Meeting with Rinpoche

Several of the people on the pilgrimage met with Lama Norlha Rinpoche last night to get his blessing and advice for the trip. I was not able to make it, but Lama Karma thoughtfully recorded the meeting for those of us who couldn't be there. Some things that stuck out from the meeting were:

This is an extraordinary opportunity to receive daily teachings from H.H. the Karmapa.

Being on pilgrimage and visiting these extraordinary holy places will change you. He also said to look for the difference when we return. It is best to take advantage of the opportunity of these powerful places and use it to generate merit. When negative things happen, illness, tiredness etc, think "I am doing this for the benefit of all beings," and use it as a purification. Indeed when we rise in the morning, say "Today everything I do will be for the benefit of all beings," and when we go to bed,  review the day and rejoice in all of the positive things we did, and also see where we went wrong and vow to do better.

Be careful what you drink and what you eat. Don't trust the water! I've heard this several times, but it's good to hear it reiterated since I wasn't sure how much of this was western prejudice.

Off to India and Nepal Tomorrow

I'll be heading to India and Nepal on a month-long pilgrimage tomorrow. I am excited about it. I've never done anything quite like it before. A group of 10 of us led by Lama Karma will going around to various holy sites and hopefully visiting with high lamas and getting an in-depth Buddhist experience. I am not taking my computer with me, but I do plan on keeping a journal, and I hope to post pictures and descriptions once I return. We're starting out at the Kagyu Monlam in Bodh Gaya, which is a giant festival in which multiple offerings are made and many prayers are chanted. There will also be teachings. I've got my portable radio with headphones so that I can listen to the English translation that will be locally broadcast to the audience.

Buddhist celebrations are hard work. Getting up early. Fasting. Chanting and making offerings without rest. The idea is to use every second of the day in generating merit. We'll have just completed a 36 hour journey, so we'll be exhausted, but I'm still looking forward to it! I just shaved my head, so now I don't have to pack a comb. All is set.

The Dharmic Map

I mentioned in my last post Ajahn Punnadhammo's image of crossing a stream as an analogy for the Buddhist path. The idea is that to reach the other sure, at some point, you have to step out into the water unsupported, a proverbial leap of faith. However, without any evidence that you are headed in an appropriate direction, what motivation is there to do so? Here's where another analogy Ajahn gave becomes relevant. Imagine you have a map of an unfamiliar area, but you don't know whether or not it is accurate. You start to use is provisionally, knowing that it could be wrong. As you continue to use it, you notice that where it says there's a town, when you get there, there's a town with the same name on the map, and so forth. Then, even though you haven't been everywhere on the map, the more towns it correctly identifies, the more and more confidence you have that the map is right. This has matched my own experience. Hitting signposts in my practice that the texts say will be there. Still, it's hard for me to break through my attachment to this life, even though I have full confidence in the dharma.

The three characteristics of phenomena

I just got back from the first in a series of teachings by Ajahn Punnadhammo, a monk in the Thai Forest tradition of Theravadan Buddhism. He's come to Knoxville twice before, and I've always gotten a lot out of his teachings. It's interesting because Theravadan Buddhism has many significant conceptual differences from Tibetan Buddhism, and yet there are also surprisingly deep similarities and parallels. I personally think it's a great complement to the Tibetan tradition. I wanted to record here one particular teaching that I had not heard before, and which I feel penetrates pretty deeply.

The teaching is that all compounded phenomena are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, suffering and not-self. 

Impermanence: This one is easy to see conceptually. All objects are in a constant state of change. Modern science of course confirms that things are changing very rapidly at an atomic level moment by moment, and we can see with our own eyes that things that come together always fall apart. Even though we know this, yet there is a very strong mental habit to see things as unchanging.

Suffering: Ajahn didn't elaborate on this too much tonight except to note that when we are still, we often experience pain and discomfort in our body. The nature of the body is suffering. (I should mention that this particular teaching, that all compounded phenomena are marked by suffering, is a big bone of contention. It's a teaching that many people do not want to accept.)

Not-self: All phenomena are empty of self. This is one of the characteristic teachings of the Buddha, and is another one that people find confusing and often misinterpret. I'll confine myself to explaining what Ajahn said tonight, even though there's a ton more to say. Namely, we have a strong mental habit of perceiving complex assemblies of processes and parts as a unitary whole. However that is just a conceptual fabrication. It's not really what's there.

I had come across in Tibetan teachings the fact that all compounded phenomena are marked by the above three characteristics. The new feature I hadn't been exposed to was the teaching on how these three characteristics are masked or disguised, which I'll now summarize:

Impermanence is masked by a sense of continuity. The perception that events continuously transform one into the other. However, it is asserted in the abhidharma that reality is actually digital and not analog. If you look closely enough, events are arising moment by moment and then disappearing. One moment arises, then disappears, and when the next moment arises it is similar to the previous one due to karmic cause and effect, so that when seen at high speed, it looks continuous. In the Tibetan tradition this is talked about as one way of perceiving reality, and Lamas have mentioned being able to experience this directly through meditation. I asked Ajahn tonight as well whether it is possible to directly experience this kind of flickering in and out aspect of reality, and he confirmed that it is.

