice of paying attention to -- and writing down -- what is in your mind in those first few minutes after waking up should begin to unlock the door of memory, and you will develop a richer relationship to your dream life.

Set your intentions.
Regard your dreams as a potential vehicle for significant communication and a potential tool for spiritual awakening. Before you fall asleep at night, set your intentions. Make the aspiration that your dreams will communicate your own deepest wisdom, and that when you awaken you will remember your dreams and understand them. Invite your dreams to teach you; let your subconscious mind know that you are paying attention. It might be helpful to create a little ritual for this. You can be personal and creative about it; the point is to make it meaningful to you. It might be some particular words that you say each night, which help you articulate your intention; or it might be some action you perform to symbolize your intention, such as offering a stick of incense, or asking for guidance in your dreams from a higher power (inner or outer).

Nightmares.
Nightmares can occur for different reasons, but in my experience they most often indicate a troubled conscience. When you have a nightmare, use it as an opportunity to contemplate what you are doing in your life that might not be sitting well with your own conscience. If you have frequent nightmares, it might be your subconscious mind's way of asking you to perform a complete ethics review of your life. What practical changes could you make in the way you conduct your waking life in order to put your conscience at ease, which would allow you to sleep more peacefully at night? When your conscience is at ease in waking life, then you are able to dwell at peace, and the monsters that appear in your dreams -- if they appear at all -- will not be nearly as frightening.

Lucid dreams.
Lucid dreaming can occur spontaneously, but it also can be developed and practiced intentionally. If this practice interests you, there are many books and teachings that provide specific methods for cultivating and working with lucid dreams, including a few books that teach techniques from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Most of these methods work, as described above, with some way of setting your intentions before falling asleep. They require consistent practice, and it may take some time before the practice bears fruit. So be patient, and keep at it. Your habits of being "asleep" in your dreams are ancient, and not easily undone -- unless you're like my friend Susan and you've been having lucid dreams all your life.

For pure inspiration I recommend Richard Linklater's entertaining and thought-provoking film, Waking Life (2001) which is entirely about lucid dreams.

Pay attention to the liminal moments.
We focus most of our attention on the waking state, and on what we can remember of our dreams. But we can also learn about our minds from paying attention to the liminal moments, the in-between states. In Tibetan Buddhism the moment of transitioning from being awake to being asleep is said to be a "bardo," a liminal moment of high potential for glimpsing and recognizing the true nature of mind. See if you can maintain awareness as you approach and cross over that line (if you can find it).

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold" ) 1. Pertaining to a threshold or entrance; relating to a beginning or first stage of a process; inceptive; inchoative; marginal; insignificant. 2. A state characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. 3. liminal space - A blurry boundary zone between two established and clear spatial areas. 4. The condition of being on a threshold or in a 'betwixt and between space'.

Similarly, the moment of transitioning from being asleep to being awake -- if we can be aware of it -- is highly charged with potential for recognizing mind's luminous nature. Daytime naps can be particularly good for working with this, because in naps we do not descend very deeply into the REM state; there is, so to speak, less distance to cover between being asleep and being awake. If we can be aware during that brief moment of transition, we can catch the waking state red-handed; we can observe it in the very act of returning to its full luminosity. It is as if a dimmer switch that had been turned down to a dim setting were suddenly turned back up to a bright setting: we can observe, in real-time, the different shades of luminosity mind goes through as it returns to waking consciousness.

Dreams, Part Three: Significant Dreams

2010-04-13T04:55:00.014-03:00

This is Part Three of a four-part series on dreams. Part One looks at the meaning of dreams, and dream interpretation. Part Two explores how Buddhism uses dreaming as a metaphor for life itself. Part Three describes several types of spiritually significant dreams. Part Four offers practical methods for working with dreams and the sleeping state.

For the most part, Buddhism doesn't dwell much on the content of dreams, and it doesn't pursue a methodology for interpreting them. The focus in Buddhism is more on the act of dreaming itself, and on recognizing the nature of dreams as a vehicle for realizing the nature of mind. Dream content is regarded as being somewhat like the thoughts we experience in meditation: it's neither good nor bad, but the bulk of it is imaginary, and in most cases no particular importance is to be attached to it. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and several types of dreams are considered to be potentially significant.

"Lucid Dream E," Parke Harrison

Precognitive Dreams

In Tibetan Buddhism -- the most mystical of the Buddhist traditions -- some dreams are considered to be prophetic or revelatory. This is particularly common among highly realized meditation practitioners. The Dalai Lama, for example, has spoken about having dreams that helped him locate or confirm the identity of reincarnate lamas. But even at a more mundane level, ordinary people sometimes experience dreams that seem to have a precognitive aspect.

I once dreamed of an old friend I hadn't seen in years, someone I had lost touch with and rarely even thought about. The very next morning after I had that dream, I had an appointment with a doctor, and was waiting in a subway station on the Upper East Side, a part of New York City where I did not usually go. The subway car doors opened, and it so happened that the old friend I had dreamed about the night before was standing right there in front of me. In a city that holds 12 million people on a typical day, he just happened to be riding the same subway, at the same time, in the same car, at the same door, and I happened to be waiting to step through that door, and I happened to have dreamed about him the previous night after not having thought of him in a very long time.

A nihilist would scoff at the suggestion that there was any connection between the previous night's dream and that chance encounter in the subway; he would argue that it was mere coincidence. A New Ager might make too much of the whole thing, and perhaps suggest that we were meant to be soul mates, or that we have unfinished karmic business whose nature can be revealed in the Akashic records or the Enochian scrolls for a low fee of just $100. A Freudian would probably brush off the coincidence and focus on the friend's appearance, with the goal of suggesting that I subconsciously equate this friend with my mother or father. A Jungian, at least, would allow space to contemplate the mystery -- the astronomically unlikely synchronicity -- of the convergence between that dream and the following morning's chance encounter in an out-of-the-way part of town.

Lucid Dreams

Among the most advanced meditation techniques taught in the Tantric Buddhism practiced in Tibet is dream yoga, or lucid dreaming. In the Kagyu lineage, dream yoga is usually introduced as part of the Six Yogas of Naropa, a set of esoteric teachings that are practiced extensively during the traditional three-year retreat. Dream yoga, therefore, is regarded as a practice for a few highly trained individuals. Through lucid dreaming, the meditation practitioner is able to train in recognizing and resting in the nature of mind right within their dreams. It is said that very advanced practitioners of dream yoga are able to maintain the same unbroken level of awareness and lucidity 24 hours a day, through all stages of waking and sleeping.

But again, on a more mundane level, many ordinary people also experience lucid dreaming -- either occasionally, or cultivated through regular practice. My friend Susan has been a frequent lucid dreamer since childhood, and says that her dreams are more often lucid than not. When she was a child, her grandmother, also a frequent lucid dreamer, used to teach her methods for working with her dreams; after her grandmother died when Susan was 15, Susan continued for years to meet up with her in lucid dreams, in the old Penn Station, whenever she needed guidance.

Sometimes lucid dreams, even if they don't occur frequently, can happen spontaneously. I recall once having a nightmare, and becoming aware -- within the dream itself -- that it was a dream. With that awareness, I made a conscious decision to wake myself up in order to put an end to the nightmare. And it worked -- I woke up.

Teaching Dreams

Another kind of dream that many Buddhists regard as potentially significant is when one dreams of being visited by, or receiving a message from, teachers or gurus or other enlightened spiritual beings. These kinds of dreams usually take place at the end of the sleep cycle, shortly before the dreamer wakes up. Tibetan Buddhism is full of legends about advanced meditation practitioners being visited in their dreams by great masters, and receiving significant teachings or guidance. The nagging (and probably unanswerable) scientific question of whether these dream experiences originate from beyond the dreamer's individual consciousness is somewhat beside the point; in either case, such dreams can be surprising, provoking, and enlightening. Jungian analysts would say such dreams reflect an encounter with the esoteric archetype of the Magus, the guru or wisdom principle that is embedded within the collective and individual unconscious.

