Two darts

I don't know about you, but I think I need a return to basics. Here's the thing: I keep writing about what has gotten weird in my life and in the lives of those around me, but beyond quoting the Buddha to the effect that one should simply accept what is as it is, I haven't had much to say about a more comprehensive way of looking at things. Whereas I have become somewhat immune to the idea that life is trying to tell me something (I think if we were able to hear Life it would sound something like, "Hum de dum de dum de dum"), still, sometimes I feel like saying to the Buddha: "Thanks a bunch, big guy, but that advice is not really all that helpful, you know? I mean, we're still hurting here." So, here's this:

One of the core teachings of the Buddha is about the feelings of negativity, positivity, or neutrality that arise in response to every experience. This is a universal feature of our lives as sentient beings. This arising of response to experience is not to be avoided—the Buddha addresses this directly; saying it is foolish to attempt to become immune to these states of mind.

Let's say something really bad  happens to you, a cancer diagnosis or an accident. Maybe someone breaks into your house or your sister suddenly and for no discernible reason stops communicating with you. These things are unpleasant. Let's say, on the other hand, that you win a million dollars, a friend receives a clean bill of health, a loved one scores a success like admission to graduate school. These are pleasant. Finally, let's say that your day is filled with the unexceptional, that whole days can go by without any conscious reaction—this is the feeling tone of neutrality. These are inevitable, these feelings. But they do not constitute suffering.

The Buddha speaks in terms of two darts. The first dart is the feeling. The second dart is my reaction to the first, my attempt to cling to the good, reject the bad and ignore the neutral. The first is the natural arising of reaction to a stimulus. The second dart is suffering. The first is unavoidable. The second is what we get to examine when we look to find the end of suffering. Accidentally grabbing a hot coal will cause pain. Tightly squeezing the coal will cause intense suffering.

In a talk I listened to recently, the great Dharma teacher Joseph Goldstein pointed to the way that children react, how in one moment they can be joyful, in the next weeping, and in the third at peace. In our "adult" way of being, we cling to that which creates feeling tones, we mull over the circumstances, the causes and conditions, favoring this obsessive clinging over the more immediate living through and letting go of experience. We reject the painful and beg the good to stay, and in doing so miss out on the immediate experience of the moment.

When my mother was child, she had a dog to whom she was very attached. The dog was struck and killed by a car. When her parents sat her down to tell her about it, they feared an extreme reaction of grief. What she said was, "Dog can't last forever". This is a famous family story, and for good reason. It wasn't that she didn't miss or grieve the loss, but that the dog was gone and that his going had been inevitable. (I know, I know, she didn't think it through like that, but that's what it tells me, anyway!)

Another story (I'm pretty sure I have written about this one before, but bear with me): a meditation master (I believe it was Ajahn Chah, but I'm not sure) once showed a disciple a cup that he cherished. It had been a gift and was beautiful, so doubly valued by him. He told the disciple there were two ways to look at the cup. The first was to dread the day it would be destroyed, since this is the way of all cups, and therefore to protect it and guard against anything that might threaten it. The other way was to say, "it is already broken", to appreciate its beauty and meaning while it was whole, then let it go when it was no longer, to see it then as having finally reached its inevitable state, the state to which his mind had already relegated it. It is clear that the first is the way of suffering, while the second is the way of peace.

My relationships are already broken, my job is broken, my peace is broken, my heart is broken, my coffee cup (his name is Bucky) is broken, my phone is broken, my health is broken, my glassses are broken, my love is broken, harmony is broken, community is broken, my feeling of security is broken, life is broken. I don't intend to give up on any of these. On the contrary, I will cherish them, hold them that much more closely to my heart. They are precious in their unbroken state precisely because I have allowed them to be broken in my mind. When they break, when my brother can't hear me, when my sister is silent, when I am stolen from, when I know how different my work is (and how much I grieve what it used to be),  I can say to myself, "Yes, yes, this is how it always was, and I had the good fortune for a time to experience these things in their unbrokenness. What a lucky man I am!" When I can do this, when I can say, in all sincerity, "It is enough", in that moment I have reached the end of suffering.

Uncertainty

There's a lot going on right now but it's difficult to know how to write about it here, at least without sounding like I'm whining.  I'm not  whining. No, really....

I am reminded by a loved  one that getting things out of my head is always helpful, no matter what. On the other hand, I don't want to feel as  if I am vomiting all  over these pages as a way of making myself feel better. Nonetheless, here goes:

• The nature of my work is changing. 


