Addicted

I was a little depressed yesterday and could not for the life of me figure out why. Last week was extremely stressful and it should have been a relief to have it over, and it was. But I was not at all pleased nonetheless. I really had to dig deep and use all the wiles I have been taught by the Dharma to figure out what was wrong.

Nothing was wrong.

But over the past month I have been "the man" at work. No matter what the problem, they were turning to Reid, and more often than not I had the answer. I got praise from every corner for what a great job I was doing. The clinic held together in difficult times and I had something to do with that. I felt like I glowed in the dark.

The problem, then? I had become addicted to that feeling, to being praised, admired, acknowledged. The situation was coming to an end and my role would change and all of that would go away. I was suffering from the vicissitude of praise.

In English the word vicissitude means (at least according to one dictionary) "a change of circumstances or fortune, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant". Since I don't read Pali, I am uncertain if this is a good translation of the original or not, but I have always felt that something more familiar like "mishaps" or "difficulties" or "misfortunes" might be a better choice. But reading this dictionary definition, I realize how accurate the word may well be, because a vicissitude is not necessarily a bad thing; it's just something different, a change of circumstance.

In the Buddhist cosmology there are eight vicissitudes: gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. No distinction is made between the ones we deem positive and those we think of as negative. What the Buddha taught is that each of these can cause as much suffering as the others. In the words of one translation of his teachings on the vicissitudes, he says the unskillful action is that we "weclome the gain and rebel against the loss, welcome the fame and rebel against the disrepute, welcome the praise and rebel against the blame, welcome the pleasure and rebel against the pain." In our welcoming of these pleasant states, we grasp at them, seek to make them stay and grow. And our rebellion against those we find unpleasant is a grasping of its own, a seeking of the opposite or some other pleasant state, rather than an openhearted acceptance of the situation as it is.

I recognized that what was causing me to suffer was the fact that I wanted to cling to praise, to gain, to fame, to feeling good about myself, to being the Man of the Hour. And it became clear to me once again that the Buddha's teachings are not about what I should or should not do or be. He was not really a prescriber, but a describer. He told it like it is. He was telling me, over those 2000 years distance, that I was suffering because I was grasping, and that the solution was to let go of my grasping and relax into the present moment. And it worked.

I am not completely recovered from my bout of praise-sickness, but I'm getting there. The wonderful thing about the Dharma is that just the realization has the seed of freedom in it. There is nothing I need to do; I need to do nothing. Above all, I need to return to work without any grasping for a replication of the positive things I experienced last week. For one thing, stress at that level would probably kill me if sustained over weeks or months.

I am so grateful that I have the teachings to guide me and help me realize what is causing me to suffer. It is not always obvious, but I know that above all I want to be free. I am willing to give up any amount of pleasant sensation if freedom is the end result.

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.

Because there is such love

A girl sings and I cry. I suspect that many of you have seen this already, but it is worth taking another look. I was blown away. (Ignore the judges, if you can; they are speaking in Dutch, for one thing).

I admit to feeling a bit of skepticism lately about the essential goodness of our species. I am not really a pessimist at heart, nor am I a cynic. When I was younger, I thought cynicism was a form of intellectual sophistication, but have since come to understand that it is actually cowardice and dishonesty in disguise. I say this because a little girl can make me cry, because there truly is so much beauty in us. What species but humans are capable of such love, generosity, compassion, and grace? Well, none, of course.

But we are also the only one capable of such destruction and devastation. We war and build and burn and kill and dig and use and pollute. How can I not be disillusioned?

Because there are little girls who can sing with such feeling. Because Puccini could write such a song (it's called "O Mio Babbino Caro", by the way, and the girl's name is Amira Willighagen). Because when disaster strikes, we come together to help one another. Because every day I work with people who come to the clinic to serve those who are less fortunate and struggling. Because we can create a painting like this:

this structure:

and a building like this:

Because we give our love to each other with so much of our hearts, with all of our souls, even though we know it is risky.

Because we have faith in each other and in Powers we don't understand.

