Who Are You?

I had a dream in which someone imperiously asked, "Who are you?" He was not satisfied with the ordinary answers: I am a man, a father, a husband, a nurse, an alcoholic, a son, a brother. "But WHO are you?" he kept insisting (and, of course, being a dream, I felt compelled to answer). More out of frustration than conviction, I finally said, "I don't know!" This seemed to finally satisfy him.

But it didn't satisfy me. I know this is a question that has been kicked around for centuries by all of the greatest minds to think about such things. Kierkegaard, Aristotle, Freud, Descartes (Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am) have all struggled with this and none have come up with answers that are viscerally satisfying, even when they are intellectually sating.

Descartes

So, who am I? It seems to me that we exist as if we were scattered pieces of identity that we coalesce around a temporary sense of self that is no more real than a story we tell ourselves. In my mind this is a very literal vision, far-flung fragments of consciousness floating in a vast void. When I have need of an identity, I pull toward me (with the gravitation of a heavenly body) the pieces that will best serve me for this moment in time, only to release them back into the void when they cease to have utility.

But in this model, there must still be a central consciousness which chooses to draw the fragments together, some controlling sensibility that makes all this work worthwhile. What is this core of being?

I think it would come as little surprise to most of us that we live different lives and are different people depending on our circumstances. I know that I am regarded quite differently at work than I am at home and quite differently with my birth family than with my wife. I am not sure the Reid of work would even recognize the Reid my mother knows. I'm not even certain they would like each other much (though each would no doubt appreciate the other's sense of humor). Yet, to me there is a seeming continuity of my being from one moment to the next.

Of course, this could just all be philosophical twaddle, just a mental twiddling of my thumbs, but for one thing. This desire to make of ourselves a solid, substantial, lasting being is the very source of the suffering in our lives. And it is this suffering that stands in the way of our freedom. Mathematically speaking, then (if A=B and B=C, then A=C), it is the "selfing" in which we engage that imprisons us in modes of being inimical to our best interests, to our release from the bondage of Self.

What did the man in the dream want from me? I'm not sure I know, but his satisfaction with my final answer suggests to me that perhaps he was asking me to recognize not just that I did not know the answer but that it was unknowable. The Buddha would suggest that the answer (and the seeking of the answer) is useless and harmful, much the same as needing to know the nature of combustion before acknowledging you are on fire.

You are on fire.

Happy Day!

It is my birthday today and find I am thinking of death. These two facts might not be related, but they might. I am only 56 years old and in good health, but I am not young by most non-geriatric measures of such things. I am certainly nearer death from any cause than I am to birth, or at least I hope so (112 seems more than a little like showing off).

I suspect this maudlin turn has more to do with the fact that my wife is away helping her mother, who is dying, and that I spent Saturday evening in an emergency department with my father. (Nothing serious, in his case). I was also this weekend with my mother, who is slowly losing her wits. So the end of life is on my mind as I celebrate the anniversary of the beginning of mine. But, you know what? It is a beautiful day today in Seattle and I have the day off. There is wash on the line and frozen custard in my belly. For a grim reaper contemplater, I am in a very cheerful frame of mind.

Western Buddhists face an interesting quandary when it comes to death. Most of us exist somewhere on the skeptical end of the spectrum when it comes to the idea of reincarnation, yet the Buddha made it central to many of his teachings. In particular, the teaching on karma assumes the ability of the fruits of our actions to follow us from one incarnation to the next. The teachings also face us with an interesting conundrum: if there is no separate self, how can a self go from one life to the next? Isn't this a basic contradiction within the teachings?

My own skepticism is challenged by the fact that perfectly trustworthy people like the Dalai Lama speak of their former lives as if they were neighbors they spoke to yesterday—recalling events, personal items and conversations that no one else could have known about. The stories of his recognition of the personal effects of the previous Dalai Lama while he, the current Dalai Lama, was still a child are legendary. What to make of that?

I have long been of the opinion that karma is simultaneously among the most and least important of the Buddha's teachings. It is vital because of the need for a deep-seated integrity and morality it implies. But if we are good to each other only to score points on the Karm-O-Meter, then we really have no morality at all, only the fear of negative consequences being visited upon in a future existence. Seen this way, karma becomes much more like the literal Christian's version of sin and, like that philosophy it infantilizes us into creatures subservient to a set of rules declared from on high. Not very appealing.  We must make the choice to be moral for its own sake, it seems to me, and let the karma chips fall where they may.