• My son and his wife are moving away. This is a good thing—she is going to graduate school—but Michigan is a long, long, long way from here.


• My mother has been  in a skilled nursing facility for several weeks getting IV antibiotics for a persistent infection. She's home now, but is still not entirely well. Both of my parents are just plain old. Meanwhile, my shoulder has been giving me trouble, making me feel as if I am getting there myself.


• My friend Debbi is dying.


• I have a coworker who's husband is going through much the same process that Debbi has, but he's only at the beginning.


• My relationship with my wife is shifting. Of course, this happens all the time, as anyone in a long-term relationship can attest. But the big changes are more noticeable and the big, noticeable changes come to pass when big events intervene.


• I have lots of committments to travel, pretty much entirely around my family. These are all good things—my parents, my brother's birthday, visiting my son and his wife (and their lovely kitties, to which I am both deeply attached and seriously allergic, an interesting combination). It is all very good and seriously stressful in aggregate.


• When I am stressed (no surprise here) I tend to eat to excess. As I have shared before, I am not an eat-the-whole-cake kind of overeater. To borrow from  the lexicon of alchoholism, I am a maintenance overeater, not a binger. Which has its downside in my ability to remain in denial about it while I am stuffing my face. And (this is key) my lack of discipline about my eating actually adds to my stress rather than relieving it. In the moment it feels good, but then the feeling  of chaos that comes with being so out of control just adds to the stress.


• OK, and this is the hardest one to write about: I just don't feel very connected to my fellow human beings. My communication with family, coworkers and friends is cursory and strained much of the time, when it happens at all. I yearn for more meaningful contact in my life and fly around trying to be all things to all people falling short (I mean, who wouldn't?)

I have nicknamed all this The Five D's: Distance, Dissolution, Disease, Disability, and Death. A cheery group. The point here is, though, that these happen to us all and happen all the time. We are all moving away from each other, if not geographically, then emotionally. We are also all moving toward each other; it is a shifting dance. Dissolution, Disease, Disability, Death—these are in the nature of what it is to be alive, at least if one does not die young. We must all face the dissolution of who we are today in order to become who we will be tomorrow. That it happens gradually for most of us is no proof against having to face the reality of it.

I know that much of what goes on with me is a lack of trust. My meditation group was talking about this just the other day. I don't trust easily and do so rarely. I have pretty good experiential proof that people are not trustworthy. Life itself is one patch of shifting sand after another; it's hard to even trust the ground upon which I stand. Which is the whole point! Yes, the Buddha would say, yes, now you've got it! Nothing is substantial, all is shifting, cloudlike, unable to support your weight. Lie back. There is nothing to do. Nothing to be. Nothing to become but free. It is enough.

Who, me?

When I describe someone, I sometimes wonder how that person would in turn describe me. The hope is that it would not suffice to say, "You know, that asshole". I'm pretty sure that's not it. But is has occurred to me that "intimidating" might be an adjective one would choose. I remember once (not long ago) I said to a boss, "I don't think of myself as the least bit intimidating". "But," she bluntly replied, "you are". I have suspected for some time that, especially at work, I am more respected than liked. Not a bad thing (it could be neither!), but not the most desirable condition.

I don't know what to make of all that, but I do know that I have discovered, by being more aware of how people respond to me, that I am most certainly not the person I wish to be. I view myself as open, kind, loving, and generous. I'm not, though. This is not a morbid reflection, just an observation. I was in conflict with a family member not long ago (I wrote about it before) and what became most evident was how very unclear I was (and am) about the effect of what I say and how I am. In many important ways I am entirely blind. What a discovery to make this late in life.

I suppose that in some ways this is quite good—what it implies is that I both care and am noticing how what I do ripples out into the world. I have to assume that prior to this awareness I was blundering through and creating wreckage everywhere I went while thinking I was doing pretty damn well. I have a coworker who, it seems to me, believes she is a benign force in the world, a person who is both doing well and doing good. But my perception of her is of a steamroller, flattening those who don't agree with her perception of what is good and truly perplexed that anyone could disagree with her vision of how things should be. After I get over being annoyed with her, with a jolt I realize I do exactly the same thing! I am not accusing either of us of malfeasance; I think we're both just clueless about our impact in the world. I'm trying to get a clue here, that's all.