Because there are more people like me, who believe in the basic goodness of my fellows, than there are those who do not, despite all the evidence that can be ranged against such a belief.

Because the human heart and mind are capable of writing this, as John O'Donohue did:

Bennacht

(Blessing)

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets into you,

may a flock of colors,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours.

And so may a low

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

The Beginning of the Path

The beginning of the Buddha's road to enlightenment was when he was removed from the cocoon of his sheltered life as a prince of the realm and taken out into the world, where he saw three things from which he had been protected his whole life. First, he saw a person who was ill. Second, he saw a person who was old. Third, he saw a person who was dead.

It may be somewhat beyond belief to think that a young man (he was married and a father when this happened) could be sheltered to such an extent that he would never have encountered any of these things, but of course the life of the Buddha is more metaphor than fact. (We know the person existed, but the literal truth of who he was is shrouded in the mystery of thousands of years of intervening history). What we can understand from this story, though, is that all of us attempt to shelter ourselves from the reality of our lives. Rather than pretend they do not exist, though, as the Buddha's protectors asked him to do, we pretend that they should not exist.

I acknowledge that this is a subtle distinction, but only on the surface. It we were to pretend that illness, old age, and death did not exist, we would be certifiably delusional. If we pretend that these should not exist, however, we are within the mainstream of Western thought. It's not just the blatant desire to stave off aging that we see in every ad for cosmetics, not just the diets, exercise programs, and surgeries we contemplate. It's also the wish-fulfillment fantasies of "reality" television and advertising for products from colas to vacations to Viagra that will turn back the hands of time.

I know a couple who are struggling and whose marriage may not survive. I know many people who are dying from alcoholism and drug addiction. I have a friend whose son was recently diagnosed with autism. I am witnessing my parents' dissolution through the slow-motion landslide of aging and dying. Several friends have cancer. My work is with those who have one or more of the most devastating physical, emotional, and/or psychological diseases known. I myself am feeling the gravitational pull of my age, and have been for some time. I live near where the Oso landslide happened. Ferries sink, floods happen, tornadoes hit, typhoons inundate, malaria decimates, hunger eliminates, lack of clean water destroys. There is grief all around.

But here is what the Buddha discovered: it is not the events that cause harm to our souls. It is not even our reaction to these events. It is the belief that only good things should happen to us and that bad never should. It is the belief that when bad things happen we are being punished and when good happens we are being rewarded. It is the mistaken belief that any event that is not occurring right this moment has any reality at all.

It seems to me that I spend far too much time in the "Oh, no!" mode. I have things all set up to work in a certain way and then they don't. Oh, no! It's a tragedy! Or they work just great and my response is, "Yay, me!" The other, associated problem is the anticipation of the fulfillment of the expectation, what might be termed "Any minute now..." thinking. I vacillate with mind-numbing rapidity from "Any minute now..." to "Oh, no!" to "Yay, me!" to "Any minute now..." to "Yay, me!" to "Oh, no!" If I am not aware, this is how I spend my life.

As I mentioned above, the biggest problem with all this is what is lost. What is lost is this very moment. "Yay" and "Oh, no" are focused on the past (and future thinking about how I can get more of the former and avoid the latter), while "Any minute now" is entirely about the future. Nowhere in this scheme is there any room for the present moment, which is the only time there is.

Of course, I am not saying we should all go blithely through life ignoring what happens, nor was the Buddha saying this. The first of his Noble Truths is, There Is Suffering. His own definition of what he came to teach was Suffering and The End of Suffering. So, he knew, we know, that suffering is out there. But what the Buddha went on to say was truly revolutionary: that every time we push against the bad or cling to the good, we add to the suffering, that the only way to truly be free is to thoroughly and unconditionally accept the reality of each moment of our lives without any opinion whatsoever about whether it is good or bad. This sounds like oblivion, but truly isn't. Rather than ignoring the reality of what is, the Dharma encourages us to immerse ourselves in it without fear or hope.

We are all Buddhas-in-waiting. Freedom is around the corner, when we live in the moment that is in front of us, when we embrace the adder with the bride, the evil with the good, the rain with the sun, illness, old age, and death with health, youth, and life, ignorance with wisdom, faith with doubt. This is possible, in this very life. It is ours for the taking.