Not-self is masked by a sense of compactness. A collecting of diverse phenomena and parts into one singular whole.

Suffering is masked by movement. Ajahn brought up the specific example of a person experiencing pain while meditating. After a while, the pain becomes too much and the person moves to a new position, whereupon the pain builds up again and the cycle repeats. The pain in each case is masked by movement. It takes the mind a while to recognize the novel configuration as being suffering. This resonates with me quite a bit, and not just because I've noticed this very cycle with physical pain. In a big way, I've noticed this cycle with mental discontent. When the mind is still, it is uncomfortable. It is experiencing suffering. So the mind moves in various ways. In meditation it will start to daydream or grasp onto various conceptual fabrications. During the day the mind will reach for the iPhone to check email or Facebook. I think this is a pretty close analogue to fidgeting to relieve physical suffering. Reflexively checking Facebook and the like is a way of distracting the mind from the inherent suffering in compounded phenomena.

Of course, if that were the entire dharma, that would be pretty depressing. The idea of Buddhism, at least as expressed in this tradition, is that true happiness and cessation of suffering can only come about by realizing the "unconditioned" or nibbana (this is the Pali term. Nirvana is the Sanskrit term). In my own personal journey, I'm at the point where I'm utterly convinced of the three marks of conditioned phenomena as I outlined above, but I don't yet have a deep resonance with the idea of liberation.  Having seen and experienced certain things, I have a lot of trust in the dharma, and I am certainly open to the idea of complete liberation as expressed in the idea of nibbana, but there's also a big part of me that seizes on the nihilistic viewpoint. Everything is falling apart, so why does anything matter? What's the point of anything? I obviously can't neatly resolve these two great rivers in my mindstream (the dharma and nihilism) with a short post before I go to bed, but I believe the dharma is there to carry me forward.

Edit: Ajahn gave an analogy which I remembered after the talk. Imagine a stream that takes three steps to cross. There is a branch on each shore that you can cling to to help you cross, but for the middle step, you can't reach either branch. The path to liberation is like that. The near shore is samsaric existence, our habitual tendencies. The far shore is the experience of nibbana. In order to get there, there is a point in the middle where you have to let go of the branch on the near shore before you can grab the branch on the far shore. I suppose that's where I am right now. Once a being has some experience of nibbana (who is then called a stream-winner in the terminology used by Ajahn), then even though that experience hasn't stabilized -- perhaps it was just a glimpse -- they still have seen its concrete reality and will continue to make progress after that. They have grabbed the branch on the far shore.

Guru Rinpoche, Father Rinpoche

I just attended a fantastic weekend retreat on Guru Rinpoche. My Dharma Path mentor, Lama Karma, a fantastically gifted teacher, led it. It was based on a practice he received in India from a Lama there, whose name unfortunately escapes me. Karma began the retreat by having everyone sit in a "council circle." There were about 7 of us. He had us pass around a vajra, and we were only allowed to speak while holding it. We were encouraged to share where we were mentally and emotionally at this start of the retreat, and more in particular how we related to the guru principle. When the vajra came around to me, I shared that this reminded me of an A.A. meeting, and although I didn't say it at the time, I meant in a good way. The sacred space that is created when sangha members can share honestly and openly is a real treasure. I certainly felt that was great part of A.A. when I was attending it. I began by saying "I'm Jim and I'm an alcoholic." As the group moved into a second round of more free-form talking with responses to others comments (still limited to one person at a time) somebody mentioned that your parents are your first gurus, and someone else mentioned that they had heard this too, but were resistant to it. I shared that my difficult relationship with my father is something I clearly have to work on! If I can't even handle the guru relationship as manifested in this familial setting, I'm not going to be able to get the full handle of it more cosmically.

Later on, as I was reflecting on this, I came to the conclusion that this was a problem that needs solving but that I am too afraid to approach. I don't feel like I have the strength. Of course, in a Buddhist Mahayana context, there is no "I" to not have that strength, so the problem is an illusion. In a more Vajrayana context, and in tune with A.A.'s higher power philosophy, I had the insight that perhaps I can do it with the help of the "cosmic guru," Guru Rinpoche, or let his wisdom manifest through me. (Or let our coemergent wisdom shine forth and illuminate the universe!)

A while ago Lama Yeshe Palmo, in response to some other personal issues I was having, suggested I read the book "Through a dark wood," by James Hollis. This is a great book by a Jungian psychologist, and his main thesis is that people start manifesting negative symptoms when their manifested self becomes out of sync with their true self. This is certainly in tune with my understanding of Buddhist belief. The true self is one's innate Buddha nature and we suffer when we can't ignore the lie we've constructed around ourselves. Hollis suggests a few methods for eliciting the true self's desires (he didn't use that word, but it seems right) from the unconscious mind. One of these is dream analysis, and I certainly feel that dreams do indeed communicate information about the unconscious. This happens, I believe, in the creation of the dreams, but also in reflection upon them. Even if the dream content has a random element, then it still serves as a kind of Rorschach test when reflected upon.

