Expectations

I had such a wonderful, relaxing time last weekend that when I went into work I felt as if I had run headlong into a brick wall. It was such a shock to come from a world of (as it seemed to me) deep rationality and peacefulness and be faced with the verbal violence of my clients, the petty territoriality of some of my co-workers, the artificial emotional boundaries placed around any suggestion of improvement in how things ought to be working there that I felt I could not cope with continuing to work there. The contrast was so stark and shocking that it felt literally impossible to continue.

At the same time, I was confronted in a friend's blog with some political realities that I would rather not have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Though I understand that the world is a certain way and to deny this is to live in a fantasy land, I have come to the conclusion that to focus on all of that negativity is to bring myself down and make me incapable of functioning in any useful way. I just become depressed, dark and cynical.

All in all, this led to something of a minor crisis of confidence, a feeling of the need to reassess my values and my aspirations. It all felt quite serious and threatening until I realized what these two things had in common: I want things to be other than as they are. That's really all this is. This is one of the tricks the ego plays to claim hegemony over my heart, to make such a fuss that I will pay no attention to the man behind the curtain and only look at the smoke and mirrors.

After my nice, relaxing weekend, I had expectations. Expectations that the peace I felt was a permanent state, for one thing. Not that I consciously thought this, but emotionally I was unprepared to go back into the rough and tumble of daily life, not because I had reached a higher state of consciousness (don't I wish) but because I was viewing things through a group of assumptions that could not be and never have been true: that I could achieve serenity by willing it to be so, that kindness on my part would yield unwavering kindness in others, that somehow the people with whom I work, both clients and co-workers, would somehow be magically transformed into peaceful, unselfish, reasonable beings without any of the emotional burdens we all carry around. What hope was there that the real world could live up to these outlandish expectations?

So, the "crisis" passed. My mind had to go grumbling back into its corner to hatch another plot for mastery of my thoughts, emotions and actions. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't wish with all my heart that things could be different for the world. I think we are headed in a direction that spells disaster on so many fronts it is hard to keep track of them all. I have vowed to keep this blog apolitical and will not contradict that now, so will say no more about specifics. But I do send lovingkindness to all those who do battle in the name of "justice" and "freedom". And, yes, I do wish things could be different at work, I will cop to that. But to set up a series of expectations based on my fantasy of The Way Things Ought To Be is to (here it comes again) create suffering.

This is, of course, precisely what the Buddha taught. He did not for a moment believe that the end of suffering meant the end of pain or a rising above problems. He spoke only of going into the midst of life without any preconceived notions whatsoever about what it all ought to be, no judgments about good and bad (though he did believe in right and wrong, a subtle distinction, I know). What I did last week was to set up a bunch of expectations and state subconsciously that life was untenable without the fulfillment of them. But my understanding of the dharma came along and said quite clearly, "Sez who?" and I did not have an answer to that.

Freedom is in accepting things as they are, as they truly are, and not as I wish they were. This is not the same as pretending that things that are unacceptable are to be ignored, but the very difficult idea that it is only through accepting them as they are first, without judgment or rancor, that we can ever hope of having a positive affect on changing their reality to something more in accord with our concept of what is helpful and will lead the greatest number of us who suffer to a greater freedom.

A poem seeks me out

So much depends
upon

A red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

It is rare for me that a poem comes to mind and will not be denied my attention. I must assume there is some meaning in the fact that the poem has sought me out.

This poem is by William Carlos Williams and is one of the most famous of the Imagist poem, the school of poetic thought which holds that the object itself is the subject of poetry and not an allegory or metaphor for another object (or feeling or event) altogether. Which is not to say there is not deep meaning to the poem, but that the objects themselves—wheelbarrow, chickens, rain—carry all the meaning there is to be found there.

There are those who claim to have deciphered the code of this poem, but I think they are suffering from a basic misunderstanding. There is no code. The images are evocative in and of themselves and the fact that the poem evokes so much for so many is the measure of its "success". Here is what it means to me:

The first four words make the whole poem work. We are not merely being given an image to look at (though that can be very effective, as in the best haiku), but told that so much depends on this object, which causes us to look more closely than we might otherwise.

The object in question is a red wheelbarrow. Notice that the word "wheelbarrow" is broken into its two constituent parts, which breaks up our assumptions about the object and causes us to look at it more closely. And a wheelbarrow truly is a rather remarkable thing, an inclined plane with a wheel. The fact of the inclined plane makes it possible for us to lift much heavier loads than we would otherwise be able to (think of a flat cart with the same load and having to lift it over an obstruction, for instance, and how much more possible the lifting is with a wheelbarrow). Then, the presence of an angled front panel combined with the incline plane makes it possible for us to dump those loads rather than have to transport them with a shovel or other tool from the cart to the ground. The fact that we have taken all this for granted does not make it any the less remarkable; Williams is asking us to notice this fact. He may not have had inclined planes and such in mind when he wrote the poem, but he had noticed the enormous utility of the tool and how much depends on it.

