Vivifying the corpse

I want it to be as it was before.

Before, I was routinely praised. I was, or so I thought, respected and liked. Oh, I had my rough edges, but those were just a part of the charmingly curmudgeonly Reid that came with the territory. I was outspoken but fair; you always knew where I was coming from, and all of that was just fine. Or so I thought.

And then The Event happened I wrote about last month (can't believe it's been a month since I wrote here! Yikes!), and everything changed. And I don't want it to be different than it was.

I ran into someone who said she used to routinely read this blog but gave it up when it became "more Buddhist". I only mention this because what I have tried to say here as often as I can is how everything the Buddha had to say was really just common sense that applies to everyone everywhere, all the time. It's not really Buddhist, per se, so much as it is deeply and abidingly human.

We want to be praised and not blamed. We want to be happy and not sad. We want to be young and not old (or at least not decrepit). We want to be well and not ill. We want to be loved and not hated. We want to be trusted and not distrusted. We want to be respected and not disrespected. We want to be raised up and not shamed. We want to be rested and not exhausted. We want to serve but not to be taken advantage of. This is what it is to be human and caught up in the day-to-day business of living a life of suffering.

And the common sense of the Buddha had this to say: yes, this is what we all want, but the suffering is not in the blame, the sadness, the aging, the decrepitude, the illness, the hatred, the distrust, the anger, in death or pain or shame. The suffering is in the lack of recognition that these things are inevitable. And when we resist the inevitable, well, we are welcome to do so, but it won't affect the outcome one bit. It will only create the conditions to exacerbate our own difficulty.

Still, I want it all back the way it was. I was probably even deluding myself about how it was before. I don't even care about that. I want the delusion back, too. In The Truman Show, the Jim Carrey film, I recall how along with the anger and disappointment of Truman's discovery of the trick that was played on him came a genuine grief that his magical world had to come to an end, had been a fraud all along. I am not at all sure that, given the chance, he would not have wanted to go back to the delusion. But that was no longer possible, as it is not for me.

I have forgiven, at least I think I have. But the injury goes deep and is not easily healed. It is as if I was stabbed through the heart—I will get better, I will forgive, I will embrace both of the people who perpetrated this harm with love in my heart. But I will think twice before I get near them while either is carrying a knife, if you know what I mean. I can love and forgive, but to trust, respect, or befriend may not be within my power.

I must constantly remind myself that the relationship of today to yesterday exists entirely in my mind. Yesterday is as dead as ash. Yesterday is a corpse. And in my desire to make things as they were, I am wasting my energy attempting to vivify that corpse, doing CPR on that which is already cold and decaying. I can prop it up, paint its face, manipulate it into the simulacrum of humanity, yet it still will be a corpse. Meanwhile, the newborn child of today is sitting neglected and sad, waiting for my attentions.

Ah, but it's not easy. The Buddha knew this. After all, if we were all already good at this stuff, there would be no need for enlightenment, would there, because we would be there instantly. As soon as we realized the problem, we would apply the solution and—poof!—no more problem! But it doesn't work that way, does it?

Still...still...and yet...I have tools. I have teachings. I have companions. I have teachers. I have faith. I have love. And I have a deep and abiding understanding that the more I practice letting go of the corpse, the easier it becomes. The more I can let go, the more likely it is that I can heal these wounds. And someday I will.

Blame

I am being falsely accused of something at work. I can't say much more because, hey, you never know who is going to read one's blog.

But I also have no desire to go into detail because it really doesn't matter much. As with everything else we encounter all the time, every day, day in and day out, the real meat of the matter does not reside in the details but in how I respond. And I feel blamed.

I have written before about the vicissitudes, the famous four pairs of conditions:

pleasure and pain
praise and blame
fame and disgrace
gain and loss

I have felt mostly praised in this job, at least recently. I have received many acknowledgements and this feels good. I want this feeling of praise to stay with me, I grasp it and will not allow it to arise and pass away. So when blame comes in, threatening to drive out the glow of praise, I am unprepared to open wide my doors and let it in.

