Cafe Racer

I went by Cafe Racer today, the little coffee shop near my home where yesterday four people were shot to death. I wondered what sense the Buddha might make of such a tragedy.

I suspect he would make nothing of it, though. He might just sit there silently in response to our asking "why?" and "why them?" and "why here?" and "what could we have done?" and "what do we do now?" My guess is that he would understand that the questions are the answers, that not only do they not have answers that will satisfy, but that in the asking we come to understand much more than we would have otherwise.

There are mounds of flowers outside Cafe Racer. I would guess that many of those who left flowers (and beer and wine and photos and other mementos) had never been there, or had been only rarely, like me. As you can see, there are people sitting and standing and hugging and wondering and grieving together. Many more people drove by as I was standing there. All of us were bearing witness to the loss, the pain, the sheer lack of sense in all of this. A community is grieving together and we don't know what else to do.

The Buddha might mention karma, but probably not. Karma may be involved, both for those who died and the man who killed them (and who killed himself later), but any such explanation for such an event is not only grossly inadequate but vaguely insulting, as if we can pass over the wrongness of it by consulting some cosmic ledger. I think not. I doubt the Buddha could be that insensitive.

This was a pleasant little hole-in-the-wall with surprisingly good food and good coffee. They served beer and wine in the evenings and had a stage for live music. They were, by all reports, good neighbors and loved companions. They did not deserve to die this way, at this time. They left a scorched patch of life behind them.

But here's the thing. When we calmed down, when we could put away our hatred, anger and fear for a moment the Buddha might well tell us, "Yes. Yes, this is evil. Yes, this is wrong. Yes, this is sad. Yes, this is tragic. But, look, it has always been so. We are born, we live, we die. And the most important lesson you can take away from this is that we are all connected. There is no separate self. You are as much a part of the killer as the killed. You carry in your heart the seeds of grace and pain, anger and benevolence, peace and discord, isolation and communion. Violence such as this cannot happen if we understand in the depths of our hearts that we are all one, for to shoot a man in a coffee shop would be the same as shooting our grandmother or our dog or our father or our mother. We wouldn't be able to do it.

"My teachings," he might say, "despite what you may have heard, do not counsel indifference to such things. On the contrary, my teachings are to understand with your whole being that this happened to you, too. This is not an event outside yourself. And my teachings would tell you, I hope, that to hate the man who killed is just as much to hate yourself or your grandmother or your dog. It is not that he is unworthy of blame, but that putting more hatred into a world made poorer by this man's hate and rage makes no sense. It is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

"Open your hearts. To everyone, always, as much as you are able and, one would hope, a bit more each day. Only in this way can we heal. Only in this way can we find true peace, a peace that last for lifetimes and covers the earth with garlands of flowers rather than scars of grief.

"And understand: this is possible. My example and those of hundreds of other buddhas and bodhisattvas demonstrate that in this very life your heart can open entirely and you can surrender hatred forever. And in the process you will be healing one small part of the torn fabric of life as it is currently lived. You will become attractive to others who will want to follow your example, and the life-sustaining force of love will take over the world."

At least, that's what I hope he would say.

Eightfold Path: more thoughts on Wise Mindfulness

There is a story about Sylvia Boorstein, who once asked an Asian scholar-monk, who had been studying the dharma for many decades, if he could encompass the teachings in one sentence, what it would be. The bhikkhu promptly replied: "Know what you're doing."

Another story: Joseph Goldstein was teaching a retreat and a young man came to him and said something like, "My shoulders are so tight and I know it's because of my job and my relationship..." and on and on and on. Joseph said, "You mean your shoulders are tight." "Yes," replied the student, and then launched into a historical analysis of what in his childhood and young adulthood might have lead to such a state of being. Joseph replied, "You mean your shoulders are tight." Apparently this exchange went on for quite a while until the young man suddenly realized the truth in what Joseph was saying: what was really happening was that he was experiencing a tightness in his shoulders and that was all. The rest is what in Buddhist circles is known as "proliferation", an attempt to explain, analyze, justify and solve what is happening. It's not hard to see that awareness of the physical sensation is the work of consciousness and proliferation the work of the overactive mind.

Mindfulness is this simple knowing. What the mind doesn't understand is that all the explanations in the world are unlikely to be helpful in finding peace and deep awareness. On the contrary, when we are busy 'splainin' (as Ricky Ricardo would say), awareness has no chance to enter in. Much of modern psychology reinforces this misconception by promoting the idea that we must dig down deep and find the sources of our neuroses before they can be "cured". This is dubious advice, if only because the sources may well be buried so deep in our psyches that all the mining in the world would never bring that ore to the surface. It is also doubtful that this is a useful exercise in any case. To assign blame or responsibility, you have no doubt noticed, is no path to healing.