I have always distrusted the idea that we abhor in others qualities we dislike in ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously. It seems to me a concept too smug and simplistic. And yet, when I look around me, that idea seems to conform to what I see. Another example: there is a meditation teacher in my town who I really don't much care for because he is self-satisfied, cranky, aloof, and intellectually arrogant. Hmm...sound a bit familiar?

This could easily begin to seem like unstinting criticism, but that's not what I'm getting at, not at all. I am pretty fond of myself (odd how in the West this sentiment has come to be seen as vanity, whereas in most cultures it is simply assumed that people think well of themselves). On the other hand, as Suzuki Roshi said, "You are perfect just as you are...and you could all use some work".

There is also a place for full-hearted acceptance of myself as I am. But I admit to being a bit confused about where acceptance leaves off and complacency begins. I don't want to be a jerk and leave it at that. "Oh, well, I broke your toes stepping all over you, too bad, that's just how I am". On the other hand, I can't and won't be eternally subject to the opinions of others in how I shape my actions and attitudes. That way madness lies.

Anatomy of anger

I had the opportunity last week to observe closely the workings of anger in me. It is very like what I imagine would be the movement of poison in my body. I mean this not as an analogy, but quite literally. Prior to the anger I was feeling clear and peaceful, so the change was that much more evident. When the anger descended on me it changed (as it seemed) my whole world.

The what and who and why of this anger doesn't much matter, nor does its justification or lack thereof. Have you noticed this? Anger is an indiscriminate toxin and has the same effect no matter how holy or unholy the triggering event.

Someone did something, then, and I reacted. I felt the surge of my righteous indignation first, and this always feels so reassuring, so powerful. I spend much of my life feeling either neutral or powerless (might as well admit it), that this adrenalin rush feels like a revelation. But it doesn't last.

Then comes that sickening feeling of the aftermath of the rush, the anger hangover which, like an actual hangover, lasts far longer than the pleasure. It is a physical as well as a psychic phenomenon, a nausea, an exhaustion, a sensation something akin to the bodily response to grief. And I know, after all, what the grief is for: I wish to be a better person than this, and have wished so for as long as I can remember. I grieve that I'm not.

And I craved. I craved sugar and warm milk and comfort and reassurance. I craved certainty and power and love and appreciation. I craved escape and clarity and unchallenged correctness. I craved fat and salt and gooeyness. I craved a solution that would make it all right.

A powerful drug, this anger.

Then it passed as if it had never been. It left a bit of destruction in its wake, though thankfully nothing like the wreckage my anger used to create. What had seemed so real and important now appeared to be a mere mirage.

I am reminded that anger is fear. I suspect there are instances where this is not so, but I have yet to come up with any. And this anger was most certainly fear. And what is the antidote to fear? Not courage, I think, though that certainly helps. I think the antidote to fear must be compassion. When I am living in my fear, my heart is closed, in a defensive crouch. If I can open my heart to the source of my fear--if only a little--the feelings dissipate and I can begin to see what I feared as the chimera it is. It is enough.

Tigers

Nazradin the Holy Fool was once found outside his house throwing garlic around. His neighbor was incredulous and asked him what in the world he thought he was doing. "Why," said Nazradin, "I am spreading this garlic about to fend off  tigers." "You idiot," replied the neighbor, "there are no tigers in this part of the country." "Ah, ha, so you can see," said Nazradin, "how well it works!"

I do this. My tigers are different beasts—the opinions of others, illness, aging, work stress, concern for my parents, money. And my garlic is worry, habitual behaviors, compulsiveness, the urge to complete tasks I have assigned to myself. And when the outcomes are good, I credit what I have done. When the outcomes are less desirable, well, life is just not very fair.

I have noticed another tendency in myself recently. I began to think that life is full of booby traps. I have plenty of evidence: I pull down a book and another falls down. I walk down the street and the sidewalk reaches up to trip me. I go to work and the ideas that others come up with to help guide my work are intended not to help but to obfuscate. I take the fork from the drawer and a spoon comes with it. I am in a hurry and all the lights are red. But I have a solution: if I can only be meticulous enough in all my actions, I can avoid mishaps. When I can't, the world is out to get me. Or something like that.

One of the most important teachings I have absorbed from the teachings of the Buddha is that It's Not Personal. How odd that I, that any of us, should believe that, out of 7,000,000,000 people on the planet, the forces of the world should be aligned against (or for) any one of us. It is the ultimate egotism. Not to mention the fact that, you know, these things just happen. Gravity is in force. The string from one thing gets caught on the clasp of another and pulls it. It is the nature of strings and clasps. This may inconvenience me (if I choose to think of it that way), but it's not a Worldwide Vendetta Against Me. The Buddha said that this egocentrism, this assumption that we are the center of the universe, even our own personal universe, is a primary source of suffering.