But what is such a trusty tool doing abandoned out in the rain rather than safely stored in a shed? It seems a rather sad oversight, but we have all done similar things through our carelessness or distraction, forgotten to put the tool away or to tell someone we love them or to notice our life passing until it is too late and the damage has been done: the wheelbarrow is rusted and worn, the relationship is dead, our lives are over. Not that we are to believe that this wheelbarrow is beyond repair—it is much more resilient than that. Nonetheless, for something upon which so much depends, it is rather cavalier treatment for us to leave it sitting in the rain.

But since we have left it sitting in the rain, let's notice how it looks with the rain streaked on it. It provides the barrow with a glaze that makes it more beautiful than it would have been otherwise. This is not a brand new, shiny wheelbarrow, after all, but a well-used, worn, trusty companion that benefits from the glaze the rain gives it.

Then, as if the beauty of the object were not sufficient unto itself, this shiny, red, beloved tool is set off against the stark whiteness of the chickens, its loveliness thereby accentuated to an even greater degree. This brings it that much more into the foreground of the image and of our thoughts.

This, then, is the gift Williams gave us, but what it means is entirely individual. For me, it brings to mind the idea, first of all, that poems are often quite adept at doing what dharma teachers try so hard to do: it asks me to pay attention and notice that the miraculous is happening in every moment, that objects have meaning to the degree that I pay attention. How many red wheelbarrows have I entirely ignored, or ran to put away before they were ruined, without truly seeing them? How many people have I entirely dismissed as beneath my notice without reflecting that they are or were someone's son or daughter, perhaps beloved, perhaps not, but miraculously borne in someone's womb and birthed from them to be loved, despised, scorned, and esteemed by many people throughout their personal history? How often have I reflected on what is mundane to me but is truly astonishing? (One example: every now and then I just have to stop and marvel at the amazing ingenuity which lead to water, gas, electricity and telephone signals showing up at my house regularly, without my having to do much of anything but pay the bills for them. Truly flabbergasting when I come to think of it). How does food get on my table? Why does anyone ever do something so inherently painful as love another? How can so much information get onto something as small as a microchip? How does that tiny sunflower seed know to grow such a gargantuan, majestic creature? What ever gave this species the idea to build buildings as high as 2700 feet in the air and how in the world is such a thing possible?

For these things are worthy of notice; above all this is what this poem says to me. So much depends on my paying attention to them. The Buddha would not be confused by this. He understood how much depends on giving our whole and undivided attention to everything that comes within our perception; a wheelbarrow, a fear, a meanness, a cockroach, a joy, a puppy, a viper. Nothing, absolutely nothing is more important than this. Why should this be? Because the Buddha taught the end of suffering and understood, perhaps more clearly than anyone before or since, that to project ourselves into a place or time other than this place and time is to create suffering. Period. Such a causal relationship cannot be subverted. Yes, of course we must think of the future in order to plan, must think of the past in order to avoid the errors we may have made there that exacerbate our current suffering, but these are the activities of a moment. Most of the time we spend in these times-that-are-not-this-time is entirely fruitless discursive thought that is our ego's attempt to take control over the uncontrollable. This is suffering. It is not possible to have such control, yet we quite nonetheless often expend all our energy trying to make it happen. How could this be other than suffering?

The past is, plain and simple, past. Lily Tomlin said that "forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past." The future is a complex welter of possibilities, the strings of which are too tangled with chance, the behavior of others, the actions of nations, the movement of planets and who knows what mysteries, that to think we can plan for all of its eventualities is like the mouse trying to run the cheese factory; he may eventually get the output he desires, but it was never his doing.

Look! What do you see?

Jacob's Children, Chapter Twelve

I am aware that I have been absent for nearly a month and have not carried on with my tale in that time. Much has happened that pertains to this story. Allow me to begin where I left off and bring you up to the present. I find I must go away for quite some time, perhaps forever, and I must finish telling you this story before I go or I will never forgive myself.

After the death of January, the work could not continue, of course. Ruth was in prison and Clara retreated yet further into that parallel world in which she believed much more than this one. My grandmother returned to her parents' house to, as she thought, live out her life as a spinster, for the one vow that had not yet been broken was that, to the best of their ability, these powers would die with the sisters. There was, though, a young man who worked for hire in the fields around town. I have seen paintings of him and one old photograph my grandmother keeps in a drawer of her desk. He was a beautiful boy and reportedly could sing like an angel. But my grandmother kept her vow not to marry and did all she could to discourage him from pursuing her, in which she was not entirely successful.

Though rarely coy, my grandmother is as silent as the grave about the circumstances of the conception of my father and will not even reveal the name of her paramour. Of course, modesty forbids her from being explicit, but one would like to know what the circumstances of such a seduction were, how they overcame her great resistance. I have proposed to her the idea that, while she had every intent to remain childless and unmarried, she need not therefore remain virgin. After all, a single sexual encounter would surely not yield a child, would it? She may have been naive enough, or sufficiently passionate, to have convinced herself of this. Her only response, though, is "perhaps, perhaps," with a musing and amused look on her face. I suspect she would say the same were I to propose that a flight of angels came to her bed, so we will never know. Very frustrating for the historian I consider myself to be.