Again, even ordinary people sometimes experience this phenomenon. Long before she became a Buddhist, my friend Susan says she repeatedly encountered in her lucid dreams -- often accompanying her grandmother -- a mysterious, large, shirtless Asian man with a kind face, wearing the dark red skirt that forms the lower half of a Tibetan monk's robes. She says it was only years later when she saw a photograph of the Tibetan master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche that she recognized him as the man in her dreams. Dilgo Khyentse often appeared in public -- in real life, not only in Susan's dreams -- shirtless. Susan says she found his recurrent presence in her dreams annoying, for he was one of the few dream figures that she was unable to manipulate -- and whenever he was around, her grandmother seemed too busy with him to pay any attention to her.

The first time I ever gave meditation instruction was at a weekend spiritual retreat in the Catskill mountains. I had been invited to lead a meditation workshop -- or I had volunteered to do so -- because it was a much-needed part of the retreat, and I seemed to be the person in that particular group who knew the most about meditation. Still, I had never actually given meditation instruction before, and had no formal training in how to do so. Suddenly I was about to lead not one but two full-blown meditation workshops -- of one hour and fifteen minutes each -- for a group of about 75 people.

We arrived at the retreat center on Friday afternoon and settled in. I was to lead the first workshop the next morning. As I went to bed that night, I was petrified -- not only with the usual fear of public speaking, but with disbelief at my own audacity. Who did I think I was, leading these workshops with no formal training or experience? I feared the weekend would be a disaster. I slept restlessly that night. But right before I woke up, I had a dream that radically transformed the entire situation.

In the dream (as in waking life) I was at a retreat center with a group of people. But this was a retreat being led by Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan teacher and meditation master who died in 1987, and who founded the Shambhala Center where I had been studying meditation at that time. Chogyam Trungpa sent us all off to bed, and he stayed up late into the night preparing a huge, elaborate Mexican feast. When the feast was ready and he had laid it out on picnic tables on the front lawn, he began to beat a drum to wake us up and call us outside, in the middle of the night, to enjoy the feast.

I emerged -- easily and pleasantly -- directly from that dream into the waking state, seemingly with no interval of unconsciousness in-between. As I lay there in bed with the dream still washing over me, I realized I had a huge smile on my face. And I realized, too, that something in me had fundamentally changed: with that dream, my massive anxiety over the workshops had mysteriously vanished, blown away like dust, and in its place was a quiet but very tangible feeling of complete confidence and joy. I felt empowered, and totally -- unbelievably -- relaxed. I went into the workshops with that relaxed, confident and joyful mind, and I never questioned it. And those workshops turned out to be quite beneficial. A few people made their first genuine connection to meditation that Saturday morning, and continued to practice what they learned there in the years that followed.

It would be grandiose to say, and impossible to defend in a rational debate, that I was actually visited in my dream by Chogyam Trungpa, or affected in some way by some energy outside myself. And yet I cannot deny that my unusual dream that night took me utterly by surprise and caused a dramatic shift of energy inside me. Where did that inexplicable charge of confidence and relaxation come from, when I had gone to bed the previous night almost trembling with anxiety and neurotic worry? Call it Chogyam Trungpa, or call it my own deepest self, or call it Jung's Magus archetype -- it makes no difference in the end. It was, for me, a significant teaching dream, one that directly and profoundly altered my experience and indirectly touched the lives of 75 other people who were there that morning.

That is the power of our dreams, or at least some of them. Through dreams, we can -- if the conditions are right, and if we are open -- receive guidance and inspiration; we can connect with a part of ourselves that is deeper and wiser than our rational, neurotic little conscious minds. But dreams, like intuition, creativity and everything else that springs from the unconscious, speak obliquely, and mysteriously, in ways that defy logic. To comprehend their communications, we must look and listen with an open mind, and learn to sense when something significant is being communicated. Not every dream is worth dwelling upon, but every now and then a dream can change our lives.

Dreams, Part Two: Life Is But a Dream

2010-04-11T04:57:00.008-03:00

This is Part Two of a four-part series on dreams. Part One looks at the meaning of dreams, and dream interpretation. Part Two explores how Buddhism uses dreaming as a metaphor for life itself. Part Three describes several types of spiritually significant dreams. Part Four offers practical methods for working with dreams and the sleeping state.

"Life Is But a Dream," John Scanlan

Dream as Metaphor

In Buddhism, dreams are a commonly used metaphor for the nature of life itself. "Like a dewdrop, a water bubble, an illusion, a dream, lightning, a cloud: regard conditioned dharmas like that," said the Buddha in one of the Prajnaparamita Sutras. In other words, anything and everything that we can point to in this life, including our own bodies and those aspects of the mind and consciousness that we usually think of as the "self," is a conditioned dharma: a temporary, illusory phenomenon that appears when the right causes and conditions come together but has no abiding essence of its own. Where is the essence of a cloud? How solid and permanent is a dewdrop or a water bubble? What reliable truth can be found in an illusion? How real is a dream, once you've awakened from it?

In Tibetan Buddhism, the metaphor of dreams is frequently applied as an actual meditation instruction -- a method of contemplating how our minds interact with, and co-create, the world we experience.

Say, for example, we dream of a bear that is chasing us, and we fear being caught and devoured by the bear. Within the dream, it feels very much like we are over here, and the bear is over there; we perceive a subject-object relationship between us and the bear. From the point of view of our waking lives, we know there is no bear, and no real duality between subject and object: the bear, and our own dream body, and the entire dream world in which it appears, is all a great fiction, a cinematic projection of our minds. But because, in the dream, we believe in our own movie and take the bear on the screen to be real, we experience fear, and our hearts beat wildly as we try to escape the bear's teeth and claws. However, if we were to be aware and lucid within the dream and recognize that the bear is really a projection of our own minds, then the bear might still appear -- because anything can appear in a dream -- but it would cease to provoke the same fear because we know it isn't really out there.

In the same way, much of what we experience in so-called waking life, which we take to be substantially existing out there, is really a projection of our own minds. Say we are in a crowded subway car, and at the far end of the car we see someone who catches our eye and looks very attractive. We begin to fix our gaze on this person, and in our minds we start building up our case, commenting on how attractive he or she is. The attractiveness appears to us to be an objectively existing quality out there in the person, at whom we are now openly staring like a deer caught in the headlights. But then the person turns and reveals a different angle, one that isn't as flattering, and suddenly our attraction goes up in a puff of smoke. What happened?

What happened is that, as if in a dream, we projected the quality of attractiveness onto this hapless person who stumbled into our field of vision, and we believed in the solid reality of our projection -- just like in a dream. The attractiveness we experience as being out there in the other person is really an illusion, a trick produced in the mind by our own habitual patterns of dualistic perception and labeling.

Whether we perceive that person as being attractive or not depends on a whole range of variable factors: our cultural conditioning and previous experiences (do they remind us of someone else we were once attracted to?), our mood (if we were fuming about something our boss said to us at work, would we even notice the person?), what the person is wearing (would we feel as attracted if he or she were dressed as a clown?), the lighting and environment and other circumstances, and so on.

If the attractiveness we perceive were really out there in the person, then it wouldn't disappear when a different angle was revealed to us; we would always find that person attractive, no matter what. Moreover, if the attractiveness were really out there in the person as an objectively existing quality, then everyone else would find that person attractive too; but in reality, we might be the only one in this whole subway car who even noticed the person. Many of the other people around us might even find our attractive person repulsive if they paid any attention. Beauty is indeed, in so many ways, in the eye of the beholder.

The same goes for our negative perceptions, and our neutral ones too: the people who irritate or repel us, and the ones about whom we feel indifferent. It's not that all these people out there don't appear in front of us, but every emotional trip we lay onto them is just like a dream. What we perceive in our world has the power to attract or repel us because we believe in its reality -- we think it's really out there -- in the same way we believe in the reality of the dream bear. In both waking life and in dreams we suffer, we experience fear and loathing, because we constantly believe that the projections of our own minds are real.