This morning I had a disturbing but surely significant dream. The dream had several stages, and I don't remember all of them clearly, but at the very end, I was with my Dad in a bathroom in San Francisco. (We had been walking around the city earlier with two other people, who were now missing. [Insight upon reading: the people we once were?]) I spotted a growth on my arm, and it looked like a small female breast. This was rather disturbing. Then my Dad put his arms around me and started repeating "I love you so much!" and I was very irritated by this. I tried pushing him away, but the alarm went off at exactly that moment, I had the irritated sense of not having been able to make the dream the way I wanted it (with my Dad pushed away) before I woke up. [My unconscious mind is a barrel of laughs, timing that exactly for my alarm!] I don't know what it all means. The phrase "I love you so much!" was one that came up on the retreat when one of the other retreatants saw a new dog, and just couldn't help exclaiming that. The San Francisco setting is interesting. That's fairly close to San Diego phonetically, and that's where my relationship with my dad hit some kind of breaking point. The growth on my arm was related to the fact that I had found some painful lumps under my armpit (swollen lymph nodes) before sleeping, the internet said that this could be a sign of breast cancer in women, and I had seen a headline about how it is common to have third vestigial breasts in women that look like little birthmarks. That's the source material for the dream. Writing about this now, this brings up the strong connotation that I had found myself with a terminal disease, and the reason my dad was hugging me was because I was going to die soon. So I think a kind of awareness of mortality, or even irritation at mortality was a definite subtext in the dream. My response to the dream, which was to continue to be irritated, is consistent with my analysis earlier on retreat. Clearly I feel like I should reconcile my relationship with my dad, but at the same time there is a huge amount of resistance within me. It's a deep rut carved in my mind since childhood, and like so many other mental habits, will not be overcome overnight. Dealing with my addictive behavior with respect to alcohol was a slow process, and this one is just as entrenched.

The fact that I had this dream anyway, and the work I did at the retreat, and my continued dharma practice make me feel like I am making progress on this big mental block in myself. I guess I will just continue to sit with the unease, and try to open up into the resistance as much as is comfortable to begin to break it up. Whether or not talking to my Dad, or being physically near him is a good idea or not (it may very well be that it's not), the strong resistance in my mind is definitely a big problem. If I decide that I can't be near him, it needs to be a decision borne from a place of love and without resentment.

Seeds of the Holocaust

Part of the story that I construct about myself, and I believe this is true of a lot of people, is that I am basically a good person. Sure I mess up here and there, but by and large what I do is moral and right. Occasionally, when I do something, it will be accompanied by a bad feeling, like "I know this is wrong," but by and large my actions are accompanied by a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, being myself, playing on the home field, surrounded by my familiar mental environment. (Which is interesting given how my self-criticizing faculty and desire to please others are undeniably acting from behind the scenes, and often fairly overtly.) Part of the process of this blog has been for me to identify certain things, that while "obviously" pathological in others, are difficult to recognize as such in one's own mindstream. I talked about the delusions experienced by a schizophrenic, and how I could find certain experiences of mine which, while not as grandiose or pervasive as full-blown schizophrenia, could at least be seen to have a similar nature: a mental mechanism inappropriately labeling a mental event as "absolutely certain." I also talked about clearly seeing racial prejudice in myself, but only after giving myself the space to look. Today, I want to talk about an incident from my childhood which I think gives some insight into how the Holocaust could have happened with the complicity of so many people who we would otherwise expect to behave morally.

I was going to the circus with my Mom. I was living with my Dad in central NJ, but my Mom was taking me to the circus in NYC. Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey. I was very excited to see the circus, and happy to be with my Mom. We were  outside on the sidewalk with a crowd, waiting for a door to open. When it did, we all rushed forward, and I noticed a prone figure on the ground right outside the door. A homeless person was lying there. I was momentarily confused. Here was a person on the ground, with no shelter, possibly in distress. Why was nobody helping him, or even acknowledging his presence? Then I did what must be an easy thing for humans to do, I accepted what the crowd had communicated. This person was not to be acknowledged.

There are so many conflicting messages along these lines that we are sent as kids and adults. Childrens' books and TV programs tend to promote love and inclusiveness and this is a message I ate up as a kid. It certainly felt right then and still does now. But then, experiences like the one above with the homeless person at the circus begin to create a dissonance. The world is not sending a consistent message, and our behavior starts to become confused and inauthentic. Looking back at this incident, seeing how easily I recategorized a living person as subhuman, not to even be acknowledged, I begin to see how a society could do the same with Jews, or other racial groups. Society sends very powerful messages, and our brains seem fairly hardwired to accept them, perhaps as part of our biological evolution as a social animal. And reflecting on this, it becomes much more plausible to me that this sort of thing could happen again in a western democracy.

I'm not saying that people are mindless automatons and when enough racism takes hold in society, everyone's brains will suddenly start switching from nonracist to racist. I believe that, at least in the U.S., the country I am most familiar with, we are making progress. However, it is sobering to reflect that I can see a similar process in myself as that which contributed to much of German society going along with the persecution and murder of so many in their midst.  All the more reason to promote mindfulness and consciousness, so we can recognize these tendencies in ourselves and as a society, and help prevent future atrocities.