There is no more certain sign of spring for me than when the robins begin to guide me. Surely you have experienced this: a robin will perch on the sidewalk or a nearby fence and allow you to get quite close, closer than at any other time of year. It will then hop away several feet and wait for you to follow. Eventually, you will have followed far enough and it will fly away. What it is doing is pretending to be vulnerable in order to lead you away from its nest. I feel like saying to the silly bird, "As if!" As if, first of all, I am any threat to you or your nest; as if I am stupid enough to be misled by you, as if I walked your direction in pursuit of you. But from the robin's perspective, of course, the subterfuge works perfectly; I do, after all, move on. Just like the dog that barks so you will be frightened away and then, sure enough, you go on past.

I do this, too. I bark to protect myself when there is no real threat. I must be right or I am wrong which, though it seems obvious,  isn't really so. Sometimes things just are and there is no value associated with them.  Like the robin, I manipulate a situation to my supposed advantage, then take credit for it when it would have come out that way in any case. I have a friend who believes the world is essentially an unsafe place. There is plenty of evidence, of course: rapes, murders, gunmen, fires, floods, earthquakes, tornados, stalkers, thieves, con artists and war. But there is more safety here than danger. There is more kindness than cruelty, more love than hate, more courage than cowardice, more openheartedness than greed. When I, when any of us, find ourselves assuming the worst and thinking that way of thinking can make us happy or even safe, we are looking in the wrong place for what we most desperately want. Why would we do this?

There is another story of Nazradin. He was under a streetlight in front of his house on his hands and knees. One of his friends came by and asked what he was doing. "I have lost my keys," he replied, "and cannot get into my house". "Oh, my," said the friend, let me help you." After searching fruitlessly for a while, the friend asked, "So, where exactly did you lose your keys, my friend?" "Oh," said Nazradin, "in that alley over there." "What? What's that you say? Well, then why in the world are we looking over here." "Well," said Nazradin, "the light is better here."

It is enough.

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.

A Spiritual Giant

I sometimes feel as if I am misrepresenting myself in this blog as some kind of spiritual giant, perhaps giving the impression that I am serene and peace-loving, that I never create discord and am never in conflict in my heart. None of this is true. I struggle a lot. I am very judgmental and believe myself to be right most of the time. I think your opinion is based in ignorance and that if I can just educate you adequately you will change your mind to my way of thinking. (Arrogant much?) Anger seems to be on my back burner much of the time. I am frustrated by work and family struggles.

If only you knew how ____________ I am! (Take your pick: sad, clever, intelligent, loving, bad, angry, depressed, wonderful).

I am confused. A lot. When I feel confused or frustrated I resort to anger. Quite often. I am deeply imperfect. I sometimes feel deeply guilty about all this. So what gives me the notion that I can write a blog about things like spiritual awareness? I struggle with this question, not so much as it regards me (I already know how imperfect I am so am not too worried about it; besides, you can choose to read it or not), but as it pertains to other spiritual teachers. I look at them and see, in some cases, anger, in others, intolerance, in yet others, egregiously bad behavior and think, what business do they have being teachers?

This reminds me of a story I heard about Sharon Salzberg, a prominent American meditation teacher. When she was seeking to be ordained as a teacher by her master (I think it was Sayadaw U Pandita, but I'm not sure), she was very young (in her early 20s) and he noted that, asking something along the lines of, "Surely at your young age, you could not have realized the end of suffering." To which she responded, "No, but I know with great certainty that there is an end to it", which answer fully satisfied him.

I know there is a path. I know that the terminus of the path is the end of suffering. I also know that every waystation along the path is a place of greater peace, filled with light, kinder, less judgemental. I (like everyone else, I suspect) wish the end of the path would arrive sooner, or at least that I could get close enough to be less of a grump, less uncertain, less sad. But that's not the way it works. I am on this path. This path is a good path. I hope with all my heart that others will want to pursue this path. That is why I write about it. Not because I am near the end of it, but because I know where it leads and that it is a place of peace, harmony, balance, caring, openheartedness, kindness, generosity, and deep faith in the rightness of the world as it is. And because I have seen progress, in myself and in others. It is enough.