Dreams, Part One: The Dreaming

2010-04-09T05:13:00.011-03:00

This is Part One of a four-part series on dreams. Part One looks at the meaning of dreams, and dream interpretation. Part Two explores how Buddhism uses dreaming as a metaphor for life itself. Part Three describes several types of spiritually significant dreams. Part Four offers practical methods for working with dreams and the sleeping state.

The Dreaming

Have you ever watched a cat or a dog sleeping, and seen its little face twitching as it dreams of whatever cats and dogs dream of? Clearly, dreaming is not an experience limited to human beings. It is perhaps something that occurs among all the higher orders of sentient beings. But I wonder how far down the ladder it goes. Do fishes and ants and spiders dream when they sleep? As Philip K. Dick asked, in the title of the novel that became the film Bladerunner, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

In any case, the difference between humans and other dreaming creatures is that people have been trying, in various systematic ways, for thousands of years, to understand their dreams. Why do we have these crazy dreams when we sleep? What do they mean? Are they just nonsense, or full of significance? Are they messages from the gods? Why do we dream about certain things and not others? Why do we sometimes have pleasant dreams and other times have nightmares?

This ongoing human project of trying to interpret our dreams has produced all kinds of absurd ideas, such as the notion -- common in New Age circles -- that every dream is a significant communication from the divine source, and that there is a universal language of dreams shared by all human beings that can be encoded in a dictionary of dream symbols. The naive and simplistic approach taken by these dream dictionaries is that a horse, for instance, has a specific and fixed symbolic meaning that is somehow embedded in the human unconscious, regardless of culture or context, and that a dream horse therefore essentially symbolizes the same thing to every dreamer. Once you have learned the God-given symbolic meaning of all the possible things that could appear in a dream, then you possess the magic key to interpreting every dream. In Buddhist terminology, believers in this approach would be called "eternalists," because they reify and ascribe a too-solid reality to dreams and to their own fixed ideas about how to interpret them.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made (Fitzgerald, circa 1858)

The obvious problem is that these dream dictionaries -- and there are many -- each ascribe a different meaning to that poor horse. Which one are you supposed to believe? But the underlying, and more troubling, problem of this approach is that it pays no heed to cultural differences, individual psychology, the context of the dream, or the shifting, amorphous nature of dreams themselves. A thinking, rational person cannot put much stock in the idea that a horse will always symbolize the same thing for two people from wildly different backgrounds, with different experiences of horses and different ideas about them -- or even for the same person dreaming about horses in very different contexts, for different reasons, at different times in his or her life.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, some naysayers respond to this inherent difficulty of interpretation by taking their cue from the apparently random, nonsensical nature of many of our dreams. These people are the dismissers, who jump to the conclusion that all dreams are nonsense and they can have nothing important to communicate to us -- a conclusion that is as absurd, in its own way, as believing that all dreams are significant communications from the divine source spoken in a fixed language. In Buddhist terminology, the dismissers would be called "nihilists," because they deny that there can be any meaning or spiritual importance at all in our dreams.

Somewhere in-between these two extremes are many people who apply various templates to interpret dreams from the point of view of specific psychological theories. Freudians see dreams as theatrical enactments of primitive impulses and unresolved trauma stemming from early childhood and parental relations; they pruriently search dreams for indications of such things as Oedipal conflicts and Electra complexes and penis envy. Jungians see dreams as expressions of the individual's potential for a deeper, more multidimensional kind of maturation, and they search dreams for indications of the dreamer's relationship to certain thematic archetypes which are, they believe (and perhaps they are right) embedded in the collective unconscious. While such templates of dream interpretation, and others like them, can be useful and revealing, they are also limiting in their scope. They look at dreams through one particular filter of preconceptions, and by definition they exclude ideas and possibilities that are not part of that set of considerations.

To their credit, all of these theories are on to something. The dismissers have seen, and rightly so, that very often what transpires in our dreams is nonsensical and not worth dwelling upon; not every dream is worth the bother of interpretation. The New Agers have seen, on the other hand, that dreams do sometimes communicate significant and even spiritually charged messages from a deeper part of ourselves, the vast part that lies beneath the surface of our conscious minds -- and these messages sometimes express a kind of magic that defies rational explanation. And psychologists have seen that dreams do sometimes reveal aspects of our personal and collective psychology that can be studied scientifically in order to understand ourselves both as individuals and as a species. The puzzling and amazing thing about dreams is that they can be viewed and interpreted from any of these angles; yet no one angle is sufficient to understand or address the content of dreams in their entirety -- much less to explain the dreaming itself.

And that is how our waking minds are, too -- why should our dreams be different? Sometimes in waking life our minds are full of nonsense and psychobabble: tangled trains of thought that are not worth the trouble of unraveling, that are better let go and forgotten. And at other times our minds are, shockingly, full of timeless wisdom and profound insight. Sometimes we experience within our waking minds aspects of our own personal, psychological growth and our relationship to the collective experience of humanity. And every now and then, we grasp intuitively that we -- and our dreams -- are part of something that reaches unimaginably far beyond this little blip on the screen called humanity: we are part of that infinite Being of which the dreaming dogs and cats and bugs, and the dreaming aliens in far-away galaxies -- and perhaps the dreaming ghosts in hidden dimensions we cannot fathom -- are also part. Maybe what we call waking life is merely the dream of that Being, and what we call dreaming is really a dream within a dream.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

-- Shakespeare, Hamlet

It would be so much simpler if we could look at our dreams, or our waking lives, from only this or that angle -- if we could reduce all our experience and explain it with a single theory or a neat package of theories. But life is complex and multidimensional; it defies simplistic explanations. The truly baffling thing is that we alternate, in waking life and in dreams, between confusion and wisdom, nonsense and meaning, being awake and being asleep. As the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche has said, if we could just be confused all the time, that would at least make for some sort of clarity; the trouble is that sometimes we are wise, and other times we are like idiots. And often, it's hard to know the difference.

Like the thoughts we have in waking life, dreams can -- if we understand their nature and investigate them in the right way -- help us recognize and understand our own minds and make sense of our lives. But they can also be meaningless distractions, and lead us in circles. The trick is in learning to distinguish between the waking thoughts and sleeping dreams that lead us in circles and the ones that lead us in the direction of knowledge and insight. In working with dreams, intuition plays a large role -- because dreams emanate from the same shadow dimension as our intuition does. Both dreams and intuition speak in the expressive but mysterious language of the unconscious mind.

And though the unconscious mind may indeed be the source of Freud's penis envy and Jung's array of colorful archetypes, and though it may indeed harbor a lot of psychobabble that washes up on the shores of our conscious minds like so much hapless driftwood that isn't worth collecting, the unconscious is also the hidden source of all that is fertile, all that is surprising, all that is magic in our lives. In its fathomless depths are buried records of everything we have ever said, done and thought, and everything we have experienced, and everything we have imagined. It is the source of everything we ever could imagine. And "it" is communicating with us, at all times and in all situations, in our waking lives and in our sleep.

Are you listening?

Notes from a Solitary Retreat: Part Two

2010-04-07T04:47:00.006-03:00

In my first week-long solitary meditation retreat, in an isolated cabin overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I came face to face with my own mind — and several hundred other wild things. What follows are some reflections on getting to know the creatures I found inhabiting my retreat cabin — and my mind — and what I learned from them. This is Part Two of a two-part series. Click here to read Part One.

Day 5

The weather has turned wild and wrathful. The wind is now blowing down from the highlands so hard that it’s pushing the waves out to sea, and not letting them break on the shore. Typical Cape Breton springtime weather.