I have written also about the lovely Rumi poem Guest House (actually, I find I have written about it twice, the other time here). I will not reproduce the entire poem here again, but the piece I find most relevant today is where, after writing that we should invite in every new arrival ("a joy, a depression, a meanness") he says that,

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of all its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be cleaning you out for some new delight....
Each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

My teacher Heather is fond of saying that there are not just four vicissitudes. We cannot live always in pleasure, praise, fame, and gain, much as we might like to. It just doesn't work that way. And Rumi is adding that I cannot possibly know what the outcome of one of the other four coming into my life might be. It could be that I am being cleaned out for a new delight.

It is especially interesting to contemplate the feeling of blame when I know myself to be entirely blameless. If my mind were a logical entity, I would simply understand that the blame was irrelevant to the situation and, no matter what the outcome, I can feel good about myself. On top of this, I work in a pretty reasonable place, so it is highly unlikely that the situation will lead to anything negative happening to me, at least nothing that will impact my ability to do my job and keep collecting a paycheck. I am in what I refer to as my "terminal position", meaning that I have no desire to have any other job before retirement, so even if there was some sort of censure, it would not matter. So, why the fear (because, of course, that's what is really going on here, I am deeply afraid). But it is not rational; it is an animalistic response to threat.

Another poem I have written about is William Carlos Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow". And while I

stick by my contention that this poem is, in fact, about a red wheelbarrow and is not particularly symbolic, it also seems to me that the line, "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow" is evocative of a larger reality. So much depends upon this job of mine: my home, my life, my health insurance, my wife's ability to live the life she lives (and that I treasure being able to help make possible), my ability to be a support to my parents and other family, food, clothing, meditation, the very electricity that makes it possible for me to write these lines (not to mention the computer and my internet connection). To feel that it is threatened (no matter how minor the threat) is to have to face the idea that what I hold most dear might not remain whole. It is mother, father, wife, son, teacher, student, member of society, survival itself.

At the risk of repeating myself, once again I must reach the conclusion that the answer is to open my heart. As Rumi says, "The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in." The answer, still, is love. I must love myself enough to know that none of this can last, it is all illusory. All of them, my parents, my wife, my son, my accuser, myself, all of us have arisen and will pass away. This situation has arisen and will pass away. The challenge (and the opportunity—oh, and what an opportunity!) is to practice loving the person who is casting aspersions on my integrity and professionalism, to entirely open my heart to her and let her in. Oh! how I want to reject her, push her and her accusations away, blame her in return and make her appear Wrong in her own eyes and the eyes of others, but this is the very nature of suffering. Make no mistake, the aversive impulse does not cause suffering, it is suffering.

And so, one more poem, from Hafiz, one of my favorites (and Heather's very favorite, I think), about which I have also written before:

The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He knows.

While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,

Keeps dropping keys all night long

For the Beautiful,
Rowdy
Prisoners

I will drop my keys. I will not imprison her or anyone else. I will work for the freedom of all beings and, in the process, will free myself. I will love, not only including where it is most difficult, but especially there. That's just the way it works. Everything else is suffering and the creation of suffering. Hey, I might not have to duck my head when the moon is low, but I'm working on it.

The Limits of Compassion and Its Limitless Nature

It is foolish for me to believe that I can understand what it is to be black in America today. As one commentator put it, there is Team Black and Team White, but if you are on Team White, you don't even realize you are on a team, it's just Normal. The only slight taste I get of the constant fear and loathing black people experience, the reflexive sense of caution and suspicion that Team White most often imposes on them, is the feeling of tension I sense in the parents of children I don't know but speak to in public. Because I am a man, the assumption is that I could possibly be a pedophile. Even in those I love, when I comment on how cute a little girl is, I can feel just a hint of the assumption that it might be a bit creepy for me to say that. They know me, they know I have no such predilections, but there is the blanket assumption that Male=Potential Creep that sneaks into every interaction, no matter how innocent. If asked, these people would say they are not sexist or prejudiced, they are just being cautious. Uh huh.

I can only imagine (I can truly only imagine) how dreadful this same sort of suspicion must be for Team Black in America. People cross the street. They wonder what you are doing in their neighborhood. It crosses the white mind to wonder if you truly belong in this place or that, or if you might have some nefarious purpose. I have never had the experience (literally never) of being stopped by a police officer unjustly, nor have the majority of my pale companions. But it is the rare person of color who has not had this experience (just ask them).