The Buddha's answer was bare attention, the cultivation of thoroughly knowing what is happening in this moment. "Bare Attention," writes Nyanaponika Thera in The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, "...allows things to speak for themselves, without interruption by final verdicts pronounced too hastily. Bare Attention gives them a chance to finish their speaking, and one will thus get to learn that, in fact, they have much to say about themselves, which formerly was mostly ignored by rashness or was drowned in the inner and outer noise in which ordinary man normally lives."

Living without a car

So, it has been a while since we stopped owning a car. I really don't miss it, except on Fridays, when I am accustomed to doing all my errands. I also have an evening commitment on that day. What I have been doing is renting a car. There is a service called Zip Car here in town where I could rent a car by the hour. They are parked all over the city and if you are a member, you can just reserve one, pick it up, then return it where you found it. The only problem is that if you use a Zip Car for more than about five hours, renting a car from somewhere like Budget for the whole day is actually cheaper.

But what we have discovered since dropping our auto insurance is that coverage when one rents a car is actually very tricky (insurance is included with Zip Car, though there is a deductible). Most credit cards provide some coverage, but when we looked a little more deeply into this, it turns out that most of them, including ours, cover only the rental car itself, not the other car or any persons in it and not the persons or property in the rental car. The rental company offers supplemental insurance, but this only covers the other car and its property and costs $11 a day. Though this doesn't sound like all that much, it really adds up over time. It was beginning to look like car payments and maintenance and such might actually be cheaper.

Yesterday I came to something of a crisis about all this. I don't want to own another car. I don't want to spend all this money. I don't want to add to the carbon emissions in our atmosphere. But if I am spending money and using gas and all of that as if I still own a car; which is to say, if I don't actually change any of my behaviors to match up with the idea of being a person who doesn't own one, what has actually changed? Not my carbon footprint. Not the financial obligation.

Another wrinkle: a good friend has offered me the use of her car as needed. She doesn't use it much and would rather it be driven. This is, I am convinced, a genuine offer from her heart. So why have I been so reluctant to take her up on it? I know, of course, what it is. I want to be in control of the situation, of my own life. I don't want to be dependent on anyone else to get me where I want to go to do what I want to do when I want to do it. Which begs a couple of questions, actually.

First of all, what part of interdependence and dependent origination do I not understand? The Buddha was very clear that all these assumptions of my clearly demarcated and entirely separate self are poppycock and a major source of my suffering. Second, a wise teacher of mine once pointed out that one of the primary attributes of a generous person is allowing others to be generous to him. Am I robbing my friend of the opportunity to be generous through the selfishness of my inability to tolerate feeling obligated?

So...I have a new plan. I will borrow my friend's car, when it works for me to do so, about every other Friday. When I cannot borrow hers, I will get a Zip Car for just a couple of hours to do essential stuff. On the alternate Friday I will do any shopping I need to do on foot. If I have a special need for a car on those alternate weeks, I will ask to borrow hers or get a Zip Car. I will take a bus to my evening commitment and ask for a ride or take the bus home (another opportunity to ask for help, something at which I suck). It will take some organizing to do a major shopping trip every two weeks rather than a less major trip every week, but these are merely logistics and can be worked out. Not only does this give my friend the chance to be generous, it decreases by half the number of trips I will make in any car. Not to mention the fact that it saves me lots of money in rental fees and keep me healthier. I am writing about it here not only because it is part of my spiritual development (that's how it feels, anyway), but because putting it out there gives me a sense of accountability for these choices. I will keep you posted, whether you like it or not.

Eightfold Path: Wise Concentration

Thinking is essential to wisdom, but you cannot think your way to wisdom. This may seem a conundrum, but is actually the explication of a truth we know in our deepest selves but cannot always bring to the surface of our understanding.

When we are born, we do not have wisdom. Though some infants seem more wise than others, the judgment and awareness essential to wisdom can only arise through experience. Infants are information-gathering machines and it would be grand to have the capacity for taking in the world around us we did at that age. But eventually we accumulate enough awareness of the world to form opinions and strategies for navigating that world as we move into it as thinking beings. We encounter loss, pain, disappointment and limitations and must find our way through these. Thought and the formation of lasting impressions are essential to this process; otherwise we would simply repeat the same mistakes over and over without learning how to avoid them.

Eventually, though (for most of us, at least), this thought formation begins to feel unsatisfying. We sense that there is something more to the world, that its patterns and synchronicity cohere into more than the sum of its parts. We seek for this deeper meaning in a variety of ways, many of them futile and some of them destructive. Many get stuck in this stage. Some of us find a spiritual discipline which answers many of the nagging questions of wisdom's path. But inevitably we come up against the frontier beyond which thinking cannot take us further. This can be very frustrating. From our earliest thoughts until this moment, thinking has carried us through, kept us safe, given us the information we needed to negotiate the world. But it cannot take us further.