I have a “retreat protector” — a friend who is supporting me in my retreat by bringing me food each day. This is a great blessing, since I get much better food than what I would cook for myself, and I don’t have to spend as much time preparing it — which leaves more time to focus on the retreat itself. Today at lunch I received a special surprise: cake and ice cream, from the farewell party for one of the temporary monks who is leaving now that his one-year commitment is up. While I was devouring the ice cream, my eyes were once again drawn to the floor by one of the ants. This one appeared to be sick or injured, and it was dragging itself around on its side, with great struggle and effort — going in circles, and trying to stand up straight, and collapsing onto its side again. My ice cream and cake didn’t taste quite as good when I was watching a sentient being — however small it might be — struggling in the throes of death right in front of me.

Still, when I dig deep inside myself, I cannot say that I feel the same degree of empathy for these ants that I would feel for another, larger creature in the same circumstances. If it was a dog or a cat convulsing in its final moments in front of me, I could not sit here eating my ice cream at all — I would be in tears, trying to do something to comfort the creature and ease its suffering. But the ant's agony does not even rise to the occasion of halting my ice cream consumption. And there is nothing I can do to comfort an ant — I cannot pet it or soothe its fears or make it more comfortable. I can only watch, and offer as much empathy and good wishes as a human being can possibly extend to an ant.

And what about this macabre charnel ground business of theirs? If there were a bunch of wild dogs passing back and forth through this cabin while I was meditating, dragging behind them canine corpses and carrying in their mouths the severed, bloody heads and legs and abdomens of other dogs, I would be upset, to say the least. But that is precisely what is happening with these ants, day and night, on a miniature scale — and it only arouses my curiosity and attention, and a glimmer of compassion that is, by comparison, shallow and superficial. I wonder why. Is it because they are so tiny? Because there are trillions of them? Because their form, and their way of life, is so alien and bizarre to us that we cannot imagine they suffer as we do? Do we suppose they have no feelings, no consciousness, no will to continue living?

That is, I guess, the view held by many people, who would have no qualms about stepping on any ant that got in their way or had the audacity to make an appearance in their kitchen. We now have industrial factories that produce nothing but toxins to kill ants, and people whose sole profession is to exterminate them. The popular consensus seems to be that their very existence is an affront to the human race, and they must be annihilated to make us more comfortable.

Day 6

The wild and wrathful wind has been blowing for two days, and has grown even stronger. I am uneasy about the many swaying trees around the cabin. They are brittle spruce trees with shallow roots, and many are already dead from a raging Asian spruce beetle infestation that’s wiping out whole sections of the forests on Cape Breton, and throughout Canada. They snap like matchsticks in these winds, and the woods are littered with fallen trees — as this cabin is littered with fallen ants.

My meditation practice started out in a thick fog this morning, with a wild wind of discursiveness blowing in my mind. But by the end of the day, the fog and clouds in my mind have cleared, and the discursive wind has stopped blowing; I feel remarkably peaceful. Curiously, the same thing has happened with the weather outside. In my last meditation session of the day, I feel inspired to do an extra rosary of my practice, and while I am at it the sky outside clears and the wind stops blowing. The sea becomes still and the air itself is now gentle and warm and soft like a baby’s blanket — a perfect springtime evening. The sun sets on the calm ocean with ridiculous splendor and majesty. It is as if a dreary black-and-white film noir has suddenly turned into a lush Bollywood musical in vivid technicolor. The winter here — which lasts, I have realized, about six months — has been so relentlessly gray and cloudy that I have almost forgotten how breathtakingly beautiful and saturated with color this place can be in spring and summer. Tonight it looks and feels like a picture postcard that I want to send to all my friends, with the inscription: “Wish you were here.”

It is April Fool’s Day, and I came to the Abbey one year ago today.

Day 7

The gray fog and mist are back, and the sea and sky have merged into one again. But there is no wind, and the water a hundred feet below — what I can see of it, anyway — is eerily calm.

Last night as I was going to bed I witnessed a murder — or at least, I think that’s what it was. One of the little worker ants had one of the big winged ants and was dragging it off by its antennae. But this one was no corpse; it was very much alive, and was trying to resist being dragged away to wherever the smaller ant was taking it. But, drunk or stoned on whatever it is that makes these winged ants so slow and dull and ineffectual, it was powerless against the smaller ant despite its much larger size. Perhaps the winged ants have no pincers to defend themselves; if they did, this one could have snapped the worker ant in two pieces quite easily. His six legs struggled against the pull of the smaller ant, but his strength was no match for it and he was being dragged away kicking and screaming — or he would have been, if ants could scream. I found the whole scene quite disturbing; but I decided I did not want to know how it would end, and I turned off the light and went to bed. This sinister turn of events has severely rattled my theory that these various kinds of ants are all getting along together peacefully. Apparently, it is not only the dead ones who can get dragged away and “disappear.” I had better watch my back in this place.

Over breakfast this morning I recalled an old scary movie called “Them,” in which America is invaded by giant, man-eating ants. (It reminds me of what’s happening these days, with America being invaded by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.) I remember being disappointed to learn that the terrible monsters — so fearsome and indescribable that they could only be known as “Them” — were nothing more than oversized ants. I was expecting, I don’t know, nameless and shapeless creatures from outer space, or something like that. Giant, man-eating ants just seemed so…plebeian.

And yet...now that I am getting up-close and personal with these ants, I am thinking how scary it would actually be if the size differential between us were reduced — or even, unthinkably, reversed. Imagine looking up at those black, unemotional eyes staring back at you, having those sharp and unrelenting pincers closing around your neck, and being dragged away to their lair and chopped up to become food for the ant kingdom.

“The ant kingdom.” It’s a dumb phrase. Ants don’t have kings, they only have queens. But “the ant queendom” doesn’t sound quite right. Anyway, it’s strange, too, to call their central figure a queen. She is the only one in the colony who can lay eggs, and that is the only thing she does. She does not resolve disputes or issue royal decrees, and she probably has little idea of what's going on in the world outside her colony. Trapped in her chamber, which she can never leave, bloated fat with eggs, all day long she does nothing but pump out egg after egg after egg. Other ants — nurses and midwives — are waiting nearby, and quickly move in to lick each egg case clean and coat it with saliva that contains mold-inhibiting chemicals. If the eggs begin to grow mold, as everything rapidly does underground, they will never hatch. The queen’s innermost, regal chamber is a nursery, and Her Majesty is really an egg-laying machine, a slave to her own reproductive role.

A friend who lives nearby has another small cabin attached to her property, and recently had an invasion of carpenter ants. They had to be dealt with decisively to protect the cabin from being eaten as the ants’ dinner. This was greatly distressing to my friend who is a very ethical Buddhist and wouldn’t dream of intentionally harming even the smallest creature. But “carpenter ants” is another misnomer. Carpenters build things — but carpenter ants only destroy them. I suppose they’re called that because they’re skilled at working with wood. And they leave scrap wood and piles of sawdust everywhere, which is the other thing carpenters are known for.

Day 8

Last night I had insomnia. I unplugged the nightlight and opened all the blinds next to my bed and watched the stars. I’m from New York City, where maybe on the best night of the year you can see five stars, and even those are probably planets or satellites. Here you can’t fathom the number of stars in the sky, the number of other solar systems and worlds that exist out there. The Big Dipper was hanging right above my bed, pouring down on my head whatever it has been dipping and pouring all these billions of years. Through the walls and the floor of the cabin, if I listened closely, I could hear a strange, rhythmic sawing noise, a vibration that sounded curiously like muffled voices coming from someone’s television in the next apartment. I am convinced it was the sound of that fat weasel beneath the cabin, snoring.

Eight days a week. Today is pack-up-and-move-out day. It’s time for me to go back and rejoin the community at the Abbey. My first solitary retreat is over. But to be truthful, it was never really very solitary. There were no other people here, but I was certainly never alone. Living for a week among these ants and flies and squirrels and weasels, I was simply part of a different community in Cliffhanger cabin, a community that will continue here after I am gone. These creatures welcomed me in their own way, and seemed to have no problem with my presence. With all these ants crawling everywhere, including up my pants, not one of them ever bit me in these seven days. So I have felt at home in this community of solitude, and I hope I have not been an obnoxious guest. Perhaps I will see some of these same faces again on my next retreat.