My point is this: I wish to consider myself a compassionate person. Compassion quite literally means "feeling with", what we might also call empathy. But because I really don't know how it feels to be a black American, there are limits to how deeply my compassion can run.

I celebrated the victory in the Supreme Court for gay marriage, but I realize that there, too, I have a very limited ability to understand the depth of meaning this has for those whose lives and loves have been further validated and enshrined in law by the highest court in the land. I can rejoice, but I can't join in. I have, after all, been able to marry for the past 41 years, and have availed myself of this privilege three times (to two people with only one divorce—it's a long story).

I can't know what it is like to be a woman. A woman who has never given birth to a child can't know what it is like to do so. We can do our best to "feel with", but there are limits. We can imagine what it is like to be another gender, but can't really know. If we have felt pain or sorrow or sadness, we can imagine what it is to be in chronic pain or deep grief or intractable depression, but this will miss the mark by light years because the very chronicity of the experience is its most salient feature. By its very nature, the pain most of us feel is short-lived and that is what makes it both tolerable and an entirely different experience from those states that seems as if they may never cease, which in fact they may not, except (one would hope) in death.

In Buddhist terms, compassion is one of the translations of the word "bodhicitta". To define things further, there are two types of bodhicitta, the relative and the absolute. It is relative bodhicitta which is sometimes spoken of as compassion. But absolute bodhicitta is emptiness or openness, and it is in this concept that we can see the truly limitless nature of compassion. While it is true that I cannot appreciate the specifics of your experience (unless you happen to be a middle-class, middle-aged, straight, white, married, male nurse), nor you mine, what I can do is strive to break down the barriers between us that make this so impossible. To put it another way, if I am so hung up on the specifics of my experience and how it is different (and therefore better, worse, superior, or more painful) from yours, then I make it impossible for us to find the common ground of feeling that opens the whole world for us to experience and share.

I understand, at least to the best of my ability, the need many people feel to separate their experience from that of the rest of the world. To do otherwise must seem like a betrayal of that experience and those who share it, whether that be the experience of color, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, politics, profession, religion, disability, parental status, education, ability, preferences, choices, needs, or what have you. But to deny the possibility of the transcendence of these categories of experience is to also deny the possibility of the end of suffering. We must never forget that the Buddha did not preach a higher moral order or a religious understanding of the world. What he taught was the definition of suffering and the real possibility of its end. By striving for the greater goal of absolute bodhicitta, we open the gate to the road of such a complete openness that we cannot divide our experience from the experience of all beings. Such divisions are artificial in any case and the reinforcement of them is the precise cause of all suffering in our lives and in the world.

In the conventional sense, compassion has nothing but limitations. But in the larger sense, the absolute nature of compassion is not a mere feeling with, but a being at One with all that is. If we can get there (if only somewhat, for it is a continuum), how can we do other than love all that is and all that can be? To live our lives there is what Joy would feel like.

Indifference?

As I was walking past a fenced-in area near our home a few minutes ago, I saw some curious behavior on the part of some geese. A flock was feeding on the grass when four geese flew in from the west. Four of the geese who were on the ground flew up to meet the four newcomers. Three of the newcomers landed with the flock, while one of them stayed in the air with the ones who flew up to greet them. These five flew around the field three times, seeming to vie for some sort of position, then flew away to the west and did not return.

I have no idea what this means. I'm sure in High Goose, or whatever language they speak, this all made perfect sense. And it occurs to me that I probably have just about that much understanding of what most humans do. I think I understand the motives of others in some significant way, but I am not at all sure that's true. Just because they resemble me in some ways and speak more or less the same language does not mean I have any idea of why they do what they do.

I work in an HIV clinic and got a call from a patient yesterday who was convinced that his wife's medical provider was actively trying to kill her. It turns out his wife had been on two different regimens of HIV medications, both of which adversely affected her liver. While this was all being sorted out, the woman had been taken off medications completely. To us, this made perfect sense; better to take the very low risk of being off the medications briefly than the very high risk of permanent liver damage. But to her husband, not being on HIV medications when one has HIV is tantamount to a death sentence. We were speaking Goose and he was speaking his language and no one had bothered to translate.