One metaphor which speaks to me is that of light. As we mature, we turn on more and more lights in our mind. We begin in darkness, lacking wisdom. Slowly we turn on lights as we learn. But the brightest of lights will never cut through the wall of our final darkness unless it is focused into a laser-like beam of unforced, unmitigated, unfiltered concentration.

This is an uncomfortable point in our development. We have always been able to think our way through any problem and find a solution. The powerful tool that is the mind has been our constant companion and surest safeguard against the depredations of the world. But now we have reached a point where the mind is no longer useful, where yet more thought will not lead us any closer to the naked truth we seek.

For this we turn to the power of concentration. Anyone who has practiced meditation for any time at all has had the experience of insight spontaneously arising when the mind is stilled. No matter what the specifics of our practice may be, if we focus our minds on a neutral object rather than on an object of inquiry, insight has the opportunity to arise. Without concentration, such an arising cannot take place—there is no room in our heads or our hearts for this to occur. The vacuum created in the absence of thought allows insight to arise.

This is illogical. (It just occurred to me when I wrote those words that Spock of Star Trek fame was very logical and because of this was sometimes not very wise). Logic is the purview of the mind. At some point in our lives we believe that logic holds the answers to all questions (most of us have encountered ten-year-olds who know everything because they have made this discovery). Coming up against the illogical barrier of the end of the usefulness of thought is very disconcerting. Nonetheless, in order to move beyond the land of limited wisdom, we must drop thought altogether.

Concentration is almost absurdly easy to develop in the short term, which is one of the reasons it may not seem very important to the thinking mind. All we need do is find an object upon which we can entirely focus our attention. The formula is simple: the more thoroughly we focus that attention, the more insight and its fruit, wisdom, can arise. We choose a neutral object about which we do not hold a strong opinion, such as the breath. (We can only imagine what would come of choosing something like our mothers or our jobs as the object of our attention; we hold many, many opinions about these and would spin off into thought and be entirely lost to concentration before we even began). There is nothing special about choosing the breath; it is constantly available and entirely neutral and therefore extremely useful for this. Other than our opinion that it is a good idea to keep doing it, we tend to accept breathing as it is.

The difficulty, if it can be called such, is that concentration on our object of attention cannot be sustained without vigorous, constant effort to train the mind to do so. As our practice progresses, we can sustain concentration more often and for longer periods. As we do this, we find that insight arises of its own accord. We are then on the road to wisdom. Every time a thought intrudes into our meditation, we gently turn our attention back toward the object of concentration. We do this over and over and over. This is compared quite often and (I think) appropriately to the training of a puppy. We ask the mind to sit. To stay. To heel. Over and over we gently, gently condition the mind to focus attention until (in theory, at least) this becomes second nature and our preferred state of being. Thinking can then become a tool we use when it is helpful but put on the shelf when it ceases to be so. Even when not in formal meditation we can return to untrammeled concentration except in those moments and situations in which thought is useful. This is the goal of this part of our practice, to come to the realization that there is a greater consciousness beyond the thinking mind. We have access to this at any time and under any conditions. But when the mind takes up so much of the foreground of our awareness, it can seem as if these thoughts are all there is. Concentration is the key that opens the door to the larger awareness, to freedom from compulsive thinking and to wisdom.

 

More about the small mind

Last time I wrote I spoke rather disparagingly about the small mind (what I have also here called ego or simply mind). I made the distinction between this small mind and the larger mind (which I choose to call consciousness).

I don't mean to denigrate the small mind, though. This aspect of our being has only our best interest at heart. All of that fear, that list-making and planning, that obsessive worrying, all of this is designed to make us feel more secure and safe. The small mind is operating on extremely limited information and believes quite thoroughly that it is doing not only the right thing but the only thing possible.

An example: I get into a conflict at work. The small mind perceives this as a threat. It is not very skilled at classifying the degree of threat; everything, from bad drivers to rattlesnakes, is THREAT, and that's all it knows. The sole strategic framework the small mind has available is elimination of the threat. It resorts to the deeply programmed response of "flight, fight, or freeze". So, my coworker is likely to get blasted with my anger, frozen out by my inability to deal with them in a humane and reasonable way, or scorched by my gossip about them. Obviously none of these can do any work toward healing and all are based in fear.
The point I am making here is not that the small mind is wrong to respond in this way. This pattern is very deeply grooved and even in our very genetic material, in the recesses of the reptilian brain. Indeed, I hope that I can accept that the mind is doing its very best to protect me. As my teacher Heather Martin likes to say, "The mind is actually very dear."

What I am doing in meditation is seeing this mind clearly and recognizing that there is a larger consciousness that is free of the reactivity that characterizes the mind. When I can train the mind to take a break from its habitual frenzied activity (very much as one might train a puppy), to relax and realize that every little thought is not a threat ("Sit. Stay".), then I can know some degree of the peace the Buddha promised is available to each and every one of us.