But some of them I would prefer not to see again. Like the spider crawling next to my breakfast table this morning. Most of the spiders around here are harmless wood spiders, but this one was something else altogether. Its body was fat and bulbous and dark, with a sinister purple tinge. People around here often say to me that there are no poisonous spiders native to Cape Breton. I say those people are full of hogwash. I have seen brown widows here, which are the little-known cousins of black widows; they are not quite as poisonous but they're no kittens, either. Maybe poisonous spiders are not native to these parts, but then neither is anyone else living at the Abbey. We’re all recent immigrants here.

No normal person can look at a spider like the one at my breakfast table this morning without getting the heebie-jeebies. Maybe it isn’t going to kill you, but it’s going to leave a permanent mark. I’m glad I didn’t see him until the morning of my departure; I would have been thinking about him the whole week, looking around anxiously during my meditation sessions, imagining him crawling onto my cushion or into my bed. But I suppose every community has its members who push your buttons, whose presence you find difficult to tolerate, the ones whose faces you’d prefer never to see again. That’s life in a community. You either suffer from it, or you learn to be more tolerant and to let go of personal preferences.

This morning as I was coming back into the cabin after carrying some of my things over to the Abbey, I was greeted at the door by one of those dim-witted winged ants, which crawled towards me slowly in its clumsy way, like an eager puppy. I felt a strange surge of tenderness for it, and even affection. I was happy to see it. But is that really possible? Can a human being think of an ant fondly, like a cherished pet? Maybe I could pack up some of these ants and take them back to the Abbey with me, and keep them in an ant farm. We’re not allowed to keep cats or dogs at the Abbey, and I really do miss having pets to care for.

On second thought, no. I think the test of whether or not a creature would make a good pet is if I would want it sleeping in the same bed with me. I’m sorry to say that these ants — and spiders, and flies, and squirrels, and weasels — definitely don’t pass that test. Wild things, I think I love you — but do me a favor, and stay out of my bed. I don’t love you like that.

Notes from a Solitary Retreat: Part One

2010-04-05T11:24:00.011-03:00

In my first week-long solitary meditation retreat, in an isolated cabin overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I came face to face with my own mind — and several hundred other wild things. What follows are some reflections on getting to know the creatures I found inhabiting my retreat cabin — and my mind — and what I learned from them. This is Part One of a two-part series. Read Part Two.

Day 1

It’s the first day of my retreat — only a half-day, really, since I have the cabin starting at mid-afternoon. Today is about settling in, unpacking the things I’ve brought over to the cabin, preparing for a full schedule of meditation practice on the following six days, relaxing in the space and appreciating the view. Now my work is done, and I am sitting at the table, staring out the window at the vast ocean, enjoying a nice cup of peppermint tea. Feeling inspired, I am moved to sing a song about meditation written by Milarepa, the legendary Tibetan yogi from the 11th century. As I finish singing, I take a drink of my tea and get a chunk of tea leaves in my mouth. I’m surprised by this, and I swish them around and feel them with my tongue against my upper palate, considering whether to swallow them or spit them out. Then it dawns on me: there are no leaves in my tea, because I used a closed teabag. There is only one possibility: what is in my mouth at this very moment is the housefly that had been buzzing around a few minutes earlier. In a fit of disgust, I spit the mouthful of tea back into the cup, and look inside. There he is, drowned and floating at the top.

After recovering from my initial wave of revulsion (which involved a lot of spitting and rinsing my mouth at the sink) I reflect that this is not a very auspicious way to begin a Buddhist meditation retreat: killing a sentient being in my tea, or perhaps in my mouth. I pour out the contents of the teacup, and look at the fly lying in the sink. I am astounded to see that his legs are moving. After drowning in a teacup and being swished around in my mouth and pressed against my palate with my tongue, he is still hanging on to life. But I really don’t think he’s going to make it; he must be on his way out. Still, I want to give him the best chance I can; I feel I owe him that much, after almost eating him. I lay the fly out on a napkin to soak up the tea and saliva covering his body, and to my amazement, within a half hour he has fully recovered and crawled — or flown — off the napkin and disappeared.

The view from Cliffhanger on Day 1 of my retreat.

I am not alone in this solitary retreat cabin. In addition to the flies, there are the ants. Black ants, large ones and small ones, that march back and forth from one end of the cabin to the other, on some kind of mission the logic of which I cannot imagine. I wonder how many hundreds, possibly thousands, of critters are sharing this one-room structure with me. In a way, it’s really their space — they live here all the time. I’m just a guest for a week.

And at night, the cabin is full of strange knocking and scratching noises. I sleep fitfully, glancing at the windows from time to time to see what kind of beasts might be lurking outside, looking in. A bear, perhaps, or a pack of wolves, or an angry moose. I expect to see glowing red eyes, watching me hungrily.

Day 2

This cabin is called Cliffhanger. For about 20 years, it literally perched at the edge of this cliff above the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with the windows looking almost straight down at the waves breaking on the rocks 100 feet below. But about a year ago there were several rockslides in which nearby sections of the cliff fell away. One of the monks who was doing a retreat in the cabin at that time came running into the Abbey in the middle of the night, totally freaked out after hearing rocks falling close to the cabin. Cliffhanger was deemed unsafe, and was off-limits for several months after that. Eventually they brought in heavy equipment and picked up the whole cabin, like a doll house, and moved it back about thirty feet from the cliff’s edge. And now Cliffhanger is back in business.

Cliffhanger Cabin during my retreat. Photo by Miao Lin.

This afternoon I saw what I believe to be one of the two or three other mammals sharing the cabin with me. It is a large brown weasel, fat and as big as a cat, that most likely lives beneath the cabin. I saw it out the picture window, and did a double-take. It has the solid brown coat of an otter or a beaver, which is what I at first thought it was — not at all like the little white weasel I once chased through the Abbey, which may in fact have been a wild ferret. But the way it slinked forward like a weasel, rather than walking like any normal four-legged creature, gave it away. I dashed for my camera to take a picture of it, but it disappeared into the bushes before I could get a shot.

I wonder: does this weasel live alone here? Is he perhaps a bachelor? I like to imagine he is. And what does a bachelor weasel do, living beneath a solitary retreat cabin perched in the woods on a cliff a hundred feet above the ocean? Does he have a network of weasel friends, and weasel enemies? How does he find a mate in all this vast wildness? There are no weasel singles bars that I’m aware of in these parts. (Come to think of it, in my experience all singles bars are full of weasels.)

There is also at least one squirrel living in the upper parts of the cabin. I adore squirrels. I wrote a term paper about them in college, in a class on urban ecology. But the squirrels around here are territorial and aggressive, like Chihuahuas; they are not accustomed to human beings, and they make an awful fuss when you cross their turf. They puff up their tails and beat them against the tree branches, and shout absurd little high-pitched curses and threats that sound like a dog’s squeaky toy being squeezed repeatedly. They apparently have no idea, as Chihuahuas also seem to have no idea, how ridiculous they look and sound. Today while circling the cabin outside, I spotted a hole under the eave, along the wall next to my bed, where one of them seems to go in and out. I hear its rustling noises in the wall and ceiling above me when I’m falling asleep, along with an occasional noisy outburst of activity caused by I don’t know what: whatever it is that upsets squirrels and causes them to screech and dash about madly — which actually, now that I think about it, seems to be just about everything. Life as a squirrel can’t be easy: being so high-strung and edgy and paranoid all the time. It’s like being a New Yorker. It must be exhausting.