What this brings to mind for me is the concept of equanimity. This is one of the Ten Perfections taught by the Buddha. In fact, many teachers have said that if one develops the qualities of patience and equanimity, the path to enlightenment is smooth. So what is equanimity?

Equanimity is quite simply the quality of mind in which we do not react to either the negative or the positive in any long-term way. At least, that's how I define it. The fact is that we will all face the pleasant and the unpleasant, and will react to them, at least until the day we are enlightened. But our reactions need not be incorporated into our being, or even into our day. We can choose to recognize them for what they are, accept them, and move on.

I know this sounds like indifference, but the two are qualitatively as different as geese and humans. My role model for equanimity is always the Dalai Lama, who said, "I try to treat everyone I meet as an old friend." The Dalai Lama cannot be said to be indifferent; far from it, he engages with everyone and everything at all times. How can he pull this off without burning out? I also think of the sage, Amma, who is well-known for sitting for hours upon hours and hugging every single person at her gatherings who chooses to approach her. But the energy to engage with the world at this level comes from the ability to entirely open their hearts in a non-judgmental way, to not feel that this engagement in any way depletes them, that in fact they gain more than they give, by far. This is one way of living in equanimity.

The Third Zen Ancestor said, "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences." No preferences? Now, hold on, now we must certainly be speaking of indifference. Not so. What he means is that we can acknowledge that both the pleasant and unpleasant will come to us but we need not react to them with aversion or desire. They can roll on through. The Buddha himself said, "As long as there is attachment to the pleasant and aversion to the unpleasant, awakening is impossible". This is equanimity.

But how can we practice this in our day-to-day lives? How can we not get caught up in the busyness or things, or resist a reaction to a slight? And why should we even try to question the pleasure we feel when praised or when things go our way? The most important thing to recognize, it seems to me, is that everything arises and passes away. It is in our natures to believe that all bad things which come to us will last, that the unpleasantness of this moment is how it will be from now on. And it is also inherent in us to believe that we deserve to have the good in our lives and it's only natural that we would want to cling to what is pleasant. But all of this, the good, the bad, and the indifferent, is simply of the nature to arise and pass away. This is the core of what the Buddha taught. All things arise and pass away. We can appreciate them while they are here, or grieve while they are here (no need to be indifferent), but then we must let them go on their way. Because they will. Always. As will we.

Overwhelmed

I must confess that I am feeling overwhelmed by events right at the moment, so I won't be blogging for long today. Why do it at all? I dunno; I guess I feel a mild sense of obligation, if only to myself. Though I am generally a pretty disciplined guy, there are many things in my life I feel I have let just slide into decrepitude, and I don't want this blog to be one of those.

So, here I am, with a few things to say, mostly personal and not all that Dharmic, but there you have it....

First of all, I continue on the Abascal Plan, as I described in the last few posts. I am not trying to sell you on this, by the way. I couldn't care less if no one else ever does it. But it sure has helped me and is helping a bunch of other people I know. Enough about that. Oh, and I found out by doing this that wheat is not my friend. Without further investigation, I am not willing to say it's gluten that bugs me, though that seems pretty likely. Fortunately, I have never been a big bread eater. And I can still eat it if I want to, I just might suffer some consequences.

I also want to put out there that Kathy and I are going to Ann Arbor next weekend and staying a week to celebrate our daughter-in-law's graduation from graduate school. Yes, by the way, since you asked, it does feel strange to be old enough to have a daughter-in-law who is finishing graduate school. And—good news—she will be coming to Seattle to continue her studies, working toward a PhD at the University of Washington (which is also one of my alma maters, by the way). So, we will have Jamie and my son, Mitchell, here for at least three years! Yippee!

After Ann Arbor, we will be home for about a week and then take off for a week at Disneyland with Mitchell, Jamie, and some friends from California. It's been a long time since I have been there. A little known fact about me: I absolutely love roller coasters. The faster, more dangerous-looking, turn-me-upside-downish the better.