Nonetheless, a conception there was, and my father, Jacob, was born nearly 85 years ago. That the boy who engendered the pregnancy offered to marry my mother is beyond doubt, but she turned him away time and again until, disheartened, he left for the city and never returned to see his child. Whether he be living or not, or where he may be is lost to us. Perhaps my mother thought that in naming my father Jacob she might bookend our lineage, for she had every intention to raise her child to succeed where she had failed and to ask him to choose a life of celibacy.

My father was a contemplative child, seemingly born with a deep wisdom, as one can sometimes see even from the day of a child's birth; he was not unique in this. Photos from that era show a boy with dark, deep-set eyes peering with uncommon gravity at the viewer. The effect is disconcerting, as if he could see into the core of one's being. He has never entirely lost this characteristic. As he grew, my grandmother made certain he received only instruction that would incline him to the life she intended for him. She was well aware that such attempts to mold the nature of a child often backfire and create exactly what was intended to be avoided, but Jacob was a tractable boy and took to the discipline of Buddhist thought in particular when it was taught to him. Though it is common in the Eastern world to make a monk of one who is still a child, it is rare in the West, but an exception was made for this remarkable child who showed such great promise. He was sent to Thailand to live in one of the forest monasteries there. He has said that it was only when he arrived there that he finally felt at home. Perhaps there is some truth to the idea of rebirth, who knows? Perhaps he truly had been there before in a previous life, as he claims.

In any case, that is how my father came, at the age of ten, to be an acolyte and finally a fully ordained monk of the Thai Forest order. He was renamed Ajahn Mehta and renounced the world entirely and with a full heart, or so it seemed. For a full fifty years he lived this life, in the fullness of time becoming the abbot of his monastery. He was, by all accounts, a sober, upright, firm, yet humorous and loving teacher, beloved by all those who lived, worked at, or visited this place of peace and calm.

At the age of sixty, while sitting in meditation, much as he had always done, my father became fully enlightened. No one was more astonished than he himself at this turn of events. Decades ago he had ceased seeking such a state, for he knew that in the seeking was the source of suffering. He had lost all desire for this, even the sneaking thought in the back of his mind, for he sought more than anything the clarity of being content in the present moment as it was. Yet it was clear to all those who came near him that he was utterly transformed. He had a glow about him, so they say, and suddenly seemed to know all there was to know.

But most astonishing of all was that, laughing and capering as he never had before, he declared that his new, deep understanding was leading him away from the monastery and into the life of a householder, a life he had never known. Such consternation this caused in the order! That one of their own should become enlightened, only to leave the confines where this had been made possible! It was a scandal! Could this actually be?

With great merriness, my father assured them that it was so and that he intended to leave as soon as his successor as abbot could be named. He did name him and, no surprise, his choice was a young, impulsive monk whose choosing caused no end of surprise and horror. Yet, it could not be gainsaid, and abbot he was and still is (and a fine one, as it turns out).

Most horrifying of all to the members of his order, he made it known that one aspect of his new-found way of knowing was to take a wife and beget children! He has told me since that it was the very awareness of the powers carried in our family line that made it clear to him that, far from being right that it should end with him, every attempt should be made to carry it on. It did not take long for a man of his accomplishments and shining demeanor to meet and marry a strong, merry woman, my mother, Theresa, nearly 35 years his junior who has, to this day, borne him ten children, of which I am the eldest.

Now it is my turn. I am Jacob, too. I have been called to go to a place far, far away from here and my father has blessed my going to do what I can. I have some ability to heal, it seems, and kindness still is my watchword. I have the tendency to gain weight that most of my antecedents share, but know that acts of kindness can keep this in check.

I know this is an inadequate story, for it is not my calling to be able to write such things. I thank you for your patience if you have come this far with me. We, my siblings and I, have great work to do. What my father seeks is that we spread the love contained in our hearts as far and wide as we can and I, for one, intend to honor this intent. It is his hope, and mine, that the world thereby be made a better place. This can come to pass, we hope, if all of us, those of us truly descended from him as well as all of you, should think of ourselves as Jacob's children.

Powerlessness

Story #1: I was supposed to fly to California Thursday and stay there all weekend visiting family but at the last minute the airline canceled the flight due to snow and ice. Ever since I have felt anxious and somewhat out of sorts.

Story #2: Because I like to always have a book handy, I usually have them going in several different formats. I have both fiction and nonfiction hard copy books, an MP3 book and an e-book on my phone. In addition, I am watching a very good television series on DVD about dealing drugs in Albuquerque. The result is that I have found myself wondering if Don Quixote will appear in Albuquerque (which has been transported to modern India) to participate in an Old West lynching and start the First World War.