Tidal Wave

My, hasn't life gotten interesting, though?

I have been very busy the past month, which is why I haven't been blogging as much. My job is becoming more intricate and demanding by the day. I still visit my California family every other month (I went last weekend) and of course there are all of the other demands life places on one. I used to have every Friday off (never knew how good I had it!) but don't any longer. Not that I'm complaining; this is all good stuff. The job is demanding, yes, but it is a new challenge and one I am enjoying. I love my family and feel comfortable and loved when I see them. Life is grand, really. Just busy.

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I try to follow the news of the world fairly closely while taking care not to become too involved in the emotional content of it. This is, as most of us understand, a very difficult balancing act. I don't want to hide my head in the sand, but also believe that engaging my emotions in every tragedy that comes along (and there are so many, aren't there?) is the road to burnout and ineffectiveness.

One thing I have begun to notice, though, is the capacity we as humans have to compartmentalize and in some cases wholly reject what have been adroitly called "inconvenient truths". I am amazed at our ability to keep calm and carry on no matter what the horrifying reality around us. One of the reasons I so enjoy dystopian fiction and film is the vision the artists behind these works have of humans moving forward to the best of their ability, surviving even in the starkest emotional and physical landscape. Books such as Riddley Walker, The Postman, and The Road, to name but a few, have impressed me with their portrayal of our species as both survivors and the perpetrators of horrors, including those horrors that brought about the apocalypse to begin with. We are both the wisest and most foolish of animals.

When reading the news, what stands out with great clarity for me is that the environmental situation could not be worse. It is hard to believe that my grandchildren's grandchildren will even have a world in which to live. I am very hesitant to even bring this up. I know this is not a topic most people want to consider, which is, of course, my every point. I have no desire to use this blog to grind any political axes. Rather, I am fascinated with what makes it possible for us to keep going in the face of such imminent catastrophe.

If there were a tidal wave coming, most of us would turn and run. This might well be a futile act, considering the speed and power of such phenomena, but we would make the attempt. The effects of environmental degradation are no less certain or powerful, they just move more slowly. Yet we continue to care deeply about things. We do not panic. Are we merely deferring consideration of the facts, or is there something deeper at work?

I read the New York Times every day. I scan the headlines and dip into any article that interests me. In this way I can stay abreast of what's going on without becoming overwhelmed. And with an eye to how much of an emergency our environmental situation is, every day I am amazed by how much we can continue to care about things, about cars and food and sports and books and plays and films and politics and family and friends and bikes and running and fun and each other. We do not despair. Many of us become depressed, of course, but it seems to me we are a species of optimists. We are not built for giving up or giving in.

I find great hope in this. True, much of our doggedness might in fact be denial. We may be assuming that human ingenuity will once again come to our rescue. Or we may have the fatalistic perspective of "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die". But it seems to me much more likely that we are beings who have hardwired into us the need to get on with the business of living our day-to-day lives, love those close to us, eat good food, continue to learn and to grow, have a bit of fun, have a good night's sleep, then get up and do it all over again.

We don't seem to have the power, for the most part, to think in grand terms, to consider the larger context for any appreciable length of time. After all, there are dishes to be done, clothes to wash, sons and daughters to love, lovers to embrace, gardens to sow. How the great world spins is the purview of the philosopher and the saint. What energy I have I will devote to those things in my immediate world over which I have some control or to which I am devoted. Of course, I will reduce my car trips and recycle my newspapers. I will vote for those who have the best interest of the planet at heart. But then I need a nap.

Far from any of this causing me despair, I find in it the seeds of hope. We love, we live, we move forward, we laugh and carry on. Perhaps the end is near. Perhaps not. We will hold our loved ones near and hope for the best. Really, what else can we do?

I am not I

I recently read a very good book about Israel. I won't go into that whole mess here, but if you are interested in what I have to say about the book, you can see my review here.

I have not been meditating as much as I would like recently. Life has become very busy.