Anyway, there you have it, the reasons I am not furiously blogging away right now, but will instead try to get my life together enough that it doesn't entirely fall apart with all of this gallivanting around. I wish you all well and will write again when I can. Take care.

Abascal Dharma

[A note: this is a continuation of last week's post and parts of it, in particular my references to the Abascal Diet Plan, might not make as much sense if you haven't read that one.]

For one who wishes to take up in earnest regular meditative practice, it will be very desirable that he should be moderate in eating.

--The Buddha

For eight years, I worked as a burn ICU nurse. I encountered hundreds of badly burned patients in that time. What struck me as most remarkable is that a certain proportion of them, say a tenth or so, told me their lives were better, had more meaning since they were burned.

A study some years ago looked at people who had won the lottery and attempted to determine if they were happier since having become millionaires. What the researchers discovered is that if the winner was happy before getting all that money, they continued to be happy; if they were miserable before, the money did nothing to change that.

I have worked with some paraplegics and quadriplegics and heard stories of many others (and you probably have, too), who said that their lives had more meaning and purpose after the accidents that paralyzed them than they did before and that they were, for the most part, happier than when fully able-bodied.

For 15 years I have worked as a nurse in an HIV clinic. There is a subculture of deep emotional and material support for those who are positive that many never felt before they contracted the disease. We surround them with help that they could not have gotten prior to having the disease and their community often gives them a level of understanding that was absent before.

It is a fact that nearly all persons who survive a suicide attempt report regretting the choice and having more pleasure in life and less of an impulse to further suicidal behavior afterward.

Of course, I am not saying that one ought to seek out being badly burned, poor, paralyzed, a suicide survivor, or HIV positive in order to find meaning in life. Rather, I raise these examples to point out a very basic reality at the core of what the Buddha taught: we do not know what is good for us. In fact, the Buddha in many places argued that precisely what we believe will bring us happiness is what is most likely to cause suffering. We are certain where happiness lies and we are often absolutely, completely, utterly wrong.

Since food is what this post is about, let's take an example from that realm: sugar. We think sugar makes us happy. It tastes nice, it touches a primitive pleasure circuit in our minds, it feel luxurious. But what we choose to ignore is that it also causes suffering of both an immediate and long-term nature. Almost immediately our insulin goes wild trying to accommodate the overload of sucrose and makes us feel worse. A craving for more sugar kicks in and this can in turn cause a cycle of binging that makes us feel terrible. Long-term, as we all know, it can cause many ills, including dental caries and weight gain out of proportion to the calories consumed as sugar. It is implicated in the development of Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, stroke, and heart disease.

Yet, knowing all this, we continue to consume an enormous amount of it. I am not speaking out here against any and all consumption of sugar: I am a fan myself and intend to have it every now and then once I am off the strict part of this diet plan. But I am trying to make the point that we are more or less clueless when it comes to what will make us happy, and sugar is a pretty good illustration of that.

I called this post Abascal Dharma, not because Kathy Abascal had this in mind when she came up with the plan, but because it fits so neatly into the idea behind the Dharmic principle of Renunciation. The Buddha did not believe in self-punishment or deprivation. In fact, he was a proponent (and an example) of the Middle Way between self-indulgence and asceticism.  But he also recognized the basic fact I have been pointing to here, that our intuitive sense of what will make us happy, what will bring joy to ourselves and to others, is misguided. We could speculate endlessly about why this is, why our most basic impulses are so off course. The theory most tossed about (and which has the greatest appeal to me) is that these predispositions are hard-wired into our primitive brains as a mode of survival that no longer serves us well. For instance, our strong affinity for sugar might be a residual impulse from a time when sweetness in food made it highly desirable for survival because it supplied sorely needed calories. Much as the fight or flight instinct in us was useful when we were a young species but now causes untold suffering, our desire for sweetness often leads to a sourness our hunting and gathering forebears could never have imagined.