Day 3

I am becoming very familiar with the ants in this cabin. Too familiar. All morning, all afternoon, all night they are my constant companions. As I sit in meditation for three long sessions each day, I see them marching back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Often I see them literally going in circles, sniffing out with their probing antennae whatever it is that ants sniff for all day and all night — which is, I gather, whatever they can score. Sometimes they march right up and climb me like a mountain while I am sitting there. I often shake them off my shirt or my shoes or my hands. I have literally had ants in my pants. A few times, I have maimed or killed them accidentally, because I didn’t know they were there, and I am roughly 20,000 times their size. I conscientiously watch the floors when I walk around the cabin, to avoid stepping on them — but it’s impossible to avoid it completely, because they are everywhere, and they are always on the move. Sharing the cabin’s tiny kitchenette with them is like performing in Riverdance.

There are two or three different types of ants here. At first I thought they were different species, though I have since realized that they are the same species, and even from the same colony, but they have different body types and different roles. Some of them are little worker ants, while others — two or three times their size — are fearsome warrior ants, with much larger pincers. You don’t want to mess with those guys. There are also a few large, winged ants that seem to do nothing but stumble around, slowly and aimlessly and ineffectively, looking rather depressed, like sad drunks or junkies. Perhaps that is what they are. They even have the junky’s narcolepsy: every now and then they’ll just come to a stop in the middle of the room and lie there without moving for several hours, until you’re convinced they’re dead and you’re ready to sweep them away with the broom, and then they’ll suddenly come back to life. They rarely attempt to use their wings, and when they do, they buzz around blindly a few inches off the floor, banging drunkenly into walls and furniture.

The fierce warrior ants, if you blow at them, will rear up and show you their pincers in a threatening gesture, the way a lobster does with its claw: they are preparing to strike if they continue to be hassled. And if you stomp your foot on the floor to shoo them away, they do not run away from it — they run, without exception, directly at it. I suppose that is what they are programmed, as warriors, to do — they are the kamikaze pilots of the ant world, the team’s offensive players. I only realized the little workers and the big warriors were the same species after seeing them meet each other several times and lock together in a sort of friendly embrace, exchanging chemical information face to face, almost like French-kissing. And then they separate and go on their way.

Their antennae, with which these ants feel their way through the world, are another amazing bit of technology. Although they grow out of their heads, their antennae also function as arms, and there is an elbow joint built right into each one. When they find something to eat, they use their antennae rather daintily to scoop it towards their mouth, as if they were holding a fork and a knife. I’ve also seen them use their antennae to clean their faces, and to scratch themselves when they itch.

Today one of the ants caught my eye while I was meditating. At that moment, I happened to be reciting a section of my liturgy that deals with the topic of death (a frequent object of contemplation in Buddhism). I noticed this ant had a very odd shape, and was limping right towards me. I looked more closely. Speaking of death, this was a worker ant, carrying half of the chopped-up corpse of a fly. I saw the other half of the fly lying on the floor nearby. (It didn’t stay there for long, as that ant or another one soon came back to retrieve it.) I can't help wondering if it was the fly that was in my mouth a couple of days ago.

If I died here, if I choked on a piece of broccoli and keeled over, how long would it take these ants to start chopping me up and carting me away? Would there be anything left of my remains by the time the folks at the Abbey came looking for me? Probably just some bones and teeth and hair, arranged in a heap on my meditation cushion. Even now, my only defense against these creatures, the only thing that keeps them in check, is that I’m inconveniently 20,000 times their size. But I suspect they’re looking at me, licking their little ant chops, and wishing, hoping for a miracle.

Day 4

Thick clouds and mist everywhere today: the sea and sky have merged into one, with no visual line separating them at the horizon. The famous Cape Breton wind is also picking up now.

I have been studying these ants, and I have realized what line of business they are in: they are all undertakers. All day long, I see them hauling around the corpses of their fallen comrades — sometimes not even whole corpses, just gruesome severed heads or other body parts. There is no shortage of ants here, and no shortage of dead ants, either. This room in which I am meditating is a charnel ground in miniature scale. Fresh ant corpses — felled by what causes I do not know — just keep appearing here and there throughout the cabin, and this work of undertaking is never finished for those who are still living. I see them at it constantly. They heave the corpses up with their jaws like Olympic weight-lifters and carry the bodies out in front of them, or they walk at a funny angle and push the bodies from the side, or they walk backwards in front of the corpses and drag them the way a dog pulls at a bone. I have even seen one of them rather sportingly dragging around a huge dustbunny, in which were tangled the severed body parts of another dessicated ant. (Don't believe me? I got the whole thing on video...)

I have now observed so much of this behavior from these ants that I am fully convinced that they spend more time searching for and transporting other ant corpses than they do looking for food, or eating it -- unless the corpses of the dead ants are their food. But I don’t think so. I read somewhere that ants build a special chamber in their colonies where they bring — as if respectfully, to their proper resting place — the bodies of their fellow ants who have passed on: an ant burial chamber. That is an altogether more civilized explanation for this behavior I am witnessing, and a more pleasing one for the human mind to contemplate. These small, black, six-legged creatures I am sharing a room with this week are either all remorseless cannibals, or a race of ethical beings whose main business — aside from survival — is scampering around looking for the remains of their relatives, and seeing that those remains are properly cared for when they find them.

Read Part Two

Not Afraid to Fall Apart

2010-04-03T12:08:00.006-03:00

Chogyam Trungpa once said that all our neurosis comes from wanting to move away from discomfort. We are experts at moving away, escaping, covering up. Our basic impulse to shrink or recoil from what makes us uncomfortable is the root of addictions of all kinds, and it is also the root of every form of hatred and prejudice.

Unless we're in denial, most of us experience a basic and ongoing sense of discomfort in our lives that is present even when when things are going well. Even when we get what we want, when we acquire the things that supposedly will make us happy, still in the back of our minds there is always that nagging feeling of shakiness and uncertainty. We don't have it all together, and yet we feel that we are supposed to. There are two common neurotic styles of reacting to this shakiness and uncertainty.

One neurotic style is self-denigration. We amplify the underlying feeling of uncertainty and discomfort by feeding it into a story-line about how messed up we are. No wonder I don't have it all together, we think. Other people have it all together, but I'm stuck here feeling shaky and uncertain because (as the story-line goes) there's something basically wrong with me. I'm falling apart, and it's my own fault, because I'm (fill in the blanks). If I could only get (fill in the blanks) or become (fill in the blanks) then maybe I could get it together. This is Tara Brach's "trance of unworthiness," the eternal fountain of low self-esteem and depression. This self-denigrating attitude produces habits of negative thinking and neurotic behaviors that stifle our spiritual growth and keep us imprisoned in discontentment and despair. People who are stuck in self-denigration always seem to be at war with themselves. When taken to its logical extreme, it leads to suicide.

The other neurotic style is arrogance. We react to the underlying feeling of uncertainty and discomfort with an attitude of denial; we cover it up and attempt to hide it by puffing ourselves up with vanity and pride. We pretend that we do, in fact, have it all together -- or that, if we don't, it's only because someone else is holding us back. The by-product of arrogance is the story-line that goes, Nothing is wrong with me; something is wrong with you! Or: If I'm falling apart, it's your fault. On the small scale, the personal level, this attitude of arrogance and blame produces people who are rude and aggressive and self-centered and abusive. On the larger scale, the social level, it produces hatred and conflict between political parties, between ethnic and religious groups, and between nations. It produces Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, and history has shown that it produces monsters even more gruesome than those. People who are stuck in arrogance always seem to be at war with someone else.

Arrogance and self-denigration might appear to be energetic opposites, but they're actually flip sides of the same coin. Their similarities are greater than their differences. They're both ways of moving away from that underlying discomfort, and both of them generate neurosis. They both involve fixation, hardening into a pattern. And neither of these neurotic coping strategies does anything to make the underlying feeling of discomfort go away. We still feel shaky and uncertain, and we never quite manage to get it all together for more than a few minutes at a time. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we're always falling apart inside -- even if, in the case of arrogance, we might be in denial about it. Look at Tilda Swinton's magnificently crafted character in the film Michael Clayton. In public she projects herself as a vicious lawyer who is cold and hard and in control -- the epitome of arrogance. But in private, she is always falling apart, doubting herself, trying desperately to hold it together, sweating and puking with anxiety and fear.