These stories are not as unrelated as they may at first appear. What they have in common is this idea I cling to that I am in control. I knew I would be in California right now. I am not terribly disappointed that I didn't get to go to California; this is a trip I make often and though I miss seeing my family, we will all be just fine, I'm pretty sure. So, rather than celebrating the fact that I have a wide open weekend (and that I get to go to the opera on Sunday, after all), I feel the disconnected sense of things not being quite as they should be.

As for my reading habits and the confusion inherent in them, it seems to me that this is how our lives truly are. Our mind wants us to believe that there is a single, coherent narrative, but the evidence of our lives really doesn't live up to this assumption. We try to bend back into shape all that we see as misshapen in what happens, but this really isn't very effective. And all of this manipulation is deeply exhausting.

Our aspiration must be to sit in the middle of what is and see the varied and variegated story lines for what they are. What I need more than anything is a recognition of my own powerlessness. I had no power over the snow and ice, I had no power over the freezing temperatures, I had no power over the airlines. I was being carried along on the stream of circumstances and had two choices (though really only one): to resist the flow or go along for the ride. My resistance was futile (as the saying goes) and, to my credit, I was not angry or even sad in the moment; I could accept the fact that I did my best and could not make the trip this time. But when I found myself possessed of such a sweet stretch of time all my own, without plans, my mind has been diving in to tell me that I must make something of this time, must do something significant with it, as if breathing in and out were not significance enough.

All of this helps me to be aware of the beautiful complexity of the stories of our lives. When we attempt to make of all this a single, comprehensible narrative, we can only do so by warping some of the strands of our reality and utterly ignoring others. But this effort requires constant attention to maintain, as any elaborate lie does. For that is what this impulse is, a lie as it pertains to the real world. It is an oversimplification to dimensions that the mind can comprehend. No wonder we are so exhausted so much of the time.

Heather Martin recommends that we recall the mnemonic S.L.O.W. in these situations and in all of our lives, especially in our lives as practitioners. We can try to Stay where we are rather than flying off to fantasies or alternate stories. But we must do so with Love or the staying is filled with judgment and can become a masochistic impulse rather than a helpful one. Remaining Open is also helpful, to be with what is and not attempt to change it, but remain with an open heart and mind to take in whatever comes. If we can do so with a childlike Wonder informed by a mature Wisdom, chances are we can live in this moment with less strain and effort. This is the road to true freedom.

The DNA of Awakening

One of the thorniest issues we face on a spiritual path is the question of how we can know with any certainty that this is a path that leads somewhere worth the journey.  Are we not perhaps deluding ourselves into thinking we are moving forward when, at best, we are staying in one place or, at worst, backsliding into some sort of spiritual slough? How are we to know? Teachers can, of course, be extremely helpful, but here we tend to get hung up in concepts of status, hierarchy and complexity, assuming that the person with the PhD or the lengthy C.V. or the complicated ritual has more to offer than the simple, quiet, uneducated person. In this country, we see status conferred upon the spiritual teacher if he or she has been a monk, with bonus points given for being a monk in an Asian country, all of this despite the fact that the Buddha never left a relatively small area near his home. How are we to know the true teacher and the true teachings?

In attempting to answer these questions we often seek out the hierarchy of power, seek to know who and what is preeminent in any aspect of spirituality, what is the rightest or truest. In the early stages of the evolution of our species, understanding and respecting the hierarchy of biological systems was essential to our survival; if we did not respect the gradations of power, we would not survive. Hierarchy is also present in many forms of learning; we must understand addition and subtraction before we can comprehend multiplication and division. If we were learning mathematics or geology or astronomy a certain level of knowledge is necessary before one can penetrate the higher levels of knowledge. But is this useful for spiritual pursuits? Or is this way of looking at things in fact antithetical to the path of awakening? It's common to get stuck in the phase of accumulation of knowledge and believe that the finger pointing to the moon is actually the moon, that the teachings are the way to enlightenment and that if we become more and more knowledgeable and erudite we are getting closer and closer to that state of being. This causes us to fall into the same sort of status fallacy that often traps us. If we come to expect some form of status to be conferred upon us, some signpost to say we have achieved adequate understanding and are qualified to move on to the next level of knowledge, we will inevitably be deeply disappointed. If we come to believe that all of this accumulated learning and experience will somehow lead us inevitably to a state of awakening, this only reinforces the idea that we are all separate egos struggling toward an individual goal, the belief that if we place ourselves on a path and walk it we will inevitably reach our destination, will achieve Nirvana. This way of thinking also implies that I can see your status compared to mine and judge you as being further along or somewhat behind me. Status and complexity give us comfort, but freedom is found in devolving, in narrowing down to simplicity rather than evolving into complexity and self-importance.