There are many teachings of the Buddha, but the one with which he began, and which constitutes the core of his philosophy is that of the Four Noble Truths, which, stated simply, is that there is suffering and there is an end of suffering. He went on to say that the source of all suffering is craving, which is the desire to have that which we do not, or to not have that which we would rather not. This is where Renunciation comes in. Renunciation is in a very real way an experiment. Something deep down in us believes that if we do without something, a certain food, tobacco, sex, a shopping trip, alcohol, that we will feel worse. It seems intuitively true: something that makes me feel good in the short term must be good for me overall. But we know this isn't always true. What the principle of Renunciation asks us to do is to be scientific about it, to do without something and see if our joy increases or decreases. The Buddha bet his spiritual life that we would discover, as he had, that it would increase.

Abascal Dharma is understanding that during this three week elimination phase of the diet, when I asked myself not to consume sugar, wheat, peanuts, dairy, or dried corn, as much as it at first felt a bit like deprivation, is actually the source of a sense of freedom. Though I have made many good food choices over the years, I feel as if I am coming (slowly, gradually) to a true wisdom about those choices and how they influence my life. And how they can lead to the end of suffering.

Abascal

Those of you with long memories may recall that the original intent of this blog was to explore my relationship to food and what it meant to be a person who embraces the Dharma and is also overweight. I hasten to add that this was not a personal judgment, but an exploration. The question was not (and is not) whether or not it was somehow wrong to be overweight and a practitioner of the Dharma, but what the connection is between the two.

I suppose the first question really must be whether or not is in unskillful to be heavy. Does that seem like an odd question? To put it in context, one might ask a similar question: is it unskillful to be angry? At first blush, one might say that it is clearly unskillful to be angry, since it disquiets us so badly and often does damage to ourselves and others and the relationships between us. But what underlies the anger? Why is it there? What does it feel like in our bodies? What is the real meaning of the anger? In other words, what precisely about anger makes it an unskillful emotion in this particular instance?

What I was trying to do, way back then, was explore similar questions in my relationship to food. So, rather than asking whether or not it is unskillful to be a fat guy (it clearly is not), what I was asking is, does the fact of being overweight speak to a larger reality? Am I dodging something that I would rather not face and using food to do it? That, of course, would be unskillful, because it is resistance that leads to suffering and this kind of suffering leads us away from the path to ultimate freedom.

It's a complicated thing. As I have written many times here, food is packed with emotion and memory and history and comfort. Food is the first comforter, straight out of the womb, and it doesn't really change much for the rest of our lives, as far as I can tell. Though we begin with breast milk, we soon branch out to creamed peas and French fries, a trajectory that has the potential to end in the booze aisle. We continue to seek comfort and if we can't find it where we are, we will go on seeking it until we do. And because most if not all of these things cannot provide the comfort we crave, we are setting ourselves up for failure and further suffering.

Which all comes back to the question of Renunciation. This is also tricky to talk about because it can feel very Catholic, as if we are giving things up in order to be good (an appropriate thought for this time of year). But that is not what the Buddha was talking about. When we renounce things in this context, we are letting them go so they don't stand in the way of our happiness. Or, put another way, the very things we think will give us comfort actually have precisely the opposite effect. By distracting us from squarely facing what stands in our way, they exacerbate our suffering, somewhat like pretending a rapidly spreading cancer is just a few aches and pain, which leads inevitably to yet greater suffering.

And so, the Abascal Plan. Kathy started doing this a few weeks ago and had such good results that I decided to give it a try. Here's the basic deal: first of all, all crap goes, which really just means sugar, chemicals and overly-processed foods. Then, for the first three weeks, the elimination phase, you also delete dairy, wheat, dried corn, and peanuts. After the three weeks you add these back one by one to determine if you have a problem with any of them. If you do, they should stay out of your diet forever. And throughout (which is to say, for the rest of your life) you eat proportionally, two thirds fruit and vegetables to one third protein and/or grain.

The basic idea behind the Abascal Plan is that inflammation causes many of the health issues we experience and that quieting this inflammation by eating the right foods for our bodies will help us have more energy, less pain, and will lead to natural weight loss. Though I remain skeptical, I am hopeful.

So, I have begun (I am on my sixth day of the elimination phase). This post has already gone on long enough, so I will close here. But next time I will go into more detail about how this relates to my relationship to the Dharma, because that connection is very cogent for me, and I hope to make it so for you.