Our bodies are entirely dependent on the health of our microbiome. There is a very good article in the New York Times about this, and about how antibiotics—those we take and perhaps those in our food—might be at least part of the cause of the obesity epidemic in the United States.

I had to fast for 12 hours Thursday night and Friday morning so I could have my blood drawn Friday morning.

I have become more and more amazed how much time, thought, and effort must go into the maintenance of a single human life.

What in the world do all these things have to do with one another? Well you might ask.

The Buddha spoke of interdependence as being the core of all his teachings. I remember when one of my teachers first introduced this topic by saying flatly, "You don't exist". I can easily challenge this statement, naturally. I can hit you in the head and then ask you why your head hurts if I don't exist. But that, of course, is not what my teacher meant. The Buddha's philosophy is unique and challenging in many ways, but this may be where it is most difficult and by far the most elegant. Because it's true: we don't exist. Not in any substantial or lasting way. And we cannot exist alone.

The odd thing is not the assertion that we do not exist as discrete beings but that we have ever thought we did. From the very start of our earliest precursors to this very day we are entirely dependent on plants to supply the atmosphere with oxygen, to take just one example. We would never have evolved as these particular beings had there not been plants. Period. We might have become some sort of nitrogen-processing organisms, but the nature of the beings we are is predicated on our ability to use oxygen and the presence of that oxygen is predicated on the existence of other beings. So, too, with every other constituent of our bodies. We are the product of stars, comets, bacteria, slime mold, flowers, and dinosaurs. The blood of emperors and slaves flows through me.

When we war with each other, when we claim territory as "ours" and not "theirs", we have entirely lost sight of our interdependence. Entirely aside from my opinion about the disposition of Palestine and the right of existence for Israel, not to mention the Russian claim to hegemony over Ukraine, when I have sufficient perspective to do so, I find myself astonished that we are still in such bellicose relation to one another. These days, it is amply evident that what will remove us from this earth is most likely either climate change or nuclear war, yet we focus on territorial disputes and health insurance. Never has it been so evident that we are interdependent than right now. If we do not take concerted and unified action to solve both of these problems, we won't last another generation.

My meditation practice is limited by the time I have available to sleep, which is impacted by the new position I have at work, which came to pass because of an injury to a co-worker. A relationship that ended years ago caused enough disruption in a girl's life that her mother, another of my co-workers, had to quit her job to spend more time with her daughter. The cruelty of a father, the coldness of a mother, rejection by a lover, failures in third grade and successes in high school—all of these influence the people who come to work where I work and limit how effectively they can work and therefore how much time I must spend there and therefore how much sleep I get and therefore how much I can meditate. Interdependence. In this context, I am interdependent with people who died before I was born and others I will never meet.

Need I say more about our microbiome (the internal microbiotic environment of our bodies, our gut in particular)? We are entirely interdependent with these billions of beasties. We would not have evolved to this state without them and would die overnight if they ceased to exist.

I take for granted how easily I am able to maintain this body's health. I also assume that my nice, healthy mind can function independent of what else goes on. Nothing like a 12-hour fast to put the lie to assumptions like these. I was irritable, could not think well, was fumbling and clumsy. It is astonishing how quickly we begin to fall apart without food. And from whence does this food come? I didn't grow it, harvest it, process it, ship it, stock it, or sell it. Literally hundreds of interlocking actions go into my breakfast. And if you consider that each being in the chain of my breakfast (cow, farmers, soil organisms, harvesters, processors, packagers, truckers, stockers, clerks, managers, executives, maintenance crews to keep all the machines and processes running, mechanics, oil rig workers, fuel processors and sellers, water engineers, research chemists, flatware and bowl manufacturers, and on and on) has its own interlocking chains of interdependence, then literally millions—billions, perhaps—of beings provide me with my breakfast, without which I am am mess before I get my blood drawn at 8:00 A.M.

But the Buddha's message, you will recall, was not one of chastisement; he was not trying to remind us where we come up short. His was and is a philosophy of freedom. He taught first of all about suffering, but only to teach the end of suffering. And the end of suffering is the end of delusion. All we must do is cease believing that which isn't so. And why not? Our believing in untruths does not make them exist—they still don't. So why not give them up?