Dreams and the Vajrayana

At this stage in my life, I'm not in the habit of remembering my dreams, but I had a pretty vivid one last night. I was looking through my grandmother's old apartment at various artifacts, missing my grandmother. I recall seeing a wooden ipad with a completely transparent screen. In fact, kind of like an empty picture frame, but maybe with electronics. At some point, I realized I was dreaming and it occurred to me to try to dream my grandmother into existence. I saw a movement in the door, and excitedly I went through to take a closer look, but it was someone else, another older woman with very little resemblance. I woke up, but I was still dreaming, and the rest is vaguer. I was discussing with someone else the meaning of the dream. We concluded that the sadness I feel for the loss of my grandmother is not the problem. It's something else, yet to be discovered.

In the context of my self-analysis via this blog, this is very interesting. I restarted this blog because I felt I had some kind of block which I needed to assess and deal with, and a couple major things came up for me as I went through this process. Anger at my Dad, sadness at the loss of my Grandmother, heightened sensitivity to racism and injustice, and I do feel like I am making some sort of progress, like peeling back the layers of an onion. On the other hand, I kind of agree with the dream that the main block has not yet been found or dealt with, and I'm not even sure what it might be or how it should be conceptualized. The Buddhist methods for freeing your mind are different from the psychoanalytic or therapeutic approach, in the sense that when you meditate, you are not actively searching for causes. A teacher I respect, Lama Karma Chötso, put it eloquently. She said that when you are ready to deal with something, it will naturally present itself to your mind to process. My own analysis is that calm abiding meditation gives you the space to see what your mind is doing. There are also so-called Vajrayana techniques of meditation, which are more dynamic, work a lot faster, and as a result, can upend your world over and over. I suspect I am going through such a continued transition now as an outcome of Vajrayana practice. Lama Lena, another Lama who I respect deeply, has said that the aim of Vajrayana practice is to release blockages in the subtle body. These blockages restrict the flow of energy. It's a fairly uncontroversial fact that we all hold emotions in our body. Somatic meditation (body scan meditation) can help put us in tune with this. But even without that, we probably agree that tension can be carried in the shoulders, or are familiar with the sensation of "butterflies in the stomach." Emotions have a very strong somatic component, which becomes increasingly obvious as you train yourself to look for it. (I recall one vivid example of feeling jealousy as a movement of heat in my chest.) Vajrayana takes this to the extreme, and as far as I understand it, says that all of our issues arise from blockages in the subtle body.

I don't think that you can say that every blockage (or mental rut) comes from some childhood trauma, and that therefore the job of self-analysis is to root out childhood experiences. These experiences are important, and as I discovered, become irrascible when neglected, but I don't think they are the whole story or even most of it. Indeed, let's go whole hog into the Vajrayana Buddhist perspective here. According to that, the habits we've built up in this lifetime pale in comparison to what we've done in our previous infinitely many lifetimes. We've built up a lot of mental habits over the course of these lifetimes, and these ruts are very well worn. From that perspective, dealing with only the issues of this lifetime actually only scratches the surface. Looking at my own mind, I do sense a vastness and depth that seem to be too complex for one lifetime to account for. That's just an intuition.

I do feel like I'm making progress on the path, and that the dharma and my teachers are working essentially as they should. Calm abiding meditation and Vajrayana practices are quite different. In the first one, the mind is pacified by reducing outward stimulus. One makes oneself and one's environment calm. In the Vajrayana, that inner peace is cultivated in the face of an outer hurricane. Last Thursday, I chanted the Chenrezi sadhana with the local sangha, and I had the experience of having certain negative emotions amplified during the entire session, and then afterwards, they basically went away, were turned off like a switch. The interesting thing is that I watched the whole process as it happened, as if from a short distance, and it didn't bother me at all. To connect with my previous description, I felt an inner calmness, even in the face of strong(ish) emotions that would normally occupy my attention, and probably trigger a sense of shame. "I'm chanting this peaceful practice for the benefit of all sentient beings, but I can't maintain a pure attitude. Shame on me!"  It was a very interesting experience, and I think emblematic of the way Vajrayana works.

So, the takeaway message seems to be, keep doing my dharma practices, and things will unfold as they should, but probably not the way I expect them to!

Review of "Time and Now" by Steve Hagen

Recently I clicked on the article "Time and Now" in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. It caught my attention with the first couple of sentences

How could it be that the Buddha's enlightenment occurred simultaneously with all beings? Didn't this event happen a long time ago? And if it already happened, where is it now? Doesn't "all beings" include us?

In various Buddhist texts, seemingly counterfactual statements along these lines are made. One such saying is that when the Buddha was enlightened, so were all sentient beings. Actually, this sort of cryptic comment was one of the first hooks that got me interested in Buddhism. Although I didn't understand what this and other statements meant, they sounded deep and I wanted to learn more. On the other hand, since I've become a Buddhist, I actually haven't heard a teacher address the particular phenomenon mentioned in this quote, so it was with high expectation that I read the article.