Retreat

I have been back from retreat for a few days. It always feels like a profound realization to do this and nearly impossible to say why. What do we do on retreat? We sit, we walk, we work, we eat, we sleep, we listen to instruction from a teacher, all while being as thoroughly conscious of what we are doing as we possibly can. So what?

Sitting meditation

It is immeasurably valuable to recognize the distinction between the small mind (mind, ego) and the larger mind (consciousness, awareness). The small mind plans and executes, is essential for day-to-day tasks. But the small mind has certain inherent limitations. It has little judgement and no wisdom. It has an unshakable belief in the proposition that getting things done is the essence of what it is to be a successful human being. In fact, it believes that the road to happiness, the only road to happiness, is in the doing of things, the achieving of goals, the reaching for and getting more, always more.

Now, one can see how practically necessary this small mind is. I could not write this blog, rent a car, brush my teeth, or lock the door without it. One of my former teachers tells of when he was a young monk and came back from Burma to the U.S. He was sitting in an airport, feeling all holy and above it all in his saffron robes. He went into a bathroom, used it, came back out and realized he had been in the women's restroom. It is wonderful to be immersed in consciousness, but the small mind is necessary to keep us from wandering away.

Eating meditation

 The larger consciousness contains and envelopes the small mind. It is expansive, vast, infinite. The space of the larger mind can absorb all the world has to offer without feeling cramped or crowded. It is ultimately accepting and benign. It is not spaciness or lack of awareness (despite the story above) but an acute realization of the underlying nature of things.

Here's the problem, though, and the crux of why retreat is so essential: the small mind believes it is in charge and that consciousness is superfluous, a luxury to be indulged after the to-do list is completed. This feeds into the Judeo-Christian sensibility in which many of us were raised ("finish your chores and you can have some dessert"). I would wager that nearly all persons in the West, and an overwhelming majority elsewhere, live with the belief that the small mind is all there is. Oh, we might touch something deeper from time to time: looking into the eyes of a newborn, standing by the sea, on top of a mountain, in true intimacy with another being, but there is an underlying assumption that this is extra and extraneous, not what life is really about.

Here's a question though: if happiness is just around the corner, why do we keep turning corners to find that it is just around the corner? This is dream logic, chasing the uncatchable unicorn but never giving up on the idea that it can be caught. Isn't it time we woke up?

Walking meditation

This is what retreat can demonstrate to us. When we can put down the lists and books and vapid speaking and smart phones and computers for a while we can clearly see that what creates all of the suffering in our lives is the fact that the small self is constantly yearning for the next thing to make it happy or fulfilled. It has an opinion on everything and everyone, is full of judgement and anger. It is constantly moving on to the next desire, even while still doing something else.

Remember that the Buddha said, "I have come to teach suffering and the end of suffering". He did not say, "I have come to teach suffering, the end of suffering, and how to be comfortable and charming and well-liked and successful". Here's the real truth: we will never, never, never, never make the small mind happy. It believes that after that ice cream cone it will finally be happy forever and has convinced us of this over and over, but it never is. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with ice cream, but it isn't really the answer to anything. Life is not about doing things, achieving things, or getting things. It is about opening your heart.

One of the qualities inherent to the small mind is extreme shortsightedness. Oh, yes, it plans for the future, but only with that extremely limited point of view which thinks that these plans will finally buy it the happiness it craves. Putting it in charge of our overall happiness is like putting a small child in charge of a nuclear power facility. The small mind does not have the perspective, experience, knowledge, or judgment to take on such a task. Eventually, inevitably, the meltdown will come.

A few things retreat is not: relaxing (it's hard work doing nothing), a time to figure things out (that's the small mind churning), social (noble silence includes avoiding eye contact as well as not speaking, writing, or reading—with some exceptions). It is fairly common for those who have never been on retreat to ask, "Don't you get bored?" Here is the truth of it, an insight that came to me on this retreat: only the small mind becomes bored. In fact, part of what we are doing with the repetitive tasks in a retreat—watching our breath, noting our steps while walking, being fully aware of what we are doing while eating—is giving the small mind a task that fully absorbs it so the larger mind has a change to emerge. In any case, though, the answer is, no, retreat is not boring. It is the most fascinating investigation one can do into what makes up this humanness with which we have been gifted.

Going on retreat

Kathy and I are leaving today for a five day meditation retreat. I will not be posting to the blog (except for this) until next weekend.

One thing that I think it will be interesting to comment on once I return is the fact of my anxiety and resistance I am feeling now in anticipating the retreat. It seems to me that the small mind (or ego, or whatever we are calling it these days) is resisting the loss of control that is implied by the retreat experience. Its comfort zone is that delusion of control my daily experience seems to reinforce.

Stay tuned....