That's the amazing thing about the Buddha's teachings: we have the choice to be entirely free today, right now, in this moment, and forever. We can choose that right now. Why do we not? Because we have so thoroughly incorporated into our consciousness the lies: that we are independent, free-standing, individual human beings with no need of anything or anyone else, nonetheless the whole of existence. We believe the lie that the problems of the world are not our problems because they are not currently on our doorsteps (they will be). We believe that the suffering of others is separate from our suffering. We believe that we deserve only good things and that when bad things happen something has gone wrong. And we believe that biggest lie of all—that we exist. But freedom awaits those of us who know that our molecules are only ours for the briefest of time, that we constantly interchange who we are with the rest of the world and they with us. We have no choice in the matter; it is who we are. But we do have the choice of whether or not we suffer.

Resentment

I resent someone. I don't hate her. I even understand why she's doing what she's doing that frustrates and infuriates me. She has her reasons and they are actually quite good ones. I might well be doing the same thing if I were in her shoes. This realization doesn't help much.

Now, this is worth remarking on mostly because it is not all that common for me. I don't often resent, not any more. But I used to be a world champion resenter. I could resent you for eating lunch. Breathing my air was an unforgivable offense. I could warm up a hundred or so resentments between the time I woke up and the time I opened my eyes, a thousand before breakfast, and pretty much everyone I encountered by the time I left the house.

When I needed to make a list of resentments as part of a spiritual program I undertook, China was on my list. Not just the country and its government, but every single one of the billions of people who lived there. Just because. China. Billions. I didn't mess around with Luxembourg or Venezuela. China.

But what was revealed by the effort to seek a better way of living my life was that resentment was a mask for fear. Actually, I have come to the conclusion (with some help from my spiritual friends) that not only resentment, but anger, unhappiness, depression (in many cases), greed, lust, cruelty, violence, and hatred are all fear in scary masks. Because fear is wimpy, dontchaknow, but hatred, ah, now that feels like a manly sort of thing.

Resentment made me feel superior to all of you (certainly all of China), and I needed to feel that way because I feared that I was actually grossly inferior, in fact not worth the skin I was printed on, worthless. But I found out that this was not so, that I am merely human and pretty much as worthwhile as anyone and everyone else. Sad but true, the hierarchy of worth is, in fact, artificial and largely nonsense, no matter what Ted Cruz may think.

And resentment, as the saying goes, is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die. It only contaminates me. Certainly the Chinese remained unharmed by my vitriol. As part of the path I had undertaken, I had to examine my resentments and find out what part of them had to do with me, with my fears and hurt feelings and confusion. Which turned out to be...oh...all of them.

Which is not to say that people don't do shitty things or that we should let them get away with them. For one thing, someone who is cruel or violent or abusive to me will undoubtedly find another victim, and I have a solemn responsibility to prevent that if I can. But the idea that it will have any positive effect whatsoever for me to stew in the juices of hatred is just absurd on the face of it. In fact, change for the better must begin from a place of acceptance and love; working from a place of anger will only exhaust me and lead to more harm.

So, to return to my present resentment. Because I don't resent all the time and have become very comfortable in my peace and sense of well-being, now even a single resentment feels like a shard of ice in my heart; cold, sharp, hard, painful. I can't stand it. I have a feedback mechanism now that tells me when I have gone there. This is healthy and right.

The solution, I am told (and have experienced) is to wish for this person everything I would wish for myself. I wish her health and well-being and peace and harmony and love. I wish for her to be comfortable and healed. I wish for all her dreams to come true. I wish her miracles. I wish her joy.

It's not easy. I am selfish. I want what I want and I want it now. I wish I could say that I am motivated by pure altruism, but the truth is that I don't want it to hurt anymore. That's OK. Why I do good things is not as important as the fact that I do them. I will have to wait a few lifetimes down the road for sainthood. But at least the Chinese are safe from my wrath. Bet they're relieved.