Unfortunately, my expectations were foiled. In a nutshell, the author mentions several modern physical theories, described in everyday language ---which is fine---, but with no indication of how accepted they are by the modern physics community ---which is not fine. Further, there are no sources or clues for the interested reader to research more carefully the various claims and models that are casually bandied about. It treats physics like an oracle, which can be relied on for certain cryptic pronouncements. In a way, the article felt condescending.

Okay, so let's go through the article a bit more carefully. The first physical model that is introduced "has been around since the 1940s." I already have no idea what he is talking about historically, but the model is clear enough. For the purposes of illustration one imagines that the universe is only two dimensional, and then imagines stacking all of the different moments of time on top of one another to get a stack of snapshots of the universe. These fit together to make a three dimensional whole, and one can imagine the progression of time as  the rise of a cross-section like an elevator through the 3D block. Hagen goes on to point out that time need not be considered movement. The 3D block (or in our universe the 4D block exists) and the passage of time can be regarded as an illusion of consciousness. There are certain paths through the block which correspond to the lives of people, and if you read the path in one direction, memories accumulate and time seems to be passing for the observer. The idea of a uniform 4D universe which exists outside of time dates back to Einstein in 1916 at least, if not earlier.  I have no idea why Hagen refers to the 1940s. A reference would have been nice.
 
As far as how mainstream this theory is, you can't get more widely accepted than general relativity. So the idea that the whole 4D universe already exists, including both past and future, would seem to be an ineluctable consequence. To be fair, the philosophical interpretation of general relativity is far from clear. But anyway, we're resting on pretty solid ground here. (Although there is a disturbing lack of free will in this completely deterministic model!)

The next model that is discussed is the idea that positrons are electrons traveling backward in time. This is a charming theory, one that the famous physicist Richard Feynman apparently subscribed to, at least during part of his career. If a positron (the antimatter version of the electron) collides with an electron, they both disappear in a flash of photons. One way to conceptualize this is that the electron "bounces off" the photons and is sent careening backward in time as a positron. That appears to be a consistent view, and Feynman described feeling quite excited about this way of thinking. (I once even considered writing a short story based on the phenomenon myself.) However, despite the charm of this interpretation, it doesn't actually seem to solve any questions, and furthermore doesn't seem to give us any insight into the passage of time that wasn't already gained by thinking of the 4D model of the universe as existing all at once, as opposed to being continuously created. I would say that the interpretation of positrons as backward-traveling electrons is respectable in the physics community, though perhaps not widely shared. Feynman himself would later downplay the idea, feeling that it didn't lead anywhere, and I think a lot of modern physicists would take a similar view. (Please correct or corroborate!)

Now we get to the last example, which is the one I find the most bothersome.

To put it in highly simplified terms, physicists are beginning to hypothesize something like the following. When, say, an electron in your kitchen vibrates, it sends out a signal traveling at the speed of light through all of time and space. When another electron receives that signal, it vibrates sympathetically and sends a return signal back to the original electron in your kitchen. Each electron gets this information from other particles anywhere and everywhere—indeed, from literally everything that it reaches out to touch in all of time and space. As a result of this process, each electron "knows" its exact place and importance in the universe.

I think he may be referring to the theory of pilot waves, which is a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics that has its small number of adherents. It is certainly a respectable theory, but not widely shared in the modern physics community. I expected more of Steve Hagen, but what is "As a result of this process, each electron "knows" its exact place and importance in the universe." supposed to mean? That is a fine example of new age technobabble. The main point of the pilot wave example is to again give evidence that time is not what we commonly perceive it to be. He could easily have done this without invoking controversial physics. 

In the end, he gave no satisfying connection between the physics discussed and the enigmatic Buddhist quotes beyond the bare fact that physics supports the illusory nature of time. I had been hoping for an explanation of why it might be reasonable to describe the event of enlightenment as occurring at the same time for all sentient beings, but the discussion as presented could easily have been used to legitimate any weird quote where time doesn't make sense. I felt like there was a bait and switch. 

I once met a dharma student who had given up a career as theoretical physicist to pursue the dharma full time. I mentioned to him that having such detailed knowledge of reality must help his dharma practice, and he scoffed at the notion. He agreed that knowing that matter is made up of strangely behaving "particles" is helpful for breaking down our usual solid notions of reality, but the details of complicated physical theories don't really help. The current article has not refuted his view. 

Cultural psychosis

A friend of mine posted this story on the warnings that black women give their male children about surviving in a white world on Facebook today, adding that he remembered getting this talk when he was five. Reading the testimonials of what black women were telling their sons, deep sobs built in me and gushed outward. Anyone who knows me knows that this is pretty uncharacteristic behavior, and I am not sure exactly what caused me to empathize so deeply right now. Possibly opening to my own childhood pain has given me a point of reference. This is a deep tragedy happening to so many kids all around us all the time. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody really knows how to talk about it, and much of the conversation seems stuck on whether racism really exists. I think the problem is that people have largely unexamined irrational unconscious or implicit beliefs which affect their actions. The implicit bias website, Project Implicit, tests for such hidden biases, and many people find biases within themselves that they had previously been unaware of. As well, there have been a number of illustrative studies on racism. A notable one involved sending identical resumes to employers, one with a white-sounding name and one with a more black-sounding name. Employers were more likely to hire the person whose name sounded white.