The same is true, I think, of concepts like heaven or reincarnation. If I am the best person I can possibly be, then if there is a reward for that behavior then bully for me. And if there is not? It could never be a waste to be a good person, to be kind, generous and loving. How could I have any regrets if I have been that? And if you tell me that I needed to join your particular brand of belief in order to be truly saved, well, I didn't much want to be in that particular heaven with you anyway.

As for the seeming contradiction of the non-self being reborn as a new self, the scholars are clear that it is the very fact that we cling to the concept of a separate self that creates the karma which leads to rebirth. It is not for nothing that those who have reached Nirvana are called "non-returners".

I have lost much of my fear of death, but like most people fear dying badly, in confusion or pain. But even that fear is muted by the fact of living in this moment as the only moment I have. Nothing comforts me on a regular basis quite so much as meditation because it reminds me over and over the joy of being in this moment and no other. If I can die while I am dying and live while I am living, I will have done all I can do in this world. And if there is a next one for me, well, I guess I'll just have to do my best in this life to make the next incarnation a pleasant one. Perhaps I can spend a few centuries as a mountain; that might be good.

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.

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 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.

The three characteristics: impermanence

One of the pillars of Buddhist thought is the recognition of the three characteristics of all things that exist. In the Pali language (the language in which these teachings were first written down), these are known as anicca, dukkha, and anatta. These have been translated as impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self. I would like to spend some time considering these three and see if I can make some sense of them for those who are new to these concepts. They can seem very foreign at first, perhaps even frightening, but are in fact so thoroughly universal that their recognition can come to be very comforting.

First of all, then, annica or impermanence. What lasts? What can we say is here, has always been here and will always be here? Intellectually, it is rather a simple task to answer that there is in fact nothing that has always and will always exist. Every mountain arose from the conditions that created it and is slowly eroding away to nothing but dust. Even that dust will not exist in its dust-ness for long, but will be further broken down to component parts and passed along on the wind or in the water to exist in another form in another place. It is interesting to note that the principle of the conservation of mass states that (essentially) nothing comes from nothing and mass can neither be created nor destroyed. In any closed system (of which the earth is, more or less, one) everything that comes into being does so using the elements that exist and have always existed in this system. Thus, it is not only undeniably true that nothing can be continuously existent in its present form, but also that the dissolution of the current form is essential for any new thing to come into existence. You are kicking up the ashes of Napoleon as you walk down the streets of Seattle. You are breathing air that was not so long ago in the lungs of a llama in Argentina. The water you drink contains elements of the blood of the victims of the Holocaust. This is inescapable.

OK, OK, I know that sounds very philosophical and challenging, but let's look only at ourselves for a moment. What can we say does not change in us? What part of us is permanently real? Certainly not our bodies, which change radically and decay over time, as those of us over thirty are all too acutely aware. But even in the short term, all the cells of our body are constantly dying and being replaced, so that we are not the same person we were ten years, two days, or one second ago. Red blood cells last about four months and their ubiquity and constant breakdown give color to all of our waste products. So much for the permanence of our bodies, then. But what about our minds? Don't we carry over our thoughts, our memories, our opinions, our feelings from one moment to the next? This is where meditation can be particularly helpful, because it is clear that the answer to this question is a resounding, "No!" Watching these things arise and pass away can be highly entertaining once we get over the thought that they should be permanent. Like fireworks they rise, burst and fall with great fanfare, but still are ashes in the end.

Then there is the ego, the self we carry with us from day to day, but that is a construct, something we have built as a response to the fear of ceasing to exist. The ego is neither real nor permanent, not in any substantial way. The self-creation of the ego is designed to protect us from the fear that we don't exist in any permanent form, but the end result of the perpetuation of ego is instead to cause the much greater suffering of clinging to something which is constantly shifting and changing, that does not in fact exist.
Christina Feldman says it this way: we suffer from a "recurrent mismatch between how we imagine ourselves and others and the world to be or how ourselves or others or the world should be and how things actually are." We suffer when we do not see clearly "the intrinsic instability of all experience." What we are seeking in meditation and the contemplation of the dharma is a recognition of this fact, the fact that suffering comes from our clinging to what cannot last and not from the fact of insubstantiality itself. As the saying goes, you can't change the waves, but you can learn to surf. We can surf on the waves of the realization of the fact of impermanence and in that way rise above that form of suffering. To do so in a permanent way is to realize Nirvana.

Of course, we do exist in a practical way; we haven't disappeared from the face of the earth. Someone has to pay my mortgage, after all, and someone will eventually die. But that topic can wait for the discussion of anatta, or non-self.

Focusing the beam

It would certainly be reasonable to ask why, if I know all this, if I understand it with such deep conviction, I am not already at my goal weight. It's all fine and well to go on and on philosophically about the efficacy of meditation and these teachings, but where is the proof that they are effective if I am still a fat guy?

I think we all know that wisdom, if that is indeed what this is, quite often precedes the actions that demonstrate it, for one thing. But even more important to me is the fact that I have seen the usefulness of these philosophies in other people and in other areas of my life, and it is in that understanding that I put my faith.

Another factor is that in addition to the ability of meditation to help create the consciousness that can set us free from the hegemony of mind, it and these teachings can also help us develop a more sophisticated ability to focus our energies. To borrow a metaphor from the meditation teacher Rodney Smith, awareness is like a flashlight beam. Our default mode is to cast the beam about more or less randomly, flitting from thought to thought without discrimination (the mind constantly scanning for threats). Meditation allows us to gradually develop the skill to focus that beam of light on a single area of thought or consciousness. This allows us to have a great deal more clarity, as you can imagine. Rather than trying to perfect myself all at once (the mind insists that I must do so immediately or I will die), an effort doomed to failure in any case, I can focus the beam of my awareness on the development of consciousness and let any changes in my heart, my body, or my mind take place organically. Or, to put it in more straightforward terms, I have been working on other aspects of my life, and it was only when the impulse to make a concerted effort to lose weight floated to the top of my awareness that I was able to apply myself to this project without using guilt or shame to try to force myself to it. Or, to put it even more simply: until now I just wasn't ready.

I mentioned guilt and shame in the paragraph above, and this is another reason why I have waited to begin this quest. I have entirely given up self-loathing; I just don't willingly give that feeling any space in my head or heart any more. Of course the mind, trying to protect me by repeatedly bringing up past failures and current inadequacies, will ask me to feel self-loathing quite often, but I know that this is a reflex action and that I need not pay it any heed. Until I reached the point in my maturity where I could take on this effort without even a smidgen of self-hatred, including hatred of my body as it currently is, I refused to go ahead. I would rather die of the effects of obesity than go through life thinking that I am unworthy if I am overweight and that the only way to change that fact is to do battle with myself. Acceptance is not acquiescence; in fact, the only way to change anything at all, as far as I can tell, is to first thoroughly accept it as it is in this moment.

I also feel quite fortunate, in a way, that I can share this journey from its beginning, rather than from some sort of spiritual hilltop after the fact. As we learn in recovery, the only person to whom we can readily relate is one who has been there and is facing the same struggles we are. I experience a feeling of joy when I think that there may be others who are on a parallel path.

Meditation

The simplest way to access the expanded space that will allow you to make room for your ego without letting it be in control is through meditation. If you are new to meditation, please don't abandon this post quite yet. Before you say, "Oh, I have tried that and it didn't work" or "I can never sit still that long" or "I actually feel more agitated after I do that" or "My mind just keeps racing and it won't stay still" allow me a few words to convince you that meditation can benefit you and may not be at all what you think it is.

First of all, to respond to the argument that you could never sit still long enough to meditate, I would say this: if I offered you a million dollars to sit still for 15 minutes and just try to follow your breath, don't you think you could? You wouldn't even have to succeed in following your breath, you would just have to try. Since I don't know anyone who wouldn't answer yes to that question, then I would further put it to you that what meditation has to offer is worth far more than a million dollars and therefore perhaps it's worth a try.

Let me also quickly respond to the objections having to do with the fact that you might not become calmer, that your mind might not stop its chatter, and all that. These are expectations and are ego-driven. Having a set idea of what meditation is or will do for you is sitting smack-dab in the middle of ego, and the goal is to place yourself outside of ego. There is nothing in particular to do in meditation, and there is nothing in particular it will yield to you. To think you know in advance what it can and cannot do, or what you can or cannot do is (what else?) pure ego. So try to let go of all that, because letting go is what this practice is all about.

Here is the practice in its simplest form, though when I say that it is simple, I don't mean that it is in any way inferior to some more complex practice. At the risk of repeating myself, most of the more complicated forms of meditation are egotistical attempts to make the practitioners of those forms seem more sophisticated than you and me. Needless to say, such attempts work directly counter to the very work that meditation is trying to accomplish. So, the practice:

Find a comfortable place to sit. It doesn't have to be quiet or the perfect temperature. You don't have to buy a bunch of cool-looking meditation supplies and cushions; a chair is just fine. (There is no evidence that enlightenment is more likely to happen near the floor). Set a timer for a specific time; try about 15 minutes to start. Close your eyes, or not, whatever works best for you, but closing your eyes removes one source of distraction. Pick a spot where you can feel your breath; the nostril is the most common place, but the movement of the abdomen works fine, too, as does the upper lip if you feel it there. Then try to follow your breath as it goes in and out. Keep doing this until the timer goes off. That's really all there is to it.

What is likely to happen? Well, your mind will supply you with nearly endless entertainment if you let it, but remember that this is the ego trying to regain control. Don't chastise it (it's doing its best to make you happy, remember), simply set it aside and return to the breath. Sometimes you may be lost in thought for minutes at a time. I have been known to set my timer for 45 minutes and never watch a single breath. There is no judgment here; we simply rise from the cushion and take the resolution to pay more attention the next time. Try not to make meditation a new problem; it has the potential to be the best friend you have, especially if your quest is to lose weight or control compulsive eating. I will talk more about that in my next post.

The source

The structure of my beliefs centers around a basic, dharmic premise: that the ego is a fairly primitive if well-meaning vestige of our prehistoric heritage and, if allowed to run the show, will inevitably lead us into dissatisfaction. The ego's response to this dissatisfaction will nearly always be destructive, in ways ranging from subtle to blatant, from overeating to war.

Allow me to expand on this and explain myself a bit more clearly. In our species' early phases we discovered a rather unfortunate truth: we were weaker, slower, and smaller than most of those animals who wanted to eat us. Hiding wasn't an option, since these behemoths were also the ones we wished to kill for our food. Bummer. What did we have going for us in this situation? Really just two things: we were smarter than our predators and we could plan ahead, anticipate the outcomes of certain actions and take those that were safest, avoiding those that harmed us in the past. Thus, to survive we became constantly vigilant and perceived everything as a potential threat. Now, there may well have been the kind and the generous, the deep thinker and the philosopher among these early humans. But if one substitutes contemplation for constant vigilance when the sabertooth tiger is around, one becomes lunch. So all of those (entirely theoretical) deep thinkers did not survive to pass their genes along. In this way, the constant perception of threat became adaptive and was passed along as part of our primal structure.

Of course, there are many ways of looking at and defining the ego, and many theories about ego formation. But I think the model I have outlined is extremely helpful to bear in mind. Because what causes me to have the impulse to overeat is this feeling of threat. Whenever my ego feels there is any imbalance in its universe, the immediate impulse is to fix the imbalance in any way possible or I AM GOING TO DIE. That is what the ego thinks. This is still a useful tool, of course, when faced with a raging maniac or a flash flood, but actual threats are pretty rare in our modern lives. When was the last time anything tried to eat you? Still, the ego persists in perceiving any and all depredations or deprivations as an imminent threat about which something must be done RIGHT NOW.

One of my favorite dharma teachers, Heather Martin (who is British) said something I loved about all this; "The ego is actually quite dear." The ego is really doing its very best to keep us safe. But like a small dog with lots of teeth and a loud bark but not much in the way of discrimination, the ego will attack anything unfamiliar. So, what are we to do with this useful but dysfunctional tool? Struggling against it only leads to more and greater suffering ("bad dog!"). The solution is deceptively simple. Rather than try to diminish the ego, we can expand the space in which it operates.

The first thing we must do is recognize that the ego's has good intentions, but is often misguided. This leads us inevitably to the realization that there must be some part of us that is not ego, since there is some part of us that is making these realizations about the ego. The next step is to become very clear that the ego is not in charge. This is a decision we can make. It is not difficult. Remember the old bumpersticker, "Don't believe everything you think"? That's the basic idea. The ego will throw all sorts of roadblocks in the way of being taken out of the driver's seat, but we simply cannot afford, as individuals and as a society, for the ego to continue running the show. Otherwise, we will all wind up like Congress, flailing about to prove that we are the top dog while destroying the very fabric of what we are sworn to protect. If we let the ego run the show, we will always be seeking for the next fix for this feeling of dissatisfaction, and always feeling that the final and complete sense of security is just around the next corner. I have bad news; it's not. But there is something much, much better: the ability to expand our consciousness to include the ego without making it the lord and master. And as it turns out, this is not so very difficult.