Self-denigration sometimes masquerades as humility, but true humility isn't despairing, neurotic and negative. True humility is a state of being open and receptive -- not assuming that you know the answers, and not holding on to fixed opinions. By the same token, arrogance sometimes masquerades as confidence, but true confidence isn't puffed up, conceited and bloated with its own prejudice. True confidence, in fact, looks very much like true humility: it's a state of unbiased openness and receptivity, a state of being okay with not knowing all the answers, okay with the shakiness and the uncertainty.

Humility means knowing that we don't have it all together, and that even when we do get it together, we can't keep it that way: we're perpetually getting it together and watching it fall apart again. Confidence means knowing that's the way it is, and we're still basically okay. We can let ourselves fall apart, and come back together, and fall apart again. We can meet the messiness and the shakiness and the uncertainty of life with some sense of equanimity -- not indifference, but equanimity, which is a mind that holds humility and confidence in equal balance.

In the end, we are all going to fall apart completely. When that happens, all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put us back together again. When we face that fact and really take it in, then we can get on with the business of living in a less neurotic way. We can stop worrying about how to get it together and keep it together permanently, because we know what an impossible fairy tale that is.

Mindfulness of Body: A Guided Meditation

2010-03-21T11:40:00.007-03:00

This short (23 mins) guided meditation on mindfulness of body was given last Saturday morning, during the "Do Something Meaningful" weekend program at Nalandabodhi New York. Elsewhere in this blog, I've written about the profound practice of mindfulness of body. This talk guides listeners through a simple 'body scan' in order to bring awareness out of our heads and down into our bodies. By being more fully present with our embodied experience in each moment, we are more awake to What Is.

What are your experiences with mindfulness of body? Post your comments and share them with others.

A Monk in Manhattan

2010-03-19T11:11:00.004-03:00

I recently spent a week teaching and visiting friends in New York City, where I lived for almost 20 years. It was my first time back to New York since coming to Gampo Abbey, and my first major trip outside of the monastery (with the exception of a weekend trip to Halifax last summer for a workshop).

The strangeness of the trip began before I ever left Cape Breton. I noticed that the driver of the shuttle van that took me to Halifax had written my name down on his passenger list as Dennis Hunger, which somehow seemed oddly fitting. I had to chew on that one for a while.

In Antigonish, halfway to Halifax, it became apparent that a big part of the strangeness of my journey would be the experience of being a monk in Tibetan robes, in a culture that has few reference points for such a thing. I often go into Cheticamp (the local town near the Abbey) wearing my robes, but people there are so accustomed to seeing monks and nuns from the Abbey that most of them don’t give us a second look. But in places like Antigonish and Halifax, I was an object of puzzlement, sometimes veering towards open derision and other times towards great curiosity and friendliness. The Indian manager at the A&W franchise in Antigonish came over to me at my table and said, rather matter-of-factly, while I was wolfing down a fast food meal during our 10-minute stop: “Buddham sharanam gacchami.” I smiled and nodded at him with my mouth full, and he proceeded to explain to his very curious employee (who had tagged along with him to my table) that it’s a phrase people in Buddhist countries often say to each other as a form of greeting or respect. I was as surprised by this information as his employee was. It’s a phrase included in our chants at the Abbey when we say our vows and take refuge in the Three Jewels every morning, but I’ve never heard it spoken outside of that context.

At the airport in Halifax, people seemed to take in my appearance as something of a spectacle. I sat in the restaurant near my departure gate and absorbed 20 minutes of open hostility and suspicious glares from a businessman dressed in tight jeans and an ostentatious cowboy hat and cowboy boots, jabbering into the wireless device embedded in his ear. When I went to the restroom, I paused in front of the two doors and looked at the signs. One sign showed a human being in pants. The other showed a human being in a skirt. I looked down at my robes. I looked up at the signs. I looked down again. Disobeying the signs, I entered the door that showed the human being in pants.

I arrived in New York City during the evening rush hour, a time of day that does not reveal New Yorkers at their best. I took the Airtrain from JFK, then the LIRR and the subway to 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue where my friend lives. As soon as I left the airport and began to see the people and the buildings and the city, I felt a surge of intense familiarity, as though I had never left this city, or had merely been away on a short jaunt, an overnight getaway. But it also rapidly became apparent how much I have slowed down internally during a year in the monastery. The pervasive feeling of speed and aggression in which New Yorkers move and breathe – which is at its most intense during rush hour – was more visible to me than ever before, and more painful to witness.

New Yorkers, needless to say, have seen it all a hundred times over, so the spectacle of a white guy in Tibetan robes, on the street or in the subway or in a museum, was not quite as eye-catching to them as it was to folks in Halifax. The majority of people in New York didn’t give me a second glance. But sometimes my robes would catch someone’s attention, and they would come over and ask me questions, or want to tell me about whatever spiritual trip they might happen to be on. A man in the airport asked me if I was a monk, and told me he practices “self-realization” (I didn’t ask what that means). A man in the bank asked me if I was a priest. A young man at the Shambhala Center asked me if I was a monk, and when I said yes, blurted out enthusiastically: “Cool!” While I was waiting to meet a friend in the East Village, two young Hispanic women passed me on the sidewalk, and one of them called to me: “I love your outfit!”

The strangeness of being a monk in the city varies depending on the neighborhood. In the East Village people expect strangeness, they thrive on it, and so as a monk in robes I felt welcomed as part of the clan. In Chinatown, I blended into the scenery and was largely invisible; the people in the Chinese Mahayana temple did not even look up at me when I came in and took photos. In midtown and the Museum of Modern Art, I was highly visible, part of the big-city experience that tourists had paid good money to see; they gawked and seemed to appreciate me fulfilling their expectations and being part of the scenery that gave them their money’s worth. In Chelsea, my old stomping ground, I stood out like a sore thumb. People on the sidewalk stared in disbelief, and even whispered to their friends as I passed, suggesting the presence of a small-town, provincial mentality right in the middle of the biggest city in America. Walking with a friend on Eighth Avenue, I almost had a Marilyn Monroe moment as I stepped over the subway ventilation grates and a sudden wind from below began to blow up my robes. I got off the subway grates very quickly, and was careful not to walk over them again.

Of course, the robes are just an outer symbol of something inside, which are the vows I’m holding as a temporary monk. That was, for me, the real strangeness and novelty of being a monk in New York City. No cocktails or wine with dinner, no bars or clubs, no dancing. No flirting or cruising. Not even the idea was really there (although, of course, many things caught my eye and took my mind in familiar directions). It wasn’t the first time in my city life that I’ve disengaged from such things, but they were very much part of my New York experience before coming to the monastery, and their absence during this trip seemed somehow conspicuous.

I expected that when I returned to the Abbey after this trip, the place would feel different somehow – but I wasn’t gone long enough for that to happen. Rounding the road into the hamlet of Red River, at the base of the mountain where the Abbey is nestled, I felt quite simply like I was coming back home again. The contrast, in scale and tone, between New York City and Gampo Abbey could hardly be any more extreme, but maybe that’s why I like them both (though for different reasons); I’ve always been a lover of extremes. Ani Pema was teaching the same afternoon I arrived, so I slipped without a pause back into the humming life of the Abbey.

As I reflect on my recent journey back to the city, I sometimes feel waves of nostalgia or loneliness. I already miss my friends in the city. I miss the freedom of deciding my own schedule, of going where I want to go, of choosing exactly what I want to eat and when. I miss the sheer volume of entertainments and distractions and spectacles available at all times in a place like New York. Yet, I know that placing myself in this small pressure cooker for the past year has been, unquestionably, one of the best things I have ever done in my life. And I know that staying here and living as a monk for another year is probably the best thing I can do right now. Beyond that, I cannot presently see – and I know that I don’t need to.