Just as in every cell contains the DNA not just of that individual cell but of the entire organism, every moment, every breath, every action contains the seed of our awakening. We do not have to look for elaborate rituals or ornate teachings to show us the way; we can look within and find everything we require quite literally at our fingertips. The miracle of DNA is that it is not only a blueprint for the entire organism, but is also the end result of millions of years of evolution that led to this state of being and as such is a record of every step along the way. Just so, in every millisecond are the seeds of awakening awaiting our discovery and each contains the wisdom of millenia. Yet we also know that it is easy to become misled and complacent, to think we have achieved something and then to come to understand that we have simply been deluded by our deep need to have it be so.

What is the true essence of liberation? Where is it to be found? How do we know it when we see it? If we trust our own hearts to tell us, how can we keep from being deceived? Believing with all our hearts that we are right doesn't make it so. Hitler believed he was doing the right thing, the Crusaders truly believed that killing the heathen Muslim was a service to God. We know just as surely they were wrong, but are our convictions any more infallable than theirs? How, then, are we to know? By the time we come to seek spiritual understanding, we have already layered over our innate understanding with so much accreted assumption and fear that we do not have the objectivity to see what is real and what is false. We must somehow chip away at these layers of psuedo-understanding and hierachy and control in order to get at the simplicity that lies at the core of our awakening. All the stories we hear about people listening to the teachings of the Buddha and becoming suddenly enlightened are not so much about the Buddha's direct influence as they are about each individual realizing in him or herself that the seeds of awakening were always there. The Buddha was just the best of all possible teachers in creating the causes and conditions for this awakening.

So we are on the path of refining our judgment to the point where we can finally perceive what is and is not true. But how can we be certain that any assumption we make that we are perceiving rightly is not another manifestation of our egoistic need to be right rather than true wisdom? One sure method is to resort to the four noble truths and measure any understanding by the degree to which it tends away from or toward suffering and to always choose the path that leads to less suffering for all beings, not just ourselves. But we must be cautious here, as well; inherent in the path is the fact that self-discovery can be intensely painful. Causing such pain to ourselves is essential to awakening; the way out of suffering involves suffering. Avoiding all suffering is mere hedonism, which we know cannot lead to awakening. This is the way of comfort and safety rather than courage and risk. When we are sitting on the meditation cushion it often happens that a thought or feeling will arise that we would really rather not have to experience, yet there we are, we have made a commitment to sit here through thick and thin until the bell rings. The perception may cause us great discomfort but the skillful response is to do nothing. This can feel like great suffering, yet we know it actually leads to the end of suffering. By allowing such experiences to arise and pass away we negate the power of such perceptions to harm us.

The only way to find the answers we seek is by availing ourselves of faith, trust, hope, courage, vision and commitment. As far as I can tell, there is no other way. We must have faith not only in others and the instruction of the Buddha and those who came after him, but in ourselves, that we have an innate capacity for knowing that can always be more finely developed. We must trust that there are those who have answers, who can steer us on our path. While it is true that our path is purely individual and there is no map that works for everyone, if we trust we can look to those who have gone before us to show where we may be misguided. We must have hope that awakening is available to us in this very life and that even if we do not find it here, the closer we get to it the more free we are. We must have the courage to face those things we would rather not face, to walk through pain without flinching on the road to finding true freedom. We must have vision in the prosaic sense of a clear seeing. Much of the work we do in meditation is the progressive clarification of our ability to see clearly, the cleansing of the lenses through which we view things, lenses sullied by decades and lifetimes of assumptions, prejudices and fears. We accrue these not only through our own experiences but are given them by those who teach us: our parents and siblings and friends and children and teachers and lovers. We must have commitment to carry on when we question whether or not we are making any progress. We must come to know that the looking itself is the goal; the destination we may perceive as the ultimate place of arrival is a mere chimera.

Above all, we must realize the many paradoxes of the spiritual quest, primary among them that while we must seek to learn, we are not building one piece of knowledge on top of another, not building an edifice of greater and greater complexity. Rather, we are seeking knowledge that drives out knowing and leads to simplicity and a true knowing that is of the heart and not the head.

The Body in Charge

An interesting realization which is still in the formative stages, so I probably won't be able to comment on it very articulately: it seems to me that the mind (ego) is more or less in charge of the reactions of the body. Now, I have gotten to the point where at the very least I question what the mind says because I know how extraordinarily loopy it can be, but I seem to have a tendency to believe what my body tells me. For instance, my shoulders are tense right this minute. The mind is using this (or so it seems to me) to communicate to me that I should be doing something else, that this tension in my shoulders is a Problem which must be Solved. If the mind had simply told me I should be doing something else, I could easily countered ("no, I thought it over and I shouldn't"), but if I buy into what my body is communicating without question, even though it comes from the same source, I can come to think I must take some action to ameliorate this discomfort. A fascinating insight! Yes, both the mind and my body can give me useful warnings, but quite often these are just vestiges of a bygone time when my progenitors were under much more frequent threat and their reactions were essential to their physical health. Whereas now my lack of reaction often is integral to my mental health. Interesting. I look forward to investigating this further.

A story to illustrate this: Joseph Goldstein tells of a time he was doing walking meditation and suddenly a feeling of doom came upon him. He began to question things, to the point where his spiritual path was up for review and he began to consider whether he perhaps was on the wrong path altogether. Then he burped. It all went away.