Meditation is a great tool for bringing unconscious beliefs to the fore. I have had this happen to me time and again. My mind would do something reflexive and the meditation practice gave me the space and training to notice that it happened. Once these implicit beliefs become conscious, they become far less powerful. They like to operate under cover in the dark. The light of day tends to evaporate them. Of course, the more engrained the belief, the longer this process will take. Yesterday I was riding my bike down the street and I saw a group of black teenagers hanging out on the side of the road. My first thought was fear and even the fleeting thought that I hope they don't kill me. That reaction lay unexamined in my mind until today when I realized what I had done. Unconscious racism. Now that that reaction is exposed under the full light of my conscious awareness I am deeply ashamed and embarrassed by it, but with it in sight, I can not listen to it or be controlled by it. I suspect that a lot of people suppress such self-analysis in defense of ego. Even as I write this, it worries me what other people will think, but how are we going to root out racism if we can't see it when it's right in front of our faces?


I think one of the ways racism and sexism functions is via archetypes. The mind has a culturally informed ''typical example" of certain categories, like say "scientist." For many people, the archetypal scientist is an older white guy, perhaps in a lab coat. When we are not careful, this archetype informs our thinking in pretty deep ways. I really like the comic strip Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, because the author consciously evenly distributes the role of scientist to men, women, whites and blacks, as well as gay and straight characters. This is something that would have been difficult for old time comics distributed in printed newspapers because the confusion that it causes among readers eats into the bottom line. This is similar to why commercials tend to reinforce stereotypes. Challenging your unconscious beliefs will associate discomfort in your mind with their product, so it's better to reinforce your beliefs from the profit perspective. Aware of the strong sexist tendencies in society, I try to do something similar in my classes. I try to use the female pronoun as often as the male pronoun, and in particular when I crack jokes, which I am wont to do, I try to include both genders fairly. Looking through humor on the internet is actually kind of depressing because jokes tend to lay bare the archetypes I've been talking about.  If a joke mentions a mathematician, for example, that mathematician is almost always male, because that is the normative trait for the defining archetype, and mentioning a female mathematician, when it is not relevant to the punchline, strikes many people as artificial. Which is completely fucking nuts. The idea that white and male is normative is as universal as it is pathological. It's a cultural psychosis.

Anyway, feeling the pain of my friend and so many other millions of kids so personally and deeply has made me renew my efforts to lay bare and root out the manifestations of that psychosis in myself.

An evolving relationship with the guru

When I started this blog back up a few weeks ago, it was clear to me that I had a block and I needed to deal with it. I didn't expect to be revisiting my childhood and my dad's mental illness, but I think it was beneficial on the whole. I'm not sure that was my block though. Indeed, I doubt that it is so simple. Really, I just need to hit the mat and keep meditating and practicing. I don't want this blog to become just about my dad's schizophrenia. I'd rather keep talking about my practice and development.

I just returned from a weekend program with my root teacher Lama Norlha Rinpoche. My relationship with my guru is evolving. Before I first met him, when I heard a lama was coming to town, I was kind of grumpy after having already spent a lot of time with a couple previous teachers who had visited. I felt like I needed a rest. As I was walking to a talk he was giving on the U.T. campus, I caught myself being negative, and I recalled Pema Chödron's advice in such circumstances. Wish the person to have happiness and the causes of happiness, and for them to be free of suffering and its causes. So I said a little prayer to that effect and I immediately, and completely unexpectedly, had a very powerful physical and mental experience. I heard the words from the Red Tara sadhana "Returned as wisdom blessings, the light is reabsorbed," ring like a bell in my mind. There was an intense euphoria localized in my torso which then rose and shot out the top of my head. All my negativity was immediately released. Later I asked Lama about this, and he said it was a sign that we knew each other in a previous life. What is very interesting is that I had no idea about the subtle energy body at this point, nor had I heard that experiences like "all the hair on your body standing on end" are relatively common when a person meets their root teacher. I overheard another student of Lama's independently describe a similar experience. I've come to associate Lama with these intense experiences of energy movement in the body, but I sense that that's not what I need now. Indeed, this is a rather superficial effect, even if it lies totally beyond conventional reality. It's not like feeling a short burst of energy can compare to the slow methodical work of sitting on the cushion. I mention this because, although I did feel a subtle energy briefly playing across my scalp after the empowerment this weekend, on the whole I didn't have that kind of experience, and I realize that I was disappointed as a result. In all the advice I've heard and texts that I've read, it always says don't attach to experiences like this. They will never repeat. They are a sign that you are heading in the right direction but they are not the end in itself. In many ways, these signs and experiences are irrelevant to the goal of freedom of mind. I've also read about how one's relationship with one's teacher evolves and changes over time, and moreover the teacher is constantly upending your expectations, not letting you get comfortable on whatever plateau you're stuck on. So all in all, it seems that things are progressing as they should.

Certificates of certitude

I feel like I need to try over on yesterday's post. Based on a couple of comments I received, I'm not sure I conveyed what I was thinking appropriately. That's quite topical, since the inherent unknowability of an an author's thoughts was an example I touched on. It's also abundantly clear to me that the closer we get to trying to communicate the nature of subjective experience and the internal workings of the mind, the further we get from consensual reality. Everyone's mental model of themselves is quite different, I expect. I suppose that's why science concentrates on outer jointly perceived phenomena. The inner phenomena are just as real, but are not subject to the usual tools of science.

So, returning to yesterday's post, let me proceed by analogy. Imagine that statements about the world that have been entertained by the mind are pieces of paper, perhaps with the statement printed on them. Some pieces might say "The sky is blue," "That person is a friend," "I once went to that restaurant," etc. Now I posit that there is a mental faculty that staples a certificate of belief to certain pieces of paper representing statements that the mind has determined are true. This certificate may come in different strengths ranging from absolute certainty to scant possibility. This is what I think goes wrong in schizophrenics, or one of the things that goes wrong. The certificate of strong belief gets wrongly stapled to various thoughts. In some ways, this may sound like a simple problem to deal with. Just stop believing the thoughts with that certificate. My analogy makes that sound rather easy, but I think that the certificate of strong belief is a hair's breadth apart from the strong belief itself, almost identical. If you have a strong belief that something is true, almost by definition you can't disbelieve it, and how do you distinguish the correctly labeled thoughts from the incorrectly labeled ones? What if your whole mental model of the universe has become so distorted from the repeated malfunctioning of this certificate system, that there is no objective way for you to sort out which thoughts are true from which are false?

Yesterday, I referred to "flashes of insight" that sometimes occur for me as a similar phenomenon. My mind attaches a certificate of strong belief to something which I probably couldn't explain or justify in words. I think that sometimes I am right, but it is clear that I am not using a secondary system of judgment to analyze whether the belief is true. I am just trusting the certificate that manifests as absolute certainty in my mind. For me these episodes are rare enough that I could always take the strength of the belief as a warning sign that I should look at it more closely, but what if dozens of strong beliefs were flooding my consciousness daily? Then it wouldn't seem unusual.

Another example of an incorrect certificate occurs with memory. When I was younger, I absolutely trusted my memory. Those memories came with the certificate of belief, so I didn't mistrust them. As the years have passed and I have seen what a fluid thing memory is, I now realize that memories cannot be fully trusted. There's plenty of science to back up how memories change over time, similar incidents get consolidated, roles get revised, etc. It's also almost universal that every time I jointly recall an event with another person there will be significant differences in what we each remember. These memories only have a certificate of moderate certainty for me though, and they are always distant memories. The certificate attached to them is not nearly as strong as the certificate attached to, say, the belief that I am now typing on a computer. It would be well nigh impossible for me to disbelieve that.

So in summary, perhaps a workable model for how belief works is that there is a mental system that attaches certificates of belief to thoughts representing the level of one's belief. I haven't really gone into how that system makes its decisions, which is surely highly complex, but it is just as surely preconscious. Indeed, the fact that it is preconscious makes it difficult to autodiagnose that it is malfunctioning.

Schizophrenia: an untrustworthy spidey sense

After I wrote yesterday's post, I went to bed, and as I was falling asleep, I reflected on the oddity that schizophrenics believe, with absolute conviction, things that fall way outside consensual reality. The mind/brain faultily attaches its imprimatur of approval to delusional thoughts, so that the schizophrenic gets a feeling of certain knowledge associated with marginal thoughts. In a normally functioning individual, the mind sets a much higher bar for what gets this same level of certitude. (E.g. confirmation by others.) Searching through my own experience for something similar, it occurred to me that I occasionally get what might be called "flashes of insight," where I become absolutely certain of something at the edges of consensual reality. It's very rare, but I might see two people interacting on the street and suddenly be absolutely certain they had just been fighting. More commonly, but still rarely, I will be reading a book or watching a movie, and suddenly feel that I know *exactly* what the author was trying to communicate. I say that these experiences are at the edge of consensual reality because the level of conviction that I have in them outweighs the available evidence to a considerable degree, and particularly in the case of reading, it is actually impossible to know whether I am really "getting" what the author was saying. These experiences have never had an oppressive or paranoid quality. They've always felt good, like I just solved a puzzle. They feel like that moment when you are struggling with a mathematical proof, and suddenly everything clicks into place and you see clearly what's going on. While I like to think these little flashes of intuition are often on the mark, I know of at least one case where I was definitely wrong, so it's not an infallible spidey sense. This adds to my suspicion that my "flashes of insight" are part of a continuous spectrum with schizophrenia's large scale delusions. I'll have to be on the lookout for this phenomenon next time it happens to me to see if I can analyze it more closely when it occurs.

Schizophrenia's delusions

Amazingly, I've never really delved that deeply into the available literature on schizophrenia, although my previous research convinced me beyond doubt. After browsing around a little bit, I bought the book "Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual" for my Kindle. Browsing through it, the following passage leapt out at me.

One simple form of a delusion is the conviction that random events going on around the person all relate in a direct way to him or her. If you are walking down the street and a man on the opposite sidewalk coughs, you don't think anything of it and may not even consciously hear the cough. The person with schizophrenia, however, not only hears the cough but may immediately decide it must be a signal of some kind, perhaps directed to someone else down the street to warn him that the person is coming. The schizophrenia sufferer knows this is true with a certainty that few people experience. If you are walking with such a person and try to reason him/her past these delusions, your efforts will probably be futile. Even if you cross the street, and in the presence of the same person, question the man about his cough, the individual will probably just decide that you are part of the plot. Reasoning with people about their delusions is like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket. If, shortly after the cough incident, a helicopter flies overhead, the delusion may enlarge. Obviously the helicopter is watching the person, which further confirms suspicions about the cough. And if in addition to these happenings, the person arrives at the bus stop just too late to catch the bus, the delusional system is confirmed yet again; obviously the person who coughed or the helicopter pilot called the bus driver and told him to leave. It all fits together into a logical coherent whole.

Normal persons would experience these events and simply curse their bad luck at missing the bus. The person with schizophrenia, however, is experiencing different things so the events take on different meaning. The cough and the helicopter noise may be very loud to him/her and even the sound of the bus may be perceived as strange. While the normal person responds correctly to these as separate and unrelated events, similar to the stimuli and events of everyday life, the person with schizophrenia puts them together into a pattern. Thus, both overacuteness of the senses and impaired ability to logically interpret incoming stimuli and thoughts may lie behind many of the delusions experienced by afflicted minds. To them the person who cannot put these special events together must be crazy, not the other way around.

Excerpted from "Surviving Schizophrenia, A Family Manual"
E. Fuller Torrey

The idea that a schizophrenic connects all sorts of dots inappropriately, seeing patterns in random noise, definitely strikes a chord. This is certainly something my dad would do, building an ever-more elaborate delusion as various unrelated stimuli were incorporated into the whole. The example of the cough reminded me of the time my dad told me that when people put their hands up in front of their face, like to scratch their nose or something, when you look at them, that's a result of their spook training to reflexively hide their face when they're on covert ops.

The passage doesn't really explain, however, why the misinterpreted stimuli tend to have a sinister or paranoid character, and why the afflicted individual tends to believe that they are at the center of the pattern. It seems to me that someone who was misinterpreting stimuli more-or-less randomly would not be that hard to get along with. The problem here with my dad and with the schizophrenic in general seems to be that the ego (or sense of self) has expanded to include the whole environment, meaning that dealing with them is very trying. My dad constantly felt that world events were being orchestrated around him. I recall one time there was an FCC hearing on curse words in broadcasting, and he felt this was an attempt to get his broadcast off the air. (After all he would sometimes curse going about his day-to-day life, which, remember, he thought was televised to the world.) He would think that speeches by world leaders were responding to things that he had said. But perhaps together with the expansive ego, there is an expanded threat to ego, which is why threats are seen everywhere. All the negatives that are experienced are projected outwards as the work of a malevolent power. Interestingly, when we were younger my dad also talked about a vast army of good guys who were helping us out and thwarting the bad guys. The bad guys wore red shirts and the good guys wore blue shirts.  However, in recent years the good guys have not been mentioned, only the bad guys, for whatever reason. But maybe this also represents a massive externalization of internal psychological forces.

So my dad's mental processing of the world is highly distorted and it's a wonder we can communicate at all, especially since we could always have relatively high-level and meaningful conversations for minutes on end before some delusional aspect would creep in. The problem is that my conditioned expectation  of him is that he is acting as a normal human being, so that when aberrant behavior manifests, it tugs strongly at my emotions. But of course, evolution programmed me to imprint on and trust my parents, so gaining the necessary distance to interact with him without engaging is difficult. Although his mental model of others is flawed, he can be highly manipulative emotionally (probably subconsciously) which adds another layer of complication.

Anyway, I am looking forward to reading more. It's helpful to have a framework.

Puncturing the shell

When I was in college I was given a book by a relative on short story writing. The book seemed to have a reasonable method. You would start by writing a description of some emotionally laden or traumatic event that happened to you. Then you would go through various steps to revise it, beginning by switching to the third person, and going through various exercises. I decided to try it out, but it's a sign of just how difficult it was to process my crazy life with my dad that I couldn't think of a single emotionally laden event that had happened to me. Seems odd now as it is definitely giving me a lot of writing fuel, but the events were so close and I was compartmentalizing them, pretending that when they were out of sight they no longer existed. I've always had a tendency to not connect the dots in my head, keeping them separate. As a result I am somewhat emblematic of my profession as a professor, being pretty absent-minded. On the one hand, I could trace this to the mental gymnastics I carried out to stay sane when I was young, but seeing it reflected in so many