First Article in Chinese

2010-03-17T20:02:00.006-03:00

My First Article in Chinese

My monastic friend, Miao Lin, generously translated one of my recent articles, "The Dark Side of Emotions", into Chinese. If you speak Chinese, please check it it out and let me know what you think. Or, if you know Chinese-speaking people who are interested in the dharma, feel free to forward the link. Other Chinese-language articles may be forthcoming soon. Click here for the Chinese page.

Of the Two Witnesses, Hold the Principal One

2010-03-05T05:06:00.003-04:00

Don't Make Gods into Demons

2010-02-28T14:57:00.003-04:00

Be Grateful to Everyone

2010-02-24T06:43:00.003-04:00

Always Maintain Only a Joyful Mind

2010-02-21T11:56:00.007-04:00

This article is part of a series of short commentaries on proverbs or slogans from the Lojong ("mind-training") teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Several other such commentaries will be offered soon, in addition to the ones that have already appeared here in previous months. To see the whole series of commentaries on Lojong slogans, click here.

Always Maintain Only a Joyful Mind

Look at the lives of the great spiritual beings who are now walking or have walked among us: the Karmapa, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others like them. These people are not gritting their teeth and just flatly enduring the hardships and challenges that come their way. They do not slog through their work as spiritual leaders with a sense of weariness or a chip on their shoulders. They do not cop resentments about the burdens they have to carry and the things they are asked to do for others. Quite the opposite: they bring boundless joy and cheerfulness and relaxation into everything they do, even in the midst of very difficult circumstances. They are always smiling and laughing, taking delight and finding humor in the situations and people around them — not in a Pollyannaish or frivolous way, but in a way that is united with their tremendous heart of compassion. They bring a constant sense of joy to their 24-hour-a-day practice of helping others.

For the rest of us, back on planet Earth, this slogan may sound naïve and pie-in-the-sky. Always maintain only a joyful mind? You’ve got to be kidding. How is that possible? And why would you even want to do that?

Often, the difficult circumstances we encounter in life land in our laps with a great thud, and no prior warning. We didn’t ask for our lover to leave us, or for our children to rebel against us, or for the stock we own to crash, or for the doctor to give us the diagnosis we didn’t want to hear. But there it is. We have no choice in the matter. The question is: how do we react? How do we work with it? How do we hold our minds in response to what life throws at us?

There is no situation that cannot be made better by infusing it with joy. Not Pollyanna joy, which is a kind of stupid, plastic cheerfulness that masks a total denial of the realities of ugly situations and negativity and suffering in our lives — but authentic joy, which sees these realities clearly but sees every situation as workable and as fuel for spiritual awakening.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux is one of the most beloved Catholic saints. She lived at the end of the 19th century and died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 24. When she was 15, she entered a Carmelite nunnery in which she was secluded for the rest of her life. Among the other nuns she encountered there was one particular nun who pushed all her buttons. Everything this nun did stuck in Thérèse’s craw: even the way she walked and talked and smelled was irritating. The Carmelites were a contemplative order and would spend many hours sitting in silent prayer in a chapel that echoed. This nun happened to sit near Thérèse, and all through the prayers she would make little clicking noises with her mouth that drove Thérèse up the wall. Thérèse sat there unable to focus her mind in prayer, consumed with annoyance and loathing for this clicking nun.

At some point, Thérèse concluded, to her dismay, that there was nothing she could do to make this nun change: she was stuck with her, and they were both committed to being there for life. Thérèse realized that the only way to change the situation would be to change herself, her whole way of relating to the other nun. Rather than avoiding the nun, as she had been doing, Thérèse began to go out of her way to find her and spend time with her. She always greeted her with the most genuine smile she could find within herself, and made little friendship gifts to give her. Finally, one day the nun said to Thérèse, “Sister Thérèse, I just don’t understand why you love me so much.” Thérèse thought: Well, if only you knew.*

Thérèse’s relationship to the other nun utterly changed, not because she succeeded in changing the other nun, but because she committed herself to changing her own mind. No doubt the other nun continued for the rest of her life with her clicking and all the other behaviors that annoyed Thérèse, but for Thérèse these things were no longer a problem. Thérèse had a boundless commitment to the practice of maintaining only a joyful mind; this commitment shines through in her autobiography. It is one of the reasons she is so beloved, and why she was one of the saints most quickly canonized after death. Thérèse didn’t have stigmata or perform any parlor-trick miracles: she performed the ultimate miracle of transforming her own mind. When she saw the blood on her handkerchief and pillowcase that signaled the presence of fatal tuberculosis and realized she would soon die, Thérèse “thought immediately of the joyful thing that I had to learn, and so I went over to the window.” How many of us would be able to hear our doctor give us a fatal diagnosis and “think immediately of the joyful thing” that we could learn from it? On her deathbed, Thérèse is reported to have said: “I have reached the point of not being able to suffer anymore, because all suffering is sweet to me.”

When we adopt the commitment to maintaining a joyful mind even in the face of challenging and difficult circumstances, then everything that happens in our lives is fuel for awakening. But if we take ourselves and our life situations too seriously and make too big a deal of them, then that very same fuel stokes the flames that burn us. Our habit is to get locked into a heavy, oppressive sense of how fixed and stuck things are — whether it’s outer circumstances, or other people and their neuroses, or just our own minds, our neuroses and our seeming inability to change. When we infuse our lives with a sense of lightness and joy and not taking things too seriously, it transforms our experience. Everything becomes much more workable, and we are able to relax right in the midst of chaos.

Our spiritual practice, too, should be a practice of maintaining a joyful mind. How often do we sit down to meditate as if we were going under the surgeon’s knife, as if meditation were a terrible and unpleasant chore that must be accomplished? With such an attitude, it’s little wonder we often lack enthusiasm for practice. Imagine, says Pema Chodron, what it might be like if we could bring to our spiritual practices the same sense of joy and delight and enthusiasm that we bring to, say, going for a swim, or eating popcorn and watching movies. We would probably be enlightened already!

When we find ourselves getting “too serious” about our spiritual practice, it might be helpful to turn down the flame on the stove a little bit, and let our practice simmer at a more reasonable pace rather than boiling over. Our challenge is often in knowing and respecting our own limits, and working at the level where we can maintain enthusiasm and joy.

We tend to think that our biggest obstacles and enemies are on the outside, in the shape of people and circumstances that challenge us. For instance, we might get very worked up thinking about the corrupt politicians, and the greedy Wall Street fatcats, and the lords of the military-industrial complex. We might get very enthusiastic about pointing the finger of blame at those people for many of the problems we see in the world today.

But in terms of what hinders our practice on the spiritual path, what stymies our awakening, it’s not the politicians or the fatcats or the five-star generals, or any other external figure — no matter how corrupt or misguided or galling they might be. In fact, no one outside of ourselves really has the power to hinder our awakening in the slightest. What hinders our awakening is the enemy within: our own mournful weariness, our laziness, discouragement, despair, depression and fatigue — all the internal enemies that deprive us of joyful exertion and make us withdraw fearfully into our protective shell.

The irony is that we devote ourselves whole-heartedly and enthusiastically to the pursuit and acquisition of external things that promise to make us comfortable and happy: money, possessions, relationships, careers, hobbies and so on. We don’t seem to have any shortage of joyful exertion for grasping at shiny baubles and emotional highs. Yet we seem unwilling to pursue the causes of true and lasting happiness — enlightenment itself — with the same zeal and enthusiasm. At bottom, it’s a question of understanding what really leads us to awakening and freedom, and what further ensnares us in suffering and delusion. When we hold the answer to that question deep in our bones, then our priorities become clear, and mournful weariness evaporates. With that kind of wind at our backs, we will not find it so difficult to always maintain only a joyful mind.

* I'm indebted to Tenzin Palmo for sharing, in one of her Dharma teachings, this beautiful story about St. Thérèse of Lisieux.