Listening to my body must be done with as much care, love, skepticism and humor as listening to the mind or to others who may try to convince me that something or other is the truth. In the final analysis, only I can judge what is true for me.

I will surely want to write more on this topic later.

Trudging

It sometimes feels, lately, like life is all about trudging, putting one foot in front of the other, not to get anywhere, but just because it's what I am supposed to do. I have obligations, I have made choices and now the only manly thing to do is carry them out. One foot in front of the other. Do it because They Said So or I Said So and don't ask any questions. Poor me.

Well.

That's not a very satisfying way to live a life, now, is it? But let's dig a little deeper. After all, what we are searching for is not contentment or happiness but the truth, isn't it? We should never lose sight of the fact that the word dharma, which is what we use to describe the Buddha's teachings, simply means truth in Pali. At first blush this seems a bit egotistical, for the Buddha or those who came after him to claim that they found The Truth. But what this really means is that the Buddha encouraged everyone to find his or her own truth. If his teachings are useful in this pursuit, wonderful. If not, they are to be rejected; the Buddha was very clear about this. So, what's the truth here? Am I really feeling such a darkness, such bleakness as all that? No, not really. But it feels so much more important to be having an existential crisis than to say, "I am tired" or "I am cranky" or "All this darkness is getting me down" or "I would rather not do that today, thank you very much". It makes me feel like Proust or something, that my every Madelaine has deep meaning. But, I mean, Marcel, it was just a cookie, for God's sake.

I was listening to a dharma talk by Heather Martin yesterday (in case you forgot, you can get all the dharma talks you want for free [donations encouraged] at dharmaseed.org) and had an interesting experience I think most of us have had. She said something I have heard before, that I have said many times, that I intellectually accept and believe I thoroughly understand, yet when she said it I finally got it at some level I never got it before. What she said, in essence, was that there is no avoiding that which makes us feel sadness, grief, pain, loss, anger, illness, disrepute, or shame. It is most certainly not the point of the dharma to place us in a position where we no longer feel these things. There are in life what the Buddha called "the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows". He was not prescribing the sorrows ("you must go through these trials") but merely describing them ("like it or not, it's like this"). Nor was he recommending the joys as a preferable state of being. In fact, he want even further and said something quite radical: even having a preference for one mind set over another is suffering.

Now, wait just a minute. I should not prefer feeling good to feeling bad? What's up with that? Could that really be what the Buddha said? Well, not exactly. What he was saying is that the event itself is just an event. When the event occurs—as it is occurring—we have a choice to resist it if it's "negative" or embrace it if it's "positive" (these are our habituated responses) or to accept it as it is. Only the last is the path to freedom. The problem with us deeply conditioned human beings is that this reaction happens in a millisecond, so it ends up feeling inevitable and out of our control. That is what practice is all about.

It has always amazed me how athletes can react in a way that seems almost instinctive. How does one respond in time to a 100 mph tennis serve or pitched baseball? How does one move in just the right way to evade a defender in basketball? The answer is that they have practiced these things over and over and over again until the movements are second nature; they have conditioned themselves to have these responses. Just so, we have conditioned ourselves with our immediate responses to each event. It requires years of practice to recondition ourselves to another response, that of complete and full acceptance first. Only then can thoughtful action take place.

The insight I had yesterday had everything to do with the fact that I practiced and continue to practice day in and day out to find acceptance of every moment as it is. This has largely been an intellectual practice and often feels more futile than useful since the same conditioned responses of clinging and rejecting are still the most common ones for me. But I believe with all my heart that it is only by preparing the ground that these little insights come to us and are recognized as such. Out of such small insights is a larger, more global insight constructed. What we need is something in which we can believe strongly enough so we continue practicing even when it doesn't feel particularly fruitful within our definition of what fruit it should bear. But experiencing these insights can encourage us to seek more where those came from. When we find that the dharma really has been telling us the truth in some particular, it causes us to be curious about whether or not the rest of it might be true as well. When even this fails us, we can reflect that people we respect have used these principles to become better, more joyful, deeply compassionate human beings and believe that it is possible for us, too. We can reflect that billions of people over thousands of years have taken on this practice.

Perhaps the most important realization is that the spiritual path does not lead to progressively more and more pleasure. Sorry, it just doesn't. It may well lead to more joy, which is an entirely different thing. If we are practicing for the particular reason of feeling better, we are doing several destructive things. First, we are setting ourselves up to fail; as I said above, there are ten thousand sorrows that are unavoidable. Second, we are setting conditions on the dharma, which will inevitably fail these conditions and may cause us to believe the dharma has no efficacy. (We made these conditions up, by the way; nowhere is there a list of promises of what will be gained by this practice). Third, by loading up this practice with expectations we are allowing our egos to take over a process that is not of the ego but of the broader consciousness. This can only lead to suffering. As the saying goes, "expectations are premeditated resentments". These expectations can be very subtle, as simple as the belief that sometime, someday, if I practice long and hard enough I will be at utter, complete, imperturbable peace. The tricky part of the dharma is that this kind of peace truly is possible, but can only be found by achieving a state in which one no longer desires it (or anything else). So much of this practice is that of abandoning what we have come to believe as true in favor of what is truer. Our capacity to cling to beliefs that have never done what we believe they will never ceases to amaze me. (An example: if I get enough material goods, I will finally feel secure, safe, and comfortable; that's a popular one. Here's another oldie but goodie: if I accomplish all of the things on this list, I will be able to finally rest and be content). What evidence do we have that any of our assumptions are true? Have they ever been?

