Expectation and Envy

I have not posted in nearly three weeks, the longest I have gone since beginning this blog. I feel a little rusty and even somewhat hesitant, as if it has become unfamiliar. I also feel a bit guilty, as if I have neglected a duty rather than just taken a break from something that is, in the final analysis, a recreation. More about that later....

I have this tendency to think I have gotten to the point where there is little left to learn about myself or about my relations with other beings. I am, so the thinking goes, 57 years old, set in my ways, unchanging and set in stone. What a crock. How is it that this lesson I have learned nearly every day for those 57 years, that each moment shows me a new perspective on myself and the world, how is it that I can believe somewhere in my addled mind that this is not so? The mind is odd in this way always. It seems incapable of believing that a future that doesn't look anything like the present is possible.

I bring this up in the context of how I have been feeling in my interactions with my fellow human beings: my family, coworkers, people I meet on the street. I am undergoing a sea change in my attitude toward myself and it's not all that comfortable. I thought I understood a few things and have come to realize recently not only how wrong I was but how counterproductive it is to believe this.

I have very high expectations of myself and others. A mantra I like (not original with me) is this: "Expectations are premeditated resentments". Let that sink in for a moment. Everything I expect to happen is a set up for disappointment and its attendant sense of betrayal, especially when that expectation includes other human beings. I will be rewarded, I will be applauded, I will be reinforced in my opinion of myself. Even the idea that I will receive feedback of some sort is an expectation. Another aphorism: "You would stop worrying so much about what people think of you if you came to realize how very rarely they do". I have heard it said that expectation is a craving for things to be other than they are. Kathy points out that expectation can only be for the past or the future, since if we are truly living in the present, regret or worry (expectation for a different past or future) are not possible.

Thus my guilt about not having written here in three weeks. Circumstances made this inevitable (trips and obligations and obsessions, oh my!), yet I have an expectation that I will write every week (at the beginning of the blog it was every day—talk about unrealistic expectations!), and when I don't fulfill that expectation, I am somehow a failure as a human being; not just as a blogger (which would be silly enough). The efficacy of my very existence is called into question. A bit out of proportion, eh? As if you, those who read these words, hang on every output of my fertile mind and go into collapse without them. I suspect you survived intact. But my expectations extend to you, as well. You are to respond in a particular way. You are to recognize my essential correctness. You are to acknowledge my inimitable contributions to the world. Let me just tell you, you are not living up to these strictures. You are falling woefully short.

Of course, I don't think this consciously—I'm not quite that psychotic or quixotic or narcissistic. But somewhere in the murkiness of that part of my subconscious that determines my attitude toward the world, I I think I really do believe these things. I feel aggrieved much of the time. You are not responding as you should and it reflects badly upon me. I worry and plan and regret, never realizing, it seems, that my life has become these things. The mind has this idea that if I just fine tune this thing and tweak that one, my life will finally be perfect and I can then begin to live, to relax into it all. The biggest problem with this approach to life is that by the time such a well-adjusted life happens, if it ever does (highly doubtful), my life will be over and I will have lived as a tweaker and a fine tuner rather than as a fully awake human being.

Joseph Goldstein points out that expectation is not the same as aspiration. They both look forward to a future that is not the same as the present in some specific way, but expectation is an aspect of craving (the source of all suffering), whereas aspiration is a letting go of craving, a gentle placement of my spiritual boat into the stream. He also wishes us to understand that the practice of the Dharma is not the gaining of anything, but the letting loose of all things; gradually, but steadily and inevitably. Only there does freedom lie. He quotes a simple mantra which originated with Buddhadasa: : "Nothing to do, nothing to be, nothing to have." Liberation is that simple, if we let it be. Letting go is the answer, but it's damn hard to do, I must say, as if a great master said, "All you must do to achieve Nirvana is stand on the ceiling". The ceiling is right there, waiting to be stood upon, yet I cannot seem to figure out how one does it.

Envy is another aspect of this same egocentric complex of belief. One more saying I ran across: "Envy is a hostile form of self-pity". Yes, it is. When you get something good, my first response is "Where's mine?", not "I'm so happy for you". This feels like a sickness, yet it is my default response. I truly do wish to wish you well, to practice the ancient Buddhist principle of mudita, which is usually translated as "sympathetic joy". Mudita is not just the idea that we ought to feel good for others, but that since we are all interconnected, any joy you feel is also my joy, not just in some theoretical, spiritual way, but as literally as if you shared out your joy among all of us. There is no separation between us, but that's very difficult to feel sometimes.

I said to my soul,
Be still, and wait, without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
Wait without love, for love would be the love of the wrong thing.
There is yet faith;
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought,
For you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be light
And the stillness, the dancing.

