Jacob's Children, Chapter Nine

Now then, we are come to the story of the four Januarys: the one who died, the one who went to prison for killing her (though she didn't), the one who became the Queen of England and the fourth, my grandmother. They were born of the union of Mackarias the Traveler and Naomi, the butcher's daughter.

As the Traveler told his story Naomi, Samuel and Sarah exchanged glances of incredulity and then joy. When he was done, Naomi told her tale, at which the Traveler was amazed and then fiercely excited. He, too, saw the implications of what their union could bring to pass, that kindness could save their children yet not enslave them. Mackarias the Traveler became Mackarias the Butcher and married Naomi while Samuel and Sarah gladly retired from active life, though for several years Mackarias was still learning the trade and required Samuel's help, while Sarah continued to work in the shop off and on until she became too infirm for this. Naomi learned from Mackarias that one need not listen to every woe, so she grew more slender and ever more able to do the things a person of average girth can do. He learned from her that even if someone discovers that he must be kind in order to live a normal life, he was under no obligation to be kind on command. In other words, they both thrived in the others' love.

Naomi bore four girls. The first was born on January 1 and was named January. (When asked what would have happened had she been born the day before, Naomi joked, "Why, she would have been named Eve, of course!"). The second was born almost exactly a year later, but on January 2. Though her given name was Sarah, after her grandmother, it wasn't long before the wags began to call her January the Second, and this name stuck to her, especially when her younger sister was born January 3 of the following year and, inevitably, the fourth sister 366 days later. Though these latter two were given their own names (Clara and Rose), they were never known as anything but January the Third and January the Fourth. By this time, the names were no longer said with humor but with a sort of trepidation, for it was taken to be a sinister sign for them to have been born in a sequence so improbable.

The girls gave no one any cause to think them anything other than odd, either, for they were nearly always together, silent, and appeared grim and humorless. While other children played on the green, the girls sat in a row, always in descending order of birth, with January on the far right and Rose (the Fourth) at the other end "as if," said their father, with a bemused shake of his head, "anyone who came upon them could read them properly, from left to right." They seemed to make up a complete being only in the presence of one another. The Four Januarys became legendary throughout their land and eventually through many lands. You have no doubt heard of them, for they became healers of some renown. Though each had inherited her mother's capacity for removing the sting of misfortune through hearing of a tale and their father's of bestowing kindness, it was when they were in a foursome that their true powers were manifest, for then they could heal those who were gravely ill or take away madness or melancholy. You, reader, may be skeptical of this, thinking it mere superstition, but the record as I have studied it seems to point to the certainty that these things came to pass; oh, perhaps the tales are exaggerated--when are such tales not? But that they could do works seemingly beyond human ken is without doubt.

January was their undisputed leader and it fell to her to determine when what they were asked to do was right and when it was not. This was her special power. As my grandmother explained it to me many years later, "It simply is not always the right thing, to heal. It seems it would be, but it was clear to us at a very young age that this was not so. Some people are meant to die; it is their time. Taking the feeling of grief from one who has lost a loved one is neither kind nor skillful, you understand? It was a hard task to put upon young girls and normally we would not have had the maturity to make such a judgment, but January was equal to the task. When we came to a place where we had been bid to go, we would gather in a circle around the bed or couch of the sufferer and hold hands. We would pray, silently, then in unison look to January. We never spoke; I suppose that is one of the things that made us so thoroughly spooky to others, but to us it was perfectly natural, for since we were born we could communicate to one another without words. So January would indicate in that wordless dialect whether we were to proceed or not. I doubt even she knew how she made the determination, but once made she could not be swayed. Often we were cursed, and crockery or even stones were thrown in our direction if we left a house without doing the ceremony of healing, but the projectiles invariably fell far short of us, for the people were afraid we had the power to curse them, though we did not. We could only do or withhold good; we could do no harm beyond that. But January was never wrong, never. Many times we would find out later how valuable the death or the suffering had been, though we could not have guessed it at the time."

January the Second, Sarah, was my grandmother. He special gift and in some ways her curse was to feel deeply the motives and secret thoughts of others. "No, no," she assured me, "it's not as if I can hear what you are saying inside your head. God forbid I should hear the thoughts of little boys! Both boring and scurrilous, no doubt!" She caused me to blush. "No, but right now I know beyond doubt you are embarassed and a bit angry that I have made you so. Ah, and now a bit more angry that I have read these things! Well, never mind. I have learned over the years to block it from me when I wish, though in the many years before I had this skill I was tormented by the uncontrolled waves of feeling coming at me from all quarters. Now, now, I will read no more of you, don't worry." But I was nonetheless always wary around Grandma, and she no doubt liked it this way.

The Third, Clara, was a sensitive child who could see the spirits of people, both living and dead, so it is said. Because it had been no other way for her, ever, she was not disturbed by this, or so it seemed. She was never at a loss for playmates, though the other girls could never see them. But this inability to divide the real world from the world of spirits came to be her downfall, for the veil between them became more and more diaphanous until it fell away completely. In her kingdom of spirits she was married to King Henry and became the Queen, his seventh wife. She bore him many sons in that realm, it seems, and made him very happy. But she came to prefer that world and left this one behind. She lived for many years with my grandmother and was invariably pleasant to us. She insisted on being called Your Highness, or course, but was not as haughty as one might think the Queen of England might be.

The Fourth, Rose, was the most beautiful of them, with sleek, dark hair that hung to her waist and flashing, dark eyes that intimidated all who came near. She was the fierce one of the four and had the special ability of being able to detect a threat and meet it with her mind, cause it to turn away or, if it was a determined foe like a man intent on doing one or all of them harm, causing him to writhe in pain without touching him. She did not misuse her skill, though, and once word got around that she was capable of this, she rarely had to use any power at all, but merely glare at the miscreant for him to cringe and turn away.

It was the girls' special joy to travel the countryside to carry their healing spirits to those who required them. At first these were special trips by invitation, but as the girls grew into young women they simply traveled on their own roundabout the country. Wherever they went there were those who needed what they had to give. When is it ever not so? They would accept no payment and no gift beyond simple beds for the night and a simple meal, then they moved on to the next town. This went on from the time Rose was four until she was 14, at which time death and love caused it all to come crashing down.

Chapter Ten is here.

Letting go: Reality

There are some moments when I feel as if I am on the verge of Figuring It All Out, then the moment slips away, slides off the face of things like a Dali clock face and I am left with what feels like reality but I seem to know deep inside is a mere simulacrum of the real thing. Does that sound a bit insane? The problem is, it seems to me, that the construct we call reality is so convincing that we have to look a bit sideways to get a good look at what is truly real. When that is too frightening we withdraw from the vision back into the comforting real-seeming world we have created. It's like the movies in which what seems real to the protagonist turns out to be anything but true when he or she gets a chance to look behind the scrim and see the workings of things, as if all of what we believe to be real is the Wizard and what is Real is the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy discovered, though, the man behind the curtain can be enormously disappointing when we have acclimated ourselves to something flashy, loud, busy, diverting, distracting, grand and pinned all our hopes of salvation to it.

Poetry tries to look at things sideways to get at a bit of the Real reality without describing its features too starkly not because it will disappear or we will recoil, but because part of the problem we have with comprehending the depth of what is Real is that it cannot be described in words and when we try to do so we reduce it to what is comprehensible to our everyday mind, which has circuit breakers designed to protect us that serve instead to shut out too much of what is Real. Why? Not only for our protection (as our minds perceive danger) but, it seems to me, because our minds, our egos, want to be in charge of things. Since no one and nothing is in charge of the larger Reality (it is wild, it is vast, it is uncontrolled and uncontrollable), that is impossible and that impossibility offends our small minds, our egos.

But, oh, it is comfortable to rest in the limited view. Things are comprehensible there, within my control. If only I do everything on my list, all will be well. If I convince you that I am OK, then I will be. If you tell me I am good, I am good. If you tell me I am bad, that must be true, too. One and one always equals two. There is a great deal of "purposeful forgetting" that goes into such a view of reality, though, for I must conveniently forget that I have never gotten to the end of the list, not in all my 55 years (though as a child my list was mercifully short and I completed it every day: play, eat, sleep, repeat. It was workable). One and one are sometimes three and sometimes 145,863. The judgment implicit in "good" and "bad" is really pretty irrelevant. That's just the way Reality works.

This real Reality, though, is like the gears and levers and pipes and switches that live behind the scenes and make things work. Have you noticed that there are spaces in buildings that seem to have nothing in them? If you pay attention, you will see that you can know where one room ends and another begins and there are some places where one room does not meet another and there is a space. In that space, in most modern buildings anyway, are wires and pipes and tubes and cables and motors, at least I assume so, though there is often no access door. In the clinic where I work, between the pharmacy and the elevators is an expanse of blank wall that seems to have nothing behind it. What's in there? That is how Reality works in our lives and if we crawl behind the facade we see the intricacies and connections that are vaster than our imaginings. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy", says Hamlet. Are dreams a map of that space? Sometimes it seems so, because when I wake up I am not at all sure which is more confused, the spaces I dreamed or the spaces in which I "live".

Fiction, too, can paint a portrait that causes us to question this narrow world in which we spend our daily lives. I just finished a book titled Room that asks this question. Jack knows only Room for his first six years and assumes that it is all there is. When he finds out this isn't so, he still questions the boundary. I think he may be more wise than most of us; oh, I'm sure he will eventually acclimate himself to the narrow reality that makes us all feel safe, but he will lose a wisdom he will have to regain if he wishes to be truly free.

I know, I know, this doesn't sound like any kind of sense, but that's the point, really. Look around at the world in which we live. Where is the sense there? People kill each other for the pettiest reasons imaginable. The wars in which this country has been engaged for the past decade are being fought for reasons that would not pass muster in the most unruly kindergarten, yet go unquestioned in the "grown-up" world.(Don't you sometimes want to send them to bed without supper? Spank their hands and take their toys away?) People starve for no good reason.  Millions are dying of preventable diseases while I sit in Starbucks sipping my five dollar coffee. This is not to induce guilt in me or in you but to ask that basic question again, what sense does all this make? Where do we find sense in the programmatic world in which we reside unless we dig deeper and find what lies beneath? And how do we go about that?

The first step, I think, is to questions all of our assumptions. The safety they lend us is illusory, anyway, so there is no threat, not really. How secure have they made us feel? It's no wonder we feel a sense of unease, of incompleteness in our everyday lives; the artificial, created world in which we spend that everyday is incapable of answering the most basic questions about cause and purpose and truth. Yet because it is where we have been taught to be comfortable we make the odd choice of no longer asking the questions rather than questioning the assumptions underlying the narrow world. Make no mistake about it, these are the most important questions we can ask and most of us give up on them at some point, then forget to pick them back up. Isn't that odd? I don't pretend to understand this. How do we get so caught up in the minutiae of life that it takes a trauma or other earth-shattering event to wake us up? When we are awakened we scramble to get back to the comfort of not thinking as quickly as we can, if we can.Our poets are all insane if sanity if this narrow world. Unfortunately for us, to glimpse Reality from time to time and then retreat behind the protection of societally sanctioned reality cannot bring us freedom.Only a determined, persistent dedication to taking off the armor and exposing ourselves naked to the world can do that. But it's worth every effort we make.

Thanksgiving

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. Denis Waitley

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. Gilbert K. Chesterton

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. Friedrich Nietzsche

Gratitude is not, to the best of my knowledge, taught explicitly in the Buddhist texts. We are asked to be thankful to the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha, but it does not get much more specific than that. Yet the spirit of gratitude imbues much of what the Buddha taught. In his words on lovingkindness the Buddha said,

Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So, with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world.

It would be exceedingly difficult to carry out this precept if we were not grateful to those toward whom we had these feelings. Of course, this is most difficult to do with those we resent or dislike, but our gratitude toward them should be much greater than it is toward those we naturally love, for in extending love to them we are able to feel the power of the work we do to transform us and the world.

I admit to having an anxious heart; this is my nature. I find more to worry about than to console me. But in gratitude, in lovingkindness I find the ability to open my heart, the heart that has a tendency to close down when I am most anxious. So, as a reminder to myself, for these people and things I am most grateful:

♣ My parents, who not only gave me birth in this human form but nurtured and loved me and continue to nurture and love me.
♣ My wife, Kathy, who has put up with me, loved me, cherished me, corrected me, and been more patient than I deserve.
♣ My son, who is a beautiful soul and a loving man. What more could a father ask for his son but happiness? And he has that, too.
♣ My siblings, for their love and support. Individually we have struggled mightily over the years and each of us has made a great effort to be loving and kind to one another.
♣ All of my family for the love they have shown me and, when I had been gone from their lives for many years, welcomed me back with open arms.
♣ My many friends. For those who are far away I wish safe journeys. For those who are ill or suffering I also wish safe journeys.
♣ The comforts of my home. It is a true blessing to have a haven to which I can come for peace and serenity. It is warm, cozy and well-stocked! I treasure it.
♣ Being born into this human realm. It is, as the Buddha points out, the realm in which we are most able to investigate and make use of what is available in the world to learn.
♣ Having a body which is still functioning quite well and without too many complaints. Being able to use my body to learn who and what I am in the depths of my soul.
♣ Having a job and enough money to do all I need to do and some of what I wish to do. Especially in these economic times it is comforting to have employment that is not just adequate but which provides me with some joy.
♣ The teachings of the Buddha and other spiritual masters. I have been guided in the ways of freedom and have come to understand that nothing stands between me and that freedom but me. This is a great gift and a great challenge. The mountain is high but there is path.
♣  All teachers everywhere who share freely of what they know so the rest of us may benefit.
♣ Humor, grace, forgiveness, hope, charity, compassion, love, harmony, and all of the impulses of the heart that make life most worth living.
♣  All children everywhere for the joy they bring.
♣ Music in all its forms and wonder. I am particularly thankful today for Mozart, Bach, k.d. lang, Joni Mitchell, Brandi Carlile and Telleman.
♣ The ability to follow the precepts of non-harm, honesty, sexual integrity, loving speech and sobriety. I have not always been as able to live within these as I am now. I am very grateful for the willingness that made me more whole.
♣ All those who continue to struggle in confusion and pain. My heart opens to them and their suffering.
♣ All those who challenge and frustrate me for the opportunity they give me to practice what I have been taught.
♣  Those of you who read these words. May you thrive.
♣  All beings everywhere,

Wishing: in gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born--
May all beings be at ease!

     The Buddha's Words on Lovingkindness

Letting go: fierceness

There is a fierceness in this practice that must have its due, what the Shambhala tradition calls the Lion's Roar. If we approach all this letting go and relaxing into the present with passivity, we may achieve a state of relaxation or a gentle questioning of the status quo, but never move one inch closer to true freedom.

When the Buddha sat under his famous bodhi tree and determined not to rise until he found the truth of his existence, he was in dire earnest. He meant to never rise again, to die and rot and blow away to dust rather than rise without an answer. This is our model. Granted, like Jesus dying on a cross, the courage of the Master is at the extreme end of commitment to the truth. We are not to expect ourselves to go quite that far. But the exemplar is one of extreme courage and dedication to the best of our individual ability.

Pema Chödrön says that if we knew what benefit could derive from our practice, we would do so "as if our hair were on fire". Yes, yes, there is plenty to be gained from a passive dedication to the cushion and a half-hearted study of the Buddha's words, but these practices reach an inevitable stopping point where they have borne all the fruit they can. Most of us stop there. We feel more serene. We are kinder. We think before we speak. We seek peace in the world around us. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but it will eventually seem like too little benefit for so much work and we will drift away or else stay in this place and accept that this is all we can derive from the practice and the teachings of the Buddha. But this is not the truth.

We must begin by acknowledging that our perceptions are wrong by their very nature as perceptions. These deeply filtered impressions of the world bear the same relationship to reality as, say, Soviet art does to art, and for the same reason: they are filtered through an autocratic, paranoid, fabulist, overbearing maze of censorship, protectionism and power hunger, in this case the dictatorship of the ego. Reality, which is the only source of lasting joy, is the proletariat and our own fear the KGB. Is this rhetoric excessive? Far from it. What is required here is a fierceness, the same fierceness the Buddha demonstrated when he sat under that tree, a stripping away of all delusion and a dedication to seeing what is for what it is and neither more nor less than that.

In the light of our everyday lives this sounds impossible. If we are easily defeated by such thinking, we may throw up our hands and say that it can't be done or we are not worthy of the task. But the most important understanding we can have is that any effort we make in the direction of awakening is of value. We need not do this all at once; we need not do it at all. But the very realization that it is possible, that it is accessible to each of us at any time, is what matters most. It is not as if we have to scale a mountain all in one go. In fact, it's not much at all like scaling a mountain. This task is more akin to leveling a mountain; it is a great task that can be done as quickly or as slowly as we have the energy to take it on. Given many lifetimes, a mountain could be leveled with a soup spoon. But the Buddha has given us picks and shovels. If we dedicate ourselves to the practice and study of this discipline, he has even given us backhoes and earth movers. And he has promised us the dynamite of moments of enlightenment if we continue trudging the path.

So you can see where this fierceness comes in handy. It is a faith that says, "I will go out today with my soup spoon even if I might not see this mountain leveled in my lifetime. I will do so because I know that the closer I get to level ground, the closer I am to being free. I do not have to take it all down in a day to benefit from the increased freedom I achieve by being even a foot closer to sea level. At the same time I know that, through the practice of kindness, love, harmony, patience, compassion, friendliness, openness, peace, equanimity, sympathetic joy and grace I am making the mountains of others easier to bear." This is, if you will, a patient fierceness, that does not judge or reprove, but goes about the task with dedication and determination, that knows that herein lies the truth.

Letting go

Of course, the answer to everything I have been writing about recently is letting go. Somehow, we intuitively know this, have all felt the joy that comes with being able (if only for a moment) to completely release all holding and relax into the moment. Love can be this way, prayer can, meditation, sex, or releasing in a situation in which we can truly, completely relax (unlike most vacations). The feeling is unparalleled and is a intimation of what that final release of Nirvana must be like.

Why do we cling to our illusion of control when it causes so much pain? Though we have experienced the joy of letting go, I don't think we entirely trust it. What we have come to believe is that if we don't hold tightly to all things, life will spin out of control and we and those we love will be done irreparable harm. I know that for me I also don't want pain to be part of the mix. If there is no guarantee that my pain will end when I let go, then I want to hang on to the delusion that if I stay in control I might be able to somehow obviate the pain. But, as I have written before, the Buddha made clear that this tight holding only exacerbates pain by turning it into suffering.

Someone once said that the equation for suffering is pain times resistance. Pain of some sort, whether physical, emotional, or psychic, whether from unexpected causes such as accidents or expected ones like aging is inevitable. So the question is, do all these walls and barriers I place between myself and pain increase or decrease my level of pain? The obvious answers are, first, no; pain has a way of finding us no matter what we do. The other answer is that while I am busy building my defenses I have neglected living the moment I am in, which also increases my suffering.

So, what would letting go look like? In some ways it is easier to describe what it is not than what it is.
--It is not giving up the fight, at least not exactly. Yes, we have stopped fighting against what is, but that doesn't mean we throw up our hands and stop striving to be the best people we can be and this world the best place it can be.
--It is not complacency. Far from it. When we let go of our need to defend ourselves against "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" we regain an enormous resource of energy we can use to take on the true injustices of the world.
--It is not an invitation to space out and disconnect. Nothing is more valuable than making connections with others and remaining awake and aware while doing so. The meaning of the word Buddha is, after all, "to be awake".

Still, this is not easy. I find myself clinging, clinging, clinging to that illusion of control despite all evidence to the contrary. I have no more control over the day to day flow of the world than I do the flow of a great river. I have no more control over your behavior than I do over gravity. I have no more control over aging, disability, dissolution and death than I do over an avalanche. As if I could stand on the mountainside and call a halt to all that falling, rushing snow; that is how little power I have over the day to day causes of my pain and difficulty. Unlike the avalanche, though, my resistance to the fact of my pain actually causes the pain of being hit by that emotional wall of snow to increase exponentially.

It is, then, a constant process of reminding myself of the need to let go of all that I can whenever I can. Meditation, as one might guess, helps immensely because when we sit in meditation we are letting go just by sitting there, letting go of our need to DO something for that. True, the mind often has other ideas and wants to keep us planning, thinking, scheming. But in those moments of quiet between the thoughts we can feel the joy of letting go and know that it awaits us if we want it more than our suffering.

What is true?

As a beginning of the investigation I spoke of in my last post I intend to make this blog more personal and less theoretical. Not that the Buddha's teachings as I understand them aren't important, but I think I need to look a bit more closely at my own struggle. So, below are the things I believe to be true. I don't claim to know anything special, this is just what I believe, for what it's worth:

♦ Increasing complexity does not confer greater proximity to the truth. Some questions have simple, correct answers that cannot be improved upon, though many will try. Conversely, some questions have complex answers that cannot be simplified, though idiots will try.

♦ Kindness has inherent value, which is to say that kindness need not be in service of anything at all to be worthwhile. Simplicity also has inherent value; it when we veer away from simplicity toward unnecessary complexity that we create suffering for ourselves and others.

♦ Meditation has great efficacy, though I'm far from clear how it does what it does. As far as that goes, the truth or usefulness of anything does not increase or decrease in proportion to my ability to understand or explain it. (By the way, all the recent scientific evidence for the efficacy of meditation annoys rather than convinces me. The proofs they offer are shallow ones that speak only to the most simplistic outcomes of meditation, like relaxation or diminishment of  stress).

♦ I believe there is a flow to the universe that tends to balance, harmony and justice. That our human nature often runs counter to this flow is no evidence it does not exist. If one chooses to call this flow God, I have no objection. If there is such a place as heaven, then Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tsu, Moses, Mohammed, Rumi and a host of their cohorts are no doubt sitting about wondering why we numbskulls can't figure out they were all talking about the same thing.

♦ Fear runs our lives. Almost all our fears are unfounded and of our own creation. Just because a small percentage of our fears come true does not imply that nurturing them makes us safer. On the contrary, it causes us to live in small cages, making it easier for our horrors to find us.

♦ Being right is far more subjective than we wish to believe. Very few things are correct in every circumstance and for each person. Being right is also overrated; it does not give any lasting comfort or peace of mind.

♦ We have a tendency to believe that everyone is just like us, so if they were only to respond as we have they would be doing the right thing, when in fact what appears to be a similar circumstance to one you encountered in the past might be (and probably is) something entirely different to the person who is currently encountering it. This is the Myth of the Continuity of Experience and underlies nearly all of the misunderstandings between human beings.

♦ Guilt is the least effective motivator. Compassion is the most effective.

♦ Goals and dreams are fine but often become anxiety and guilt, which are death to joy. Joy is the ultimate goal and the ultimate dream. It is extremely easy to lose sight of the fact that accomplishment does not yield joy and that our passions can, if not properly directed, destroy the very pleasure which caused us to come to love the object of our passion.

♦ There really is nothing wrong with doing nothing. The concept of laziness is an invention of the Overlords who find a busy rabble easier to control than a thoughtful crowd. Always be ready to ask, "Says who?" There was never an epigramist half so destructive as he who said "An idle mind is the devil's playground." On the contrary, an idle mind is the breeding ground of angels.

♦ "Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain": Danna Faulds.

♦ The day will never come when the circumstances are all perfect and the stars all aligned for you to be free enough to relax and do as you wish, so you might as well go ahead and relax and do as you wish. This is not permission to run roughshod over others, but let's be truthful: you were never going to do that anyway. Compassionate freedom will always be benign and helpful, much more so than forced charity.

♦ Despite knowing all this, nothing is easier than falling back into anxiety and expectation. These are intricately grooved into our experience of the world and do not fall easily away. They are worthless but very powerful. They do not stand up to scrutiny but we have learned not to question them. We seem to believe that feeling anxious about what we must do and having expectations for the future, for things we must live up to, are the natural conditions of life and that we must accept these as our lot. This is poppycock, but this fact does not diminish their power, at least not by much. Perhaps we need a Poppycock Guild to stand against them, to shout from the rooftops their perfidy and shallowness. "Anxiety" our orator would say, "is a false goad and a false God. It leads to false goals and false failure. Since its aims are always unachievable it guarantees only its own survival. Poppycock!" he would shout, "Poppycock!" and once again, "Poppycock!"

♦ I just unsubscribed from all of my "guilt" emails. I am tired of being informed of events and movements I can do nothing to help. If I find myself in need of an outlet for my energies I am quite certain I will be able to find one without their help.

♦ The Buddha and all great teachers were and are trying to say something extremely simple: freedom is not so difficult and nothing stands between you and it but you. So get out of the way, already. But beware; all of what you have learned to think will bring you freedom is actually building your prison, yet giving up the idea that you will eventually become free by building it will be extremely difficult.

Wanted

I visited this weekend with a friend who has a meningioma, a "benign" brain tumor. It is called benign because it is not a metastatic cancer, but I doubt she would call it benign in any meaningful way. Her struggle and my grief are fairly personal; that's not the reason I bring this up. Rather, it caused me to reflect how my brain gets taken over by my mental and emotional meningiomas, how hijacked I often feel. Right now I am sitting in the Sacramento airport nervous and out of sorts, yet there is no proximate cause for all this. What I seek is to be in control and there are few things more out of my control than flying on a jet. Yet this is familiar territory; nothing unusual here. I am safe. I am protected. But I cannot fly the plane.

Despite all the study I do and commentary I write, I find myself tied up in the same knots as always, really. Though I aspire to spiritual motives, I still want to look good, seem good, be thought well of. Not that these are in themselves base motivations, but with the ego in charge they can run my life and make me miserable. I don't just want to lose weight, I want you to notice. I don't just want to write about my experiences here, I want you to think I am brilliant; I want thousands of followers and hundreds of comments. I don't just want to be the best son, brother, friend and uncle I know how to be, I want some sort of credit from those parents, siblings, nephews and such and to be considered a cut above all others, holier or some such nonsense. I want to go immediately to my rental car on arrival in Sacramento and am feeling all peaceful and serene until it turns out that the rental car company screwed up my Fastbreak reservation again, at which point I turn into the same judgmental fool who always emerges when I am tired or hungry or stressed or in anything but an absolutely pristine frame of mind.

When I say that I want these things, though, that is a very confused statement. The best part of my consciousness doesn't want them at all, recognizes that these desires are a source of suffering, are, in fact, the source of suffering. That egotistical, small mind which seems to have the upper hand much of the time, though, wants these things very much, does not feel safe unless it has the reinforcement, the reassurance of praise, fame, pleasure and gain without any of their counterparts: blame, disrepute, pain or loss. These eight factors are called, in Buddhist parlance, the Eight Worldly Winds, so called because they can blow us about if we allow them to and because they are in essence both insubstantial and inescapable. The Buddha recommended being like a great tree in the midst of them all. The winds blow and I may bend this way and that but, all in all, I stand steadfast and unchanged by them.

Part of the problem, for me at least, is that all of this Buddhist stuff can complicate things rather than simplify them. Everyone seems to have an opinion and there is no consistent teaching that is simple and infallible. I know, it's unrealistic to expect such simplicity, but at the same time something in me (and in the Buddha's own teachings, for that matter) says that this whole thing really is quite simple and it is us who complicate it.

What is wanted here, then, is an investigation of what this all boils down to, what is the essence of what the Buddha taught and what makes a life worth living. I think perhaps the first is much less important than the second. The Buddha himself recommended rejecting his teachings altogether if they did not make sense to each of us, if they did not tend, over time, to bring true joy. For me, though, they are the closest I have ever come to that state, so for the time being I intend to stick with them.

Do I sound a bit impatient? I suppose I am. I am 55 years old and wiser than I used to be, but far from wise. I am more serene than I used to be, but far from serene. I am kinder, but not consistently kind. I feel as if I have to reinvent the wheel every time someone pisses me off and I'm tired of that fact. I am tired of my ego taking control and suffering because of it. I have an inkling that somewhere in all of this is a kernel of truth, a jewel in the manure pile that would cause this path to be much, much simpler than I am making it. Unfortunately, if such a jewel exists I suspect someone would already be teaching it and what I see out there is a bunch of opinions and complex teachings that only leave me more confused and feeling as if I can never be erudite or learned enough to get it, whatever it might be. I'm not really asking for much, just peace and contentment. Is that really so much to expect? I don't ask that life not be a challenge and full of grief, confusion and pain. God knows I have seen enough of that to be convinced. What I do ask, though, is the serenity to accept it as it is without adding anything to the story, because those additions only exacerbate the pain and do nothing to ease it, despite my mind's idea that they will. But such serenity cannot lead to passivity, because to be passive in this world is to be complicit in the injustice, hatred, violence and greed that are rampant here.

Any suggestions?

The body

In my posts on the three charteristics of existance, I wrote quite a bit about ethereal things, as if who we are is Out There somewhere and has very little to do with this ME each of us is from day to day. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of the Buddha's teaching, in fact, is to emphasize that freedom is no further away than the next thought, that awareness is always quite literally at our fingertips.

The Buddha said, "In this fathom long body is found all of the teachings". To think of the body as a vehicle that carries the important parts (our soul, our consciousness, our mind) around is a mistaken perspective. It is not uncommon to think of our body as merely transportation for our heads, which is where all the important stuff happens. Awareness is present in every aspect of our existence and nothing is closer to us or more available than our bodies.

One of the primary ways in which we can deepen our meditation practice is to pay attention to the sensations of the body, to give them the same full awareness we have been devoting to the breath. One way to do this is a body scan, tuning in to each part of our bodies in turn. We can also do walking meditation, in which we walk at a pace that allows us to be aware of every sensation. Classically this is very, very slow and appears a bit bizarre to anyone not familiar with the practice. Truly, though, walking meditation can be done at any pace. One way to keep our thoughts on the sensations is to verbally (though silently) note what we are doing as we are doing it. If we are going slowly, we can note "lifting, moving, placing" as each foot is raised, moved, and lowered. At a faster pace, we might simply think "left, right, left, right". Whatever noting  technique we use, though, the practice is not to focus on the noting but on the sensations that accompany the words.  If you become truly adept at this, you can drop the noting and only go back to it if you feel your mind wandering back to thoughts. When you feel comfortable with it, the practice of very slow walking meditation can be very freeing. Try it some time when no one is watching and see what happens.

There is no need to do a formal practice to know that our bodies are filled with consciousness, though. We can feel what our body does when we are stressed, when we are happy, when we are calm or grieving or angry. Notice how intimately connected the bodily sensations are to the emotion; it is difficult to imagine the one without the other. The clenched jaw, the butterflied stomach, the tense shoulders, the expansive chest, the sickening drop of the stomach or the nauseating rise all attest to the connection our bodies have to everything we experience in our minds. When we are speaking of ourselves and gesture, we point to our hearts, not our heads.

In Ulysses, James Joyce noted that Bloom "lived a short distance from his body". So do most of us, don't we? We seem to be somewhat disconnected from what is going on here in this fathom-long body and much of what we do recognize disgusts or disappoints us. Yet this is the place where we live out our lives. Like so many of the teachings of the Buddha, it is vital for us to understand that nothing, absolutely nothing is rejected. This is not a practice which leads to some airy state of separation from the everyday world, but to wholesale engagement with it. "In the Buddhist way of understanding, our human body is considered exceedingly precious because it provides the necessary conditions to realize freedom and true happiness," Jack Kornfield wrote. "Mindfulness of the body allows us to live fully. It brings healing, wisdom, and freedom."

It is not difficult to see where our commitment to healthy eating comes into play in all of this. We can also appreciate how unhealthy eating comes about. If we reject uncomfortable bodily sensations or reject our bodies altogether, we will do nearly anything to escape them. Though many of us have used alcohol, drugs (both legal and illegal) or other techniques, food is often the most accessible and socially acceptable avenue for the rejection of feelings. This is why I find the use of calorie restriction so helpful: it gives me the opportunity to come face to face with my impulse to bury my feelings in food; when I am facing the reality that a piece of cake will take up the remainder of my calories for the day and there is really no very good reason for me to eat it, I have no option but to ask myself why I am making that choice. Of course, the other advantage of calorie counting is that I can make that choice anyway, if that's what I decide to do. If I am being honest with myself, I can recognize that my impulse to overeat is invariably tied into antipathy toward some sensation of my body engendered by unwanted emotion. But if every emotion is a precious jewel carried in this miracle of a body, I can breathe it in and breathe it out without trying to make it go away. And when the time comes for this body to die, I can let go of it as I would a dear friend, without remorse but only a slight wistfulness that something I have come to know and love so well will be no more. After all, as Ajahn Chah says, "We only rent this house. If it belonged to us we could tell it not to get sick, not to grow old. But it takes no notice of these wishes. With wisdom, if you live, that's good. And when you have to die, that's fine, too."

I drove a Mustang

Because our old Subaru is not entirely reliable (though we recently upgraded her to assisted living from being on hospice) from time to time I rent a car to do my errands. I always ask Budget for a nice, little compact, but Friday the rental guy asked if I wanted a free upgrade to a Mustang. I said yes. I mean, who wouldn't? (Well, probably lots of people, actually. But not me).

So for 24 hours I drove a car that goes vroom! and responds to a touch of the accelerator with a surge rather than a faint complaint followed by a reluctant lift, the difference between a go-go teen and a worn down if still game middle aged guy both getting up off a couch. The difference, you understand, is not merely one of style or degree but of perspective. There is potential trouble, the geezer understands, in rising from here where it is comfortable; life is not all adventure, son, and even if it is an adventure some of those can be very, very painful.

In this metaphoric world, my Mustang was about 14. And four cans into the Red Bull.

Not that I'm complaining. I am enough of a Guy that I think it's pretty damn cool to drive around in a sky blue, brand new muscle car for a few hours. I drove 50 on streets I haven't taken over 35 in ten years. I unnecessarily zoomed past people going slower in the other lane. This thing had lights on the lights in the interior. The threshold of each door had a lighted MUSTANG on it that looked pretty damn cool at night when you got in the car. I got admiring looks from pimply teenagers and fellow old guys. I preened.

Then I heard myself. It was me getting admiring looks? This car, not even mine, was garnering this attention and making me feel all powerful and edgy. My whole adult life has been the search for a way to subvert the idea that my external reality represents who I really am and a 'Stang comes along and hijacks my psyche for an afternoon? Fun, but in the grand scheme of things, I am more my sad, brave Subaru station wagon than I am this rod. In the end I felt a little silly, another 55-year-old geriatric with a new toy. I was glad to get it back to the rental lot and walk home.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't mind having some of that vroom back in the old bones, to think that the rumble I feel is raw power rather than the result of digestion. A boy can dream.

The three characteristics: non-self

You don't exist.

This statement may be a bit disconcerting until you go to the mirror and say, "Whew, there I am. That Reid, what a kidder." There is a story (probably apocryphal) of the painter Claude Monet who, upon being told by a young acolyte that he, Monet, did not exist kicked a rock and said, in essence, "There! I do exist, or what kicked that rock, you little ninny?" But we must ask this question of Monet: what if gangrene set into the toe that kicked the rock and it needed to be removed? Would you still be Monet? Naturellement!, he would no doubt reply. What if the whole leg needed to come off? Both? And both arms? What if you were whittled down, Monsieur Monet, to nothing but a brain floating in a jar and you were somehow still sentient? Would you still be Claude?

The question that arises from all of this, naturellement, is, what is your Is-ness? Where do you reside? These are the questions of anatta or non-self.  One place this comes into play is when our society engages the conundrum of our attitude and actions toward a person who is demonstrably brain-dead yet whose body continues to thrive. Is this person dead? Legally? Morally? Actually? Where does (or did) she live when she was living? Any of us who have been at the bedside of a person who glides over the divide between dying and dead knows the great mystery of that moment when the body contains the essence of Being and then in a flicker does not. What was that? Where has it gone?

In the discussion of impermanence, we looked at what is never-changing in us, what never shifts and is constant from one moment or one decade to the next and concluded there is no such thing. That things change so slowly we can't detect the change is no proof that they do not; my house is falling down on my head, though it does not appear to be so; the mountains are washing away to the sea and will one day be as flat as any desert. The great ME is no less subject to change and the change occurs much more rapidly. It is visible to the naked eye, but only the eye that is trained to see it. This is one of the cardinal benefits of meditation, to slow our reversion to the blandishments of the ego to a point where we can see the essential impermanence of who we are and, by corollary, of all things.

Because we are by nature ever-shifting and this frightens the ego (or mind), it imposes on this chaos an artificial structure it sees as the lasting world. The mind is not stupid; it readily acknowledges that we age and die, though it prefers not to dwell on these distasteful truths. But as for the daily shifts in the reality of our self-ness, the mind is simply unwilling to bend that far, to see that truth. It does not require much introspection for us to realize that there is nothing very permanent here, that who we define as ME is a shape-shifting wraith and the mind's attempt to pin it down is actually a source of suffering rather than the end of suffering. The mind wants us to believe in this fantasy as a panacea. The mind believes that imposing this order (which it knows deep down is artificial and quite fragile) will be the end of fear. The amazing thing is that most of us persist in this delusion despite the fact that all evidence points to the contrary conclusion: this false order increases fear because what we deem substantial crumbles at the lightest touch. If we have placed any hope of security in these structures we are constantly rushing from one disintegrating reality to the next in a permanent state of frustration. Only fear keeps us on this futile path, yet fear is one of its primary fruits. "In discovering the origins of our suffering, we uncover how the self is created...pain needs our understanding, not our cunning," says Rodney Smith.

Whenever I think of these things, I am reminded of a moment in the film, "It's A Wonderful Life" when Burt the cop is trying to arrest Clarence the angel. Clarence evaporates into thin air and Burt is left scrabbling with nothing where a substantial being was moments before. This is how we are when the mind is left to create these airy castles for us to live in. This realization may make us feel insecure and insubstantial (Ernie the taxi driver needs a drink after seeing Clarence disappear), but is in fact reality; life is a whirling, metamorphosing, kaleidoscopic landscape, nearer Dali than Constable.

So are we simply cast adrift? Not in the slightest. For in meditation, in contemplation of the verities of what incontrovertibly exists, we realize that all of this energy devoted to the creation of a permanent self (what some teachers cleverly term "selfing") is in fact not merely futile but the very source of the insecurity it is supposed to remedy. It is in the letting go of the baubles of substantiality that a deeper awareness emerges. This awareness is without judgment, without form, without substance but nonetheless more solid than any of the fairy kingdoms to which we have pinned our hopes of relief before this realization.

What is this awareness, then? Tara Brach says, "What we are looking for is that which is doing the looking." She compares it to seeing through our eyes: while we are seeing, we cannot see the structure of the eye that is doing the seeing, yet it is there. Just so, though awareness cannot see itself perceiving, we can sense that something is always there under the whirlwind of mind's machinations and meanderings. It is in meditation that this is most readily accessed and it is perhaps the most important aspect of this practice to permit mind states to come and go without interference as a way of allowing awareness to emerge from the semblance of what passes for our day to day reality. Can we put a name or form to this awareness? No, any attempt to make of it a solid entity is the mind slipping in, once again attempting to impose a structure, engaging in "selfing" all over again.

Is this awareness, then, our soul? Is it this that passes from one life to the next, if one is to believe the entire cosmology of the Buddha? Is it this that leaves a body at death, this that we feel departing from the dying as they die? I don't pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I do know this: to cling to awareness as "me" or "mine" is to once again engage in the act of selfing, the attempt to create a lasting version of Who I Am. Awareness is far, far vaster than any such image allows for, is not personal and has no boundaries, most especially including the boundary between a discrete self and a discrete other. Allowing for mystery and not-knowing is a necessary prerequisite to letting go of the mind's urge to creation, thereby entering into a realm of true and lasting peace. Rodney Smith once again: "It feels joyful to be awake, and the mind slowly learns to trust its own quietude and persistently moves into difficult emotional experiences with ease."
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A warning: the ego finds this whole idea very threatening. I began this post a few days ago and have been letting it rest so I can edit before sending it this weekend. That whole time my mind has been struggling to assert itself as being in charge (and being mighty grouchy about it, too). But really, the mind's fears are misplaced. Of course the egoic mind exists; after all, what is writing this post? (What could be more like the ego than to think that such concepts can be reduced to mere words?) What is important to recall is that what we call our "selves" are really just constructs, things we have created to get along in the world. It is not a problem that we have a self that exists in time and space; the problem comes when we believe that it is the primary manifestation of our being. Rodney Smith says that "spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of the heart."

The way I look at it, the mind is a tool and a very powerful one. We can take it down from the shelf to pay the bills, do our day-to-day work, plan our week, write our blog, but then it is most useful back on the shelf so we can then spend the majority of our time in bare awareness (a difficult but not impossible aspiration). Mind you, that's not to say there cannot be a great deal of awareness in the mundane tasks of everyday life. But the mind is best suited to these concrete tasks and putting it in charge of everything we think and feel and are is like putting a three-year-old in charge of a nuclear reactor. No wonder we melt down so often. Extending the metaphor of the mind as a power tool, we can imagine that it is a circular saw: very effective at cutting wood, something of a mess when asked to cut birthday cake. Our life is mostly cake; the mind is not the correct tool for comprehending it. Awareness is a way of being that lets cake be cake.

Jacob's Children, Chapter Eight

The chronicle becomes a bit more murky at this point, for while we may trace the offspring of Naomi, it is uncertain whether Lemuel fathered any children (he may not have known the truth of this, in fact) who may have expressed the traits of Jacob. There is no record of any such and one would think there might be some mention of it in the histories of the time, for these clearly record the lineage of Jacob otherwise. This fact in placed in this record only as a disclaimer of any hope that we may have captured here all of those who may have received from Jacob his unique response to the world and its suffering.

To the Traveler, then. Though going from place to place is common to us, in the times of which we speak it was rather unusual to simply take to the road. Security was to be found in community and not in one's individuality. Even a misanthrope like Lemuel required a symbiosis with those he shunned. So the Traveler, in the very fact of his traveling, was an oddity. He arrived in the village unheralded and asked for hospitality at what appeared to be the richest of the hovels, which belonged to the community's butcher who, as we know, was Samuel. He was willingly taken in, for not only were they spontaneously, unaffectedly openhearted but the allure of a stranger, who would have tales and a life quite unknown to them, was deeply appealing. The Traveler's name was Mackarias. He had indeed travelled the corners of the Earth, and this is the tale he told:

I was born not far from here and was by all reports an average child. I was not distinguished by my learning or my industry. I was but middling strong and middling smart. But my mother reports me friendly, open and sweet. When I neared my teen years, though, I underwent a metamorphosis most strange, for I became surly and unkind to most everyone. Almost immediately I began to grow more and more stout. I was no less active than before but grew heavier and heavier as the days went by. My mother wept a great deal around this time and I didn't pay it much mind, though it seemed to me a bit excessive under the circumstances. But what did I care? It was nothing to me. One day, though, my dear mother packed a bag for me and all but pushed me on to a train bound for the city where my uncle lived. I was mystified by this but she offered no explanation, only cried and cried as if I was going off to war.

Nonetheless I was cheerful enough, for my uncle was a kindly gentleman and quite wealthy, so spending time with him was a treat. At that time I considered myself worldly and the city my natural domain. So it was with a glad heart that I boarded the train. My uncle met me at the station and took me out to a superb lunch, at which the only somewhat embarrassing part was how kind and effusive my uncle was with all of the staff. We then retired to his house and, after we had made ourselves comfortable in the drawing room, I surmised from my uncle's unusually grave visage that some weighty subject was at hand, for he never as a rule appeared anything but cheery. It was with some relief I saw this, for I was anxious to finally get to the bottom of the oddness that had enveloped the last few weeks.

He cleared his throat and began, "My boy...." He hesitated, seemingly uncertain how to begin.

"Uncle?"

"Mmm. Hmm, well. Yes. I...I see you seem to have gained a bit of...girth about the middle, eh?"

My face flushed and I made as if to remonstrate, but he held his hand up to stop me. "No, no, this is not an idle observation, son. For you see...well, in our family there is a rather peculiar trait. Your mother had thought you might be spared and so it seemed, for you never had any sign of any untoward...adiposity, if you know what I mean."

I didn't, but I got his drift well enough. Well, of all the things! Mother sending me to Uncle to tell me off for being portly or some such thing. I was deeply offended. But one thing he said caught my attention and made me pause before an explosion. "An odd trait, you say, Uncle?"

"Yes, rather. Well, you see, the fact is, that in this family from time to time a boy or girl is born with the predisposition to become rather obese, sometimes to quite an extreme, unless they are...well...unfailingly kind to everyone they meet. I know, I know, it sounds fantastic. You do remember your Aunt Beattie, though?"

God, did I. One of the nastiest dispositions on the face of the Earth. And...why, she had been one of the largest women I had ever seen. But, still. "Uncle, you can't be serious. If this a ploy to get me to mend my ways...."

"I assure you I have never been more in earnest than I am at this moment. I know it is something of a shock. While you were young it never manifested, I suspect because you were an uncommonly graceful, kind child. Your mother had hope that you had escaped the inheritance but, alas, it is clear that you have not. That is why you are here, for me to tell you about this from my own experience."

"You, uncle?" I asked incredulously. "But you are always so...and you have never been.... Oh."

"Yes, oh, indeed. Please, my boy, there is no need to absorb this all in one go. Let's us go to bed and discuss it more in the morning. After a good night's sleep you may see things in a brighter light." For I fear my face must have betrayed my deep misgivings about either my uncle's sanity or my own fate. I was not able to sleep much that night and when I dropped off toward dawn could only dream of emaciated renunciates and corpulent gluttons until I woke more exhausted than I had gone to bed.

It did not take many days before I began to see the truth of what my uncle had told me. When I was kind to all and sundry (a rather unpleasant undertaking for such a surly lad as me), I could consume to my heart's content and had nary a change in my belt loops. But a day of meanness put me well on the way to needing a whole new wardrobe. Soon it was undeniable. I was doomed (so it seemed to me at the time) to a life of kindness.

Chapter Nine is here.