One of the things about which I have been cranky the past few days is that I am once again trying to live by the principles for eating I have set out in this blog after being somewhat lax over the holidays. I would really rather continue eating snowman cookies and drinking egg nog, thank you very much. That certainly is one option and there is nothing standing between me and another headless snowman. But I know that, contrary to what my body and mind seem to be telling me, there is no freedom in the indulgence of excessive amounts of food. There is freedom, however, in coming face to face with this irritability and my feelings of unfairness ("me want cookie!"), to use this as grist for the mill of my spiritual practice. Nothing is required of me but that I stick to my vow of renunciation and watch to see what happens. I have the chance to be a spectator at one of the finest shows of all time; I would be a fool to miss it.

Resolutions

It is a new year and this always feels like a new beginning. I have no doubt that one of the most common resolutions made on January 1 is to finally lose that nagging 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 pounds that keep us from being the perfect, happy human beings we know we have the capacity to be. Nothing wrong with the impulse, of course. To set an intention is one of the holiest things we can do, to place our feet on the path to something that transcends the suffering we currently experience.

But we have been here before, haven't we? We have made these same resolutions over and over and yet we seem incapable of keeping them, of finding their fulfillment. (Not this year, though, this year I am stronger, surer, want it more completely). I suspect I have quoted before the old saying that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, each time expecting a different result. A corollary is: another definition of insanity is finding the same explanation for getting the same result each time. Because we know, don't we, that it is our weakness, our lack of will power, our self-hate, our mothers, our upbringing, our disappointments, our fears, our losses (take your pick of one or more) that cause us to persist in our self-destructive behaviors despite all of our determination to have it otherwise. Where does it all fall apart, this resolution of ours?

I would assert that, having begun from faulty premises, we cannot help but reach erroneous conclusions. Having determined to do something that cannot be done in the way we propose to do it, nor by the person we have decided will do it (us, ourselves), there is no possibility but that we will fail and in failing fall into the same pattern of self-recrimination followed by renewed effort to do the impossible followed by inevitable failure....

So, do we give up? Do we just remain fatties (or junkies or drunks or sexpots or compulsives)? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall have type II diabetes? Hardly. But the so-called "problem" and the so-called "solution" are the same thing, really, or at least derive from the same source, which is a basic and complete misunderstanding of who and what we are. Don't get me wrong, I am not speaking from some spiritual hilltop as one who has incorporated these truths into my everyday life. But I am pretty sure that the truths are out there to be comprehended if we choose to go about addressing our lives through that lens rather than the self-defeating one we have been using ere now.

Resolutions fail at their inception because of the inherent emphasis on reinforcement of the ego as the active agent of change. When we reinforce the hegemony of this strong sense of self, when we give it the power to determine how we view the past, present and plans for the future, we are stepping directly into the very source of suffering. Odd, really, like escaping snakes by jumping into the snake pit. Isn't there a better way?

When it comes to food, we really can't hope to change our attitude toward what we eat with the same mind that led us to have our current attitude toward it. Sure, for a while we may fare forth with great confidence and the bold impulse of abnegation, thrusting aside every danish and pizza in our path. But that inevitable day will come when we are weak, tired, grieving, sad, depressed and that same mind we have been using to deny ourselves those foods will resort to the same patterns it has always known to assuage bad feelings, which is to eat those very same foods, in direct proportion to the level of negativity contained within the feeling states. Why would it not? When the monkeys are mad, throw them bananas. It may not solve the problem, but at least it will distract them long enough for us to escape.

What we can do is treat each morsel of food as a meditation. As has been repeatedly emphasized here, the awareness aspect of our beings is external to and encompassing of the mind. When we ask ourselves, with gentleness and love, what this feeling means and what this food means to it, when we investigate in this way, only then can we find a sustainable change of heart and mind that leads us, not to new, sleek bodies or the ability to resist sinful impulses, but to a new way of viewing the world, ourselves and everything around us. That the new bodies may come, that we may feel better in them is something to which we cannot cling, for it is that very clinging that is the nature of suffering to begin with. This, too, will arise and pass away. What will not arise and pass away, not ever, is our realization of what is true at depth in all we do and are.

So, by all means, make those resolutions. There is wise effort in that, in determining the path and lacing up our boots and beginning to walk.

New York Times articles

 The New York Times today has two articles on the difficulty of losing weight (makes sense, it being the first of January; time to make those resolutions!). The first is in the travel section and is about the Biggest Loser camp, the second is in the magazine and is called The Fat Trap. Each is interesting in its own way. The travel article is mostly about the physical set-up of a resort designed to take off pounds quickly with an enforced combination of diet and exercise.

The magazine article, though, is a fascinating piece about how those of us who are obese or overweight face a very difficult time overcoming our genetic tendency to being that way. Will power can only take us so far when it comes to facing the overwhelming power of our hormonal legacies. It describes a few people who have reduced their weight and kept it off for at least a year and the conclusion seems to be that one must be ever-vigilant to have any hope of success. They make it sound like a rather grim process. (Note, too, the before and after pictures of the one couple featured in this portion of the article: they look pretty happy in the photo when they are fat and fairly grim when thin. Hardly good promotion of the joyfulness of the process!)

I think that we must reframe the whole idea of being vigilant. Yes, this is a lifetime effort, just like being an alcoholic or, for that matter, diabetic or gluten-intolerant is a lifetime thing. But it's not a life sentence. It need not be such a downer or a downer at all. It need not even be a struggle. We have the power to take charge of our eating lives, but it's not will power, it's spiritual power that we need. I know this sounds rather woo-woo and precious, but it is borne out by the experience of countless people. What creates transformation is a transformative experience. But I think it's a mistake to think that such an experience is a sudden thing; for most of us it is an ongoing and growing belief that we can tap a power that has no source and no end, the power of our own unlimited potential to be awake.

This world of addiction, violence, despair, grasping and such things is a narrow, dark place in which we are constantly looking for something outside ourselves to fill the emptiness. Because it can't, we grasp for more to try even harder. The expansive, gigantic, free world exists in our hearts, not out there somewhere. It is available to us anytime and anywhere. We need no accessories to access it; we need not look good while doing it. We are all we need, all we are, right here and right now. It really is as simple as that.

O Christmas Tree

Though I am not a Christian, I am not an unChristian, either. I don't consider myself opposed to any philosophy or system of belief that promotes values of freedom, harmony, compassion and love. Done right, Christianity certainly can be these things. Still, I find it a bit odd in myself that I so thoroughly embrace Christmas. Sometimes I find myself singing along to a carol, the sentiment of which is not one I share, but lustily singing along anyway. All of which is a way of introducing the fact that one of the things I love most about Christmas is the traditional tree.

My grandfather Vern was 91 when he died. He was a man who was of the opinion that, while some rules were necessary, others were merely inconvenient; he felt free to ignore those that fell into the latter category. Thus it was that on one trip to visit him a few years before he died, he dug up, on National Forest land, a hemlock seedling that he believed would never survive in the shadow of its progenitor, which towered above it and placed the little tree entirely in its shade. He offered this little proto-tree to us. Not knowing what else to do, we took it home and planted it in a wooden pot outside, thinking, if it survived, we might be able to make use of it as a living Christmas tree, perhaps for many years in a row. We placed it in the shade of the big holly in our back yard for protection.

Vern's hemlock growing under our holly

Years went by. I watered the tree as often as it seemed to need it, but otherwise more or less ignored it. Being as it was in a wooden pot directly on the ground, eventually the bottom rotted out and the hemlock planted itself under the holly. Now it became a dilemma. We really didn't want a big tree in our back yard--or anywhere else in our yard, for that matter. We live on a fairly small urban lot and did not relish the idea of a giant hemlock taking up so much space, aside from the possibility of a windstorm bringing it down on the roof. But because it was Vern's tree, we really didn't want to just destroy it. Since it was in the shade of the holly, it grew very slowly, but as the years went by it became clear that it was only a matter of time before it broke through the cover and really took off.

So, this year we decided to bite the bullet and cut the tree down to use as our Christmas tree. Having had several years to think about it, I was no longer very sad at the prospect of destroying Vern's tree. Instead, I had come to think of it as a way of honoring him.

We first trimmed the branches back a bit. They had grown horizontally to compensate for the lack of sun, so would never have fit in our living room. Then we set about the job of cutting it down. I first had to cut away the old wooden pot, which was not too difficult, of course, it having long ago rotted. Then we got down to business, using a pruning saw. Not very efficient. Soon, our wonderful neighbor, Dave took pity on us and brought over a power tool called a Sawzall. After

Kathy with the pruning saw

Reid the maniac cuts down a tree!

switching out the batteries once, he got the job done.
According to the rings on the stump, Vern's hemlock was 16 years old.

Dave using the correct tool!

Kathy with the big guy

We then dragged it into the house, leaving a wake of destruction behind us. It seemed like such a small tree out there, but inside it turned out to be bigger than we thought! (Note the yard waste bin for further trimmings). After we whipped it into shape we put on some lights. Then, when our son and his wife came to visit for Christmas, we trimmed the tree and voila! our beautiful tree. Thank you, Vern!