—TS Eliot

Judith Ragir once said that the key to freedom is to "allow the universe to satisfy me". Everything I need is here. It is enough.

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P.S. I cannot include photographs in this blog the way I did before because, as part of their misguided attempt to bring everything under the banner of their operating system (which is obnoxious), Google made most of their images unreproducible on any other platform. Of course, this is their right and I wish them well, but I miss being able to break up the unremitting text a little with visual accents that have some relevance. I have a passion for photography, though, so I hope this will motivate me to include more of my own photos here. The problem, of course, is not so much having photographs to hand as having any that are relevant to the text. I will do what I can. All of the photographs in this post are mine.

Eightfold path: Wise Speech

Whereas Wise Speech obviously has to do with what one says, it is perhaps more importantly a way of viewing the world and those in it. One of the most vital teachings of the Buddha is that we are all so thoroughly interconnected and interdependent that to do harm to one is to do harm to all, including ourselves. To lie, to speak ill of another, to gossip, all of these are ways of driving a wedge between others and ourselves. This division is entirely artificial and therefore cannot be otherwise than harmful, a source of suffering.

In all parts of the path we can begin at a very basic level but when the goal is to create the greatest harmony between ourselves and the world, the layers begin to fall away and our actions become ever more subtle and attuned to the true meaning of what it is to be wise within the Eightfold Path. In terms of speech, the most basic level of Wise Speech is truthfulness. This accords with what we were told as children, that to lie is wrong. But it doesn't take much thought to realize that absolute truthfulness is not only a very difficult assignment but is often neither kind nor judicious. One famous example is this: if you know that a man intends to kill your brother and your brother is hiding in your house, if the potential killer comes to your door and asks, "Is your brother inside?", what should you answer? It is clear that there are gradations to the morality of truthfulness.

However, in most instances it is best to frame our answers so they are both truthful and skillful. It is sometimes necessary, I have found, to simply say, "I choose not to answer that question." Not that such an answer would help defend my poor brother from the murderer; in that case a lie is the moral choice. But in everyday commerce, when I am faced with the opportunity to lie or tell the truth, I always choose to tell the truth or warn the questioner that the answer may not be to their liking and then give them the choice to hear the answer. Sometimes I don't even provide that choice if I feel it would create a situation of unhappiness that would have no usefulness.

The truth can also be used as a weapon and must be skillfully applied. When speaking of someone not present, what is our motive, even if we are speaking the truth? If we speak the truth maliciously with the intent of spreading bad news in order to denigrate the person being spoken of, we are not being skillful in our speech. Gossip often falls into this category of speech even when truthful, which often it is not. Rare is the occasion where we have enough information to be certain that the gossip we are repeating is entirely true. Even more rare (and almost nonexistent) are the times when we both have access to the truth and that such speech is entirely necessary and helpful. By these standards, we can see that gossip is never skillful speech, for if it is both entirely truthful and entirely useful, it is no longer gossip but some other form of speech altogether.

Sayadaw U Pandita lists four kinds of "crooked" speech (he draws a contrast between the straightness of the Eightfold Path and the crookedness or actions that are in opposition to the Path): lying; speech which causes disharmony; crude, profane, or coarse speech; and frivolous speech.

It seems to me that this last one, frivolity in speech, is particularly relevant in today's world of nearly nonstop chatter. Facebook posts, tweets, You Tube videos, text messages, emails; all of these are forms of speech and quite often entirely trivial. It is easy to conclude that these are also entirely harmless, but Wise Speech would disagree. When we are distracted by such frivolous speech, we cannot dwell on what is wholesome and beneficial. It is quite clear that often such speech is a blatant attempt to escape the need to focus on what is important because doing so can be frightening. Just as some people in a dark forest cannot help chattering on and on to escape their fear so, on a more subtle level, we often chatter to hide the fear in our day-to-day lives.

Where speech has the potential to do harm, there is another layer of subtlety wherein the harm to be avoided is greater than the harm done. This is a very difficult judgment to make and requires great wisdom. It is better to avoid such speech than to be wrong in speaking in such a way. But it is not acceptable or wise to avoid speech when a greater harm can be averted by speaking honestly, even if the honest speech might cause a lesser harm. A simple example is when you become aware of abuse; to report the abuser (which will undoubtedly cause that person harm) is not evil when the greater evil of abuse can be averted. This level of moral speech has been much in the news lately with the scandal in the Ohio State athletic department. The protective silence of the Catholic church around the sexual abuses of a small minority of priests has served to irreparably harm not only the children who were abused but the credibility of the church itself.

At work, I find myself often in the position of speaking truth to power. I feel this is essential because one of the most subtle forms of unwise speech is to allow false assumptions to take hold which then create the conditions for further falsehood or unwise actions. At the same time, though, I have a reputation for being something of a malcontent, which means that many of my challenges are dismissed as the ravings of the same old lunatic. It is clear that Wise Speech in this context would be to limit my opposition to those things which truly have the potential to cause harm rather than every cockamamie scheme, many of which are clearly smoke and mirrors with absolutely no potential to have any effect, good or bad, on the operation of my clinic. These I could as easily just leave alone and I am learning, quite slowly, to do so.

One mnemonic I was taught that is sometime helpful is T.H.I.N.K. In this paradigm, all speech should be thoughtful, honest, intelligent, necessary, and kind. If it cannot satisfy all five of these criteria, the words are better left unspoken. Of course, we must be wise in applying these standards or we will allow some potentially injurious actions to go unchallenged. (Would it be kind to unmask an abuser? Perhaps not in a very narrow sense, but the greater kindness is to harm the abuser). Nonetheless, when I truly apply the THINK principle, I find that I am silent much of the time. How much of what is say is truly necessary? Is my sarcastic wit kind? Do I think intelligently before I speak? Is my honesty truly thoughtful and necessary, or am I hiding behind a mask of honesty in order to seek revenge or a feeling of superiority?

It is clear that Wise Speech is extraordinarily subtle. Silence is an important form of Wise Speech and is better resorted to than error. But, as described above, silence can also be unskillful speech. There is no one right answer to questions of Wise Speech, but the heart most often knows what is right to do. Even if it requires courage, to speak wisely when the heart says it is right is an important step on the straight path of real wisdom.

The next part of this discussion is here.

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?

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.

Forgiveness

It surprises me a little that I have such a tendancy toward a lack of forgiveness. It's not that I hold a grudge, exactly, or behave uncharitably toward those I believe have wronged me in some way. In fact, in any conscious sense I do forgive them entirely, even when they are not contrite or continue the same unpleasant behavior.

No, this failure in my capacity to forgive takes the form of my inability (or unwillingness) to trust. Once you have proved yourself untrustworthy, selfish, or unkind, I tend toward shutting you out of my heart. As I said, my conscious desire is to treat that person as I would anyone else, to entirely eradicate from memory all perceived slights and misdeeds. But there is a part of me--and I fear it may be the most important part--that seeks to shut them out. Oh, I know the various sources of this distrust: feelings of abandonment from half a hundred incidents of my childhood and young adulthood, but I don't believe that uncovering those old wounds is terribly helpful or healing, no matter what modern psychology may have to say about that. Where I am is here and what I need is a way to move forward in love and trust.

This impulse also seems somewhat arbitrary. To take a rather petty example, I find it very difficult to enjoy films with Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, or Russell Crowe in them because I am aware of what jerks these guys can be in their personal lives. Yet I feel free to admire the work of Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso and the like, even though I know that in their personal lives they were not very nice men. Is the difference that the one group are still alive and perpetrating their brand of neurosis? Or is it something else? Why have I managed to forgive these men but not the others? I know it's not just that they are dead, because I have a real animus for Jack Kerouac due to the way he treated his family. Though he is an important author, I have read very little of his writing because I simply cannot forgive him.

This is based in a rather simplistic morality, though, isn't it? There's bad guys and good guys and I'm the one and judge of the other. Those who act badly are in all ways bad and those who act well are all ways good, and so on. We know this is nonsense, of course, because we look into our own souls and see that both the light and the darkness are thriving there. If we judge the darkness as bad and the light as good, then we are also passing judgment on our own darkness and condemning ourselves. But when we allow accepting awareness of the darkness of our hearts, what arises is compassion for all beings. They have their darkness and we have ours. It is also simplistic to respond by saying, "Well, yes, but their darkness is so much darker than mine. I have my foibles, but there is true evil in the world". Yet, what is true evil but the end result of a collective darkness, an allowing of a bigger darkness? Hitler (everyone's avatar of evil) would have been just one more insecure nut case if the German people had not been in a time of great distress that allowed them to grasp for any solution. One of the characteristics of evil is the sheer lack of ambiguity to its claims. True wisdom recognizes the play of forces that are neither purely good nor bad, but evil suggests there is a simple solution, usually to blame another. And simplicity of solution is so very comforting when one is in distress. Or, to put it another way: my little darkness supports the larger darknesses in ways I don't even understand; by putting that darkness (cynicism, for example) into the world I allow space for a much larger darkness to gain a foothold.

Far from encouraging a false cheerfulness, this idea leads us to nothing less than absolute honesty. When honesty recognizes our complicity in the dark side of things, the essential part of our nature that resonates with the darkness, we open our hearts to true forgiveness. Though another simplification, it seems to me there is some truth to the idea that what I most loathe in others is what I most fear in myself. I don't want to be unkind, angry, hateful, bigoted, violent, vengeful, intolerant, impatient, or unwise, yet I am all these things from time to time, at least in my heart. Forgiveness arises from this understanding, for from this understanding arises compassion.

Metta has been defined in several ways, including lovingkindness, but from Christina Feldman I have learned that perhaps the most useful way to define metta is as unconditional friendliness. Can I be unconditionally friendly toward all people? Well, no, but I can aspire to it. This is relatively easy to do toward my wife, my son, his wife, my family generally. But toward Russell Crowe? Mel Gibson? Himmler? Idi Amin? My first impulse is to say that if I allow them into my heart I might be contaminated by the contact. My second is to think that I will be allowing them to get away with something if I am friendly toward them in my heart. But we know that our hearts are too large to be overwhelmed by any one person; we have been working to "bigger" it haven't we? And to think we are punishing these perpetrators of bad acts by spurning them out of our hearts is a kind of magical thinking. Sorry, but they don't even know you exist and care even less, especially the dead ones. Not only is Jack Kerouac dead, but so is his wife. If his children are still alive it is their job and not mine to deal with the consequences of his neglect. Whereas it's true enough that I can vote with my dollars and choose not to support the depredations of mean people by eschewing their movies or their books, if I do so from a motive of rejection I achieve the opposite of what I intended by creating yet more darkness in the world.

And if I practice this pushing out of my heart on people I don't know, it can easily lead to the same behavior toward those in my life who behave in ways I find objectionable. There is a particular person at work I have a very difficult time forgiving and trusting. Her behavior is often unskillful, but rather than engaging her with compassion my impulse is to shut her out entirely. There are those inside my circle of trust, those about whom I have yet to decide (the vast majority) and those I have absolutely decided do not belong there. When put in that way, it sounds so...petty and mean-spirited. Yet I spend much of my life doing this very kind of dividing out, as do most of us. I believe that one of the most important things the Buddha accomplished is not shutting anyone out of his heart. All were welcome there and in his vast capacity to love, he embraced each one wholeheartedly. May I come ever closer to such an acceptance, even if I never manage to get very near it in actual fact. The closer I am, the better place the world will be.

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.

Jacob's Children, Chapter Eight

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

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

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

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

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

"Uncle?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Nine is here.

Jacob's Children, Chapter Six

So it is that we return to the picture of Jacob dying in his bed. Dying is not what he thought he was doing and perhaps it is only in retrospect this can be said with assurance, but dying he was. His great heart could not pump much longer under the burden placed upon it and must give out. That he was brokenhearted in a less literal way was no less so.

Jacob had never been loved for himself alone by any woman or man. Neither had ever been in his bed, nor he in theirs. He was virgin, alone, beloved and tenderly cared for, but what he craved was passion; no, not the sexual experience itself (about which he felt little more than avid curiosity). Rather, a consuming connection of the heart to just one other was what he had never known and that which, he realized with overwhelming sadness, he would never know.

Unfortunately for Jacob, this grief made him all the more luminous, suffused his face with the glow of a martyr, made him seem to be standing in the sepulchral glow of a Renaissance painting of a saint. He couldn't help it, nor did he wish it, but it was so. Jacob knew what was whispered about him and it exasperated him, yet he never corrected the misguided people of the village and surrounding villages who considered him an icon, a saint, a martyr and a hero. He knew better, knew himself to be nothing more than a receptacle for pain, but knew also that their belief somehow sustained them and was loath to rob them of this small comfort.

For by now the astute reader will have guessed Jacob's secret, that some quirk of life had made him one who can channel the darkness of others' souls and convert it to energy which, in surplus, became the enormity reposing on this bed. Jacob chuckled to himself sometimes at the idea that he was even remotely a good man; if only all those poor benighted souls knew the truth, that he was more a privy for the off-loading of grief than a loving counselor. Never did it occur to him to think that his uncomplaining  acceptance of his lot, his willingness to shoulder this burden, to open the door of his home to any and all who sought him out could be thought of as a supremely unselfish act and worthy of praise. Such was his humility that he only thought of this as his role, his calling and his very function, a calling perhaps, after all, from God.

Due to the generosity of Sir Ambrose, who made provision in his will for the mother and child, a legacy which continued when Anna died, Jacob never held a job or learned a trade. He was always at home and always ready to hear woes. Men would come to him furtively, but in nearly as great a number as the women, and women flocked to him in droves. It was not so much the telling of the tale that kept them coming back time and again, but the fact that, unlike other forms of confession, telling a sorrow to Jacob caused it to be entirely lifted from one's soul. Quite a nice little party trick, Jacob often told himself with a wan smile.   

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Mariam was a young, childless widow who cared for Jacob quite often. Having few responsibilities at home, she was free to spend time at his. She was quite cheerful there, cleaned and cooked and bathed Jacob until everything and everyone shone. Mariam was one of those most grateful to Jacob, for her confession had been dark indeed: in the midst of one of his frequent rages she had wished her volatile, violent husband dead and the next moment, he was. Though Jacob tried to soothe her, tell her that it could not possibly be her doing, she was convinced of her guilt both in the act and in the elation she felt at the doing of it. Jacob had relieved her of these and she was filled with gratitude and yearned to be able to show him that.

Their conversations became quite intimate and though weeks in the discovering, eventually it became clear to Mariam that Jacob had never known the physical love of a woman. Though she still had enough modesty to blush in the doing of it, she took it into her mind to give this gift to him before he died. This she did. The sheer physics of the act can only be guessed at, for his mass was indeed prodigious, but managed it was. In the post-coital interlude, Jacob shared with Mariam his deepest secret, that which made him what he was. But she assumed this was the raving of a dying man and paid it little heed. Jacob slept then and was never lucid again. He died a few days later with a smile on his face.

Chapter Seven is here.

Foundations: Pema Chödrön

"As we train in unblocking our hearts, we'll find that every moment contains the free-flowing openness and warmth that characterize unlimited joy."

 Pema Chödrön (nee Deirdre Blomfield-Brown) was born in the United States and had what might be termed an average American life until the breakup of her marriage and a broken heart pushed her to the brink. She sought relief and found the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa. Through his teaching she found great inspiration and release. She became the abbess of a monastery in Nova Scotia and, fortunately for the world, a renowned teacher.

"What keeps us unhappy and stuck in a limited view of reality is our tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort."

Pema has not yet written a book in which she explicitly lays out all of her philosophy in a linear fashion (though Start Where You Are probably comes closest). Rather, she publishes mainly works that are pithy segments of her teachings, based on the teachings of Trungpa and the Buddha. For me this is a very helpful, because it gives me the opportunity to take in a piece of information or a new concept and then stop to digest it. In my opinion the best of these is Comfortable With Uncertainty, a compilation of 108 teachings, each of which is a page or two long. These can be read as a daily inspiration to think in a way that goes counter to our usual way of thinking, which, as we know, leads to suffering.

"Resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego...resisting life causes suffering....We can use everything we do to help us to realize that we're part of the energy that creates everything. If we learn to sit still like a mountain in a hurricane, unprotected from the truth and vividness and the immediacy of simply being part of life, then we are not this separate being who has to have things turn out our way."

The core of Pema's teachings are three fundamental practices: meditation, tonglen, and lojong. We have discussed meditation quite a bit here. Tonglen has been mentioned in this blog before; this is the practice of sending and taking: we breathe in all that is negative and breathe out all that is positive. This goes against our usual habit of trying to cling to what we like and discard what we do not. It breeds a natural compassion in us because it increases our appreciation of what others suffer. It helps us to practice lovingkindness as we give what is the best and most joyful in our hearts outward to others rather than hoarding it for ourselves. Here is a wonderful, brief teaching on Tonglen by (who else?) Pema Chödrön.

"Tonglen takes courage to do, and interestingly enough, it also gives us a lot of courage, because we let it penetrate our armor. It's a practice that allows us to feel less burdened and less cramped, a practice that shows us how to love without conditions."

A brief teaching by Pema on lojong is here. Briefly, lojong is the use of one line slogans from the ancient teacher Atisha which help us to open our hearts and look at the world in a different way. An entire list of the lojong slogans is here, although many of them are impenetrable without insight from a teacher. Pema provides such guidance in her book Always Maintain a Joyful Mind. Some examples of lojong teachings:

Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment.

Don't be swayed by external circumstances.

If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.

Be grateful to everyone.

Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation.

This time, practice the main points.

Don't try to be the fastest.

Don't make gods into demons.

Overall, I consider Pema Chödrön one of the great Western teachers. Her writings and recorded teachings

strike a chord in me that no other teacher has been able to match. Though I do not practice in the Tibetan tradition, where universal spiritual values coincide I find that Pema has a greater insight, compassion, and wisdom than nearly anyone I have studied.

"This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky--that's called liberation."

(This is part of an ongoing series detailing the sources of my inspiration. The list, which will be updated whenever I post a new one, is here).

Resolution

On my way home from work not long ago I walked past a sign on a lawn that said, "FREE". All of the wares it has advertised as for the taking had already gone, so I felt free to pick the sign up and take it home. To me it was a reminder of a fundamental truth: I am already free and any lack of freedom I feel is due to an imprisonment of my own devising. It brought to mind the wonderful Kabir poem about small men who "build cages for everyone they know, while the sage...keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners." The sage knows that the cages are not only unnecessary but a hindrance. Nonetheless, as Heather Martin helpfully points out when discussing this poem, the sage does not unlock the cages, he merely drops keys, trusting to the native intelligence of the imprisoned to free themselves.

I mentioned a couple of days ago the Pema Chodron quote, "Not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution." Why is this? Because when we focus on resolution (one of my primary failings, I must admit), we are always leaning into the future, when everything will theoretically be definite and complete and comfortable. We are never in the here and now, where we are always free, no matter how confining our current circumstances may seem to be. The most enlightened of our leaders, from Martin Luther King to Gandhi to Nelson Mandela to the opposition leaders in Burma have emerged from years of imprisonment to say that they have never felt so free as when they were imprisoned because to allow the oppressors to determine the state of their mind would most certainly have let the bad guys win. But they also emerged free because they never lost sight of the fact that the freedom they sought was inside them and not "out there".

The core of the Buddha's teaching, as I have written several times before (stop me if you've heard this one) is that only when we place our focus on this moment and not on the past or future that we have any chance at joy. We may be unhappy about what is in this moment, but that need not take us away from joy. Right after the Buddha reached enlightenment, so the story goes, the forces of Mara were ranged against him. Mara, who is the embodiment of everything that works counter to enlightenment--fear, insecurity, lust, greed and their compatriots--said to the Buddha, "Don't you realize I could pluck your eyes out?" To which the Buddha responded, "Don't you realize that I would not care?" Though this seems a rather heavy witness (one would have to be enlightened to truly get to that point, I think), the point this story makes is that in this moment the Buddha is not blind. In the moment of having his eyes plucked out he would be in pain and sorrowful, but would never lose his focus on the here and now. And blind, he would embrace that blindness as his current reality and never mourn the loss. In other words, he would never lose the freedom that is this very moment. When I spoke of dread two days ago, I think I had lost sight of this basic truth.

Jack Kornfield uses the analogy of a snake. When we go walking in the woods we may fear seeing a snake. If we see a snake, we fear that it will notice us. When it looks our way, we fear that it will come our way. When it comes our way we fear that it will bite us. When it bites us, we fear what the venom will do to us. What we fear, then, is never what is present. This is the nature of fear, to dread that which we anticipate might happen. Mark Twain may or may not have said, "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." When we live in fear we leave the freedom of the present moment for anticipation of something vague in the future which might or might not occur. In a rather extreme example, I found myself one day concerned that a raccoon or other wild animal might follow my dog into the basement. Now, this may be a somewhat rational fear, but becomes ludicrous when you consider that I not only have no dog door, I have no dog! Of course, I was able to laugh at myself and leave this vague fear behind (we have considered getting a dog and I was thinking in a purely hypothetical way about the mere possibility of a pet door). But many of our fears seem to us very real, what Pema refers to as "ephemeral--but at the same time vivid and convincing--stuff."

The antidote to fear is not courage, though that helps. The antidote to fear is compassion, the ability to not only face our fears with love but also to turn our hearts toward the fear of others and to appreciate and incorporate a heart-felt understanding of those fears even before our own.

A summary

As promised, here is a summary of the philosophy I am propounding in this blog and by which I am currently living my life. This will also be helpful to me, no doubt, as a reminder of just what I am doing and why.

The Buddha was a real human being who found enlightenment over 2500 years ago and spent the rest of his life teaching the path to freedom he discovered. He was not a fat guy. Because he taught the middle way between indulgence and asceticism, it is highly doubtful he would have been self-indulgent enough to overeat to that extent.

The Buddha taught only two truths: there is suffering and the end of suffering is possible. All the other teachings and corollaries and commentaries are an attempt to teach these truths and the path to their fulfillment.

Each of us already have enlightenment in us, but it has been obscured by generations and centuries of fear, instinct, and training. These have created layers upon layers of rock-hard assumptions, beliefs, and actions that stand between us and the precious jewel of enlightenment. Nonetheless, it is there in each of us all the time, waiting to be discovered.

When we are not working toward our own enlightenment and that of others, we are suffering. This is true by definition, since enlightenment is the end of suffering.

Overeating and being overweight are forms of suffering. Not only do they cause us to suffer directly, they are also futile attempts to find the end of suffering through external means. This will never and can never work to find the true end of suffering and as long as we are practicing futile means, we will be neglecting skillful means.

Deprivation and dieting are also forms of suffering. This blog is not about dieting or control or guilt or shame. In fact, the first step in the process of any change is complete and loving acceptance of ourselves as we are in this moment in time. This moment in time is all we have until the next moment comes, and no moment should be wasted in self-hatred of self-loathing. This, too, cannot and never will lead to the end of suffering.

The key to a healthy relationship to food is mindfulness. There are many ways of becoming more mindful about how we eat. Jan Chozen Bays' book Mindful Eating is a useful if imperfect guide to this. Particularly useful is her description of the seven hungers.

Meditation is one of the keys to eating mindfully. It need be no more complicated then finding the time to watch the breath arise and pass away. The more one meditates, the more benefit derived, but each person much find what works best for them. Typically, meditation is a minimum of 15 minutes a day. On retreat, one meditates up to 18 hours a day. Finding a happy medium between these two should be the goal. 45 minutes at least once a day is fairly typical.

My primary method to develop mindfulness about eating is calorie restriction. The formula I use is ideal weight (in pounds) times 10 equals daily calorie intake. I do not consider this deprivation because my attitude toward it is to use this discipline to increase my awareness of my relationship to food. I also am not depriving myself because this amount of calories is sufficient for my well-being and I assume that consumption in excess of this is an attempt to find the end of suffering through the medium of food, which will never be effective.

When on vacation or out to eat, I do not count calories, but still try to eat mindfully at all times. I abandon the calorie counting primarily because it's just too much of a hassle and because I don't want my practice to become a pain for others. Because I do not consider the calorie restriction to be a burden, I don't splurge when I am not observing it. Rather, the way I eat on vacations and such is simply a different way of paying attention to my relationship to food. Yes, I feel the urge to gorge myself when on vacation, but why is this? Is this just habit? Does it really make me feel better? Is it on the path to the end of suffering or a form of suffering? On the other hand, as past posts have made clear, I don't practice deprivation, either.

Eating itself can be a method of contemplation and meditation that leads to the freedom of the end of suffering. Life cannot be separated into the good and the bad, the useful and the not-so-useful. Everything is grist for the mill of mindful investigation.

Despite what we may have been taught, it is not a waste to leave food on our plates or throw it away. It makes no sense to think that eating an excessive amount of food is somehow less wasteful than to toss it out. Ideally, we would always have the perfect amount in front of us (or perhaps just slightly less than that) and never waste a thing, but this is not always possible. Let it go. The starving children of Darfur were not going to eat the rest of your burrito anyway.

There are many teachings that point to the path the Buddha taught, and some of the most useful ones are the Four Noble Truths, the Five Precepts, and the Brahma Viharas. These are not obscure or difficult to understand. The Four Noble truths simply state that there is suffering and an end of suffering and describe the path to it. The Five Precepts suggest that it is most skillful to avoid killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, harmful speech, and intoxication (and I would include overeating in this last). The brahma viharas describe four ways we can be more attuned to the path to enlightenment: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

No one is more deserving of love, kindness, compassion, and joy than you are. Celebrate life. Food is part of the celebration, but so is feeling physically whole. There is a balance that is possible. I wish nothing less for all of us that we should find this truth for ourselves, and to find it now.

The brahma viharas

But first...another gastronomical event. We went to a lovely little French bakery in northwest Portland (23rd and Thurman, for those of you in the area) called:

Where we shared this nice pastry. A little cookie filled with custard and those little puff pastries on the top with some sort of glaze on them. Scrumptious. It is nice to be able to share something like this rather than feeling deprived because I can't have one of my own. I know it is heart hunger calling out to me when I feel this sense of deprivation. Who knows where this impulse arises from? I was never really deprived as a child, at least not of food.
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I want to promise something to those of you who are reading this and are not familiar with all of the Buddhist terminology I am tossing about. I am going to talk a bit about the brahma viharas (really not at all mysterious, though the name sounds like it) and then in the Tuesday post I will go back and summarize things and relate all of this to the overall subject of food and weight and such. I am aware that some of this may be a bit obscure, but I swear to you it all makes sense in context. It concerns me that I may have waded in too deeply and perhaps not taken all of you with me. I will do my best to make the context clear on Tuesday.
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Since I wrote about mudita or sympathetic joy yesterday, and mentioned that it was one of the four brahma viharas, I thought it would be worthwhile to go into the other three, though not in any great detail. The link in the previous sentence can provide more insight into these essential concepts.

First of all, the term brahma vihara itself. The words are usually translated as "divine abode", but we should remember that in the time and place the Buddha was teaching, everyone would have understood precisely what he meant when he said this. He was determined to make the dharma accessible to everyone, and part of that was to use terms lay people could understand. So a more up-to-date translation of brahma vihara might well be "ideal place" or "most comfortable home". This is a place all us would want to live our lives, which is precisely what the Buddha intended.

I covered sympathetic joy in yesterday's post. The other brahma viharas are lovingkindness, compassion, and equanimity.

Lovingkindness, translated by some as simply "friendliness" is taking the attitude of wishing all people to be happy and free of suffering. There is no idea in Buddhism that if we have this attitude we can free others of suffering or keep bad things from happening to them; this would be magical thinking, and the Buddha did not advocate any such hocus pocus. Rather, the point of such loving aspirations for others is to set our minds in the direction of love rather than suspicion, bitterness, or anger.


Compassion is perhaps best defined by its root meaning, which is "to feel with". When another is suffering, we can enter into their mind state to the best of our ability and wish for them that this suffering may cease. It is all too easy to see the suffering of others and feel pity, which is essentially a thinly-veiled comparison of their plight to our own lives and the underlying pleasure that we are not suffering as they are; compassion is an antidote to this feeling.


Equanimity ties these all together and serves as an assurance that they will not get out of control either in the direction of excessive involvement in others' sufferings or self-serving reflection on them. It is also very important to recognize that we must extend lovingkindness, compassion and sympathetic joy to ourselves. Without this reaching out to what is needful inside us, practicing the brahma viharas is nothing but martyrdom.

As with all the teachings of the Buddha, these are not commandments or even "shoulds", but what are known as "skillful means". When we practice the opposites of the brahma viharas, which is to say greed, selfishness, anger, envy, pride, hatred, resentment, cruelty, and their "near enemies" attachment, pity, comparison, and indifference, we create suffering for ourselves and others. When we practice this path of the brahma viharas, we put ourselves in the way of joy and genuine, lasting happiness. Of course, we cannot control the waves or the wind life sends our way, but we can set the sails.

Dove Vivi

Yum! I hope I have made clear that while this is a blog about losing weight, it is also about the absolute joy of food and eating. That is part of the problem with dieting, it seems to me, that food becomes the "enemy" and we give up far more than we gain. As I have said in a prior post, I would rather die a diabetic death than put myself into an adversarial relationship to food or anything else. This was a big part of the Buddha's message, that one must find the joy in life; this joy is not even particularly well-hidden, but is part and parcel of our everyday lives, if we were but to look for it. An ancient sage named Atisha one said, "Always maintain only a joyful mind". As with so much of what are known as the lojong teachings, this is more an aspiration to be contemplated than something it is possible to live all the time, but the point here is that it is indeed possible to live in joy all the time, and that this is the state of the end of suffering. It is not my intention to add to the suffering of my life by making myself an adversary of wonderful food.

I ate with family last night at Dove Vivi, a wonderful pizza place in northeast Portland. This is the sign outside the little storefront operation, and one of their pizzas,
the sweet corn and carmelized onion. All of their pizzas are on cornmeal crust. It was some kinda wonderful. I also had a slice of the pesto and spinach pizza. Also quite a treat. I passed up on the third slice my mouth hunger was telling me I really wanted, but my stomach was quite certain was superfluous at best.

I feel so fortunate that I have family and friends I can spend time with and share these sorts of things with. Jamie's family is wonderful and, as her mother said, we have all gotten very lucky. I couldn't agree more. But I have the sense that all of us have also worked very hard to bring this sort of "luck" about. One of the things that Kathy brought to mind for me yesterday is the concept of sympathetic joy. In Pali (the language in which the teachings of the Buddha were written), this is known as mudita. This is one of the brahma viharas, a way in which we can incline our minds. Like any other thing in which we train ourselves, from riding a bicycle to another language, it is a matter of taking the time and effort to do this, but the benefits are enormous.

Sympathetic joy is the training of the mind to live in joyfulness in situations where disappointment or (in particular) envy might cause us to take a negative view of an event or person. As an example, yesterday the graduation ceremony went much more quickly than we anticipated and felt a bit chaotic all the way at the back of the seating area, so we missed the actual moment Jamie went across the stage to receive her diploma. What might we have felt? Disappointment, if that moment is what we came for. Irritation, that those around us were so loud that we couldn't hear or that the sound system was not powerful enough to allow us to hear. Anger, that we couldn't sit any closer and get a good view of her. General annoyance that there were just too damn many people in such a small space, that they couldn't shut down the farmer's market next door for just this one day to cut down on crowds and noise. And on and on and on, right? It seems like there is never a lack of locations for the placing of blame.

But because we were there merely to bear witness, to simply be present at the event and not have any specific expectations for how that event should unfold, and above all because we can practice mudita, we could see that all around us were families and friends who were celebrating this huge step that one of their own was taking, and we could bask in our sympathetic joy for them. The gift is this: all of this joy, the joy of all these thousand or so people is now our joy, too! We get a share of every moment of pleasure they are feeling.

The many faces of joy. What a pleasure. This is all by way of getting back to how very fortunate I feel to be among people who love one another, and my recognition that it is part of the work that each of us has done to this point that we can feel that love without reservation. Perhaps because of the deeply-felt sense of threat that seems to be hard-wired into us, as I spoke about in earlier posts, this does not come as naturally to us as we would like, and I give thanks to all of those around me who have worked to be the people they are, so I can bask in their love. It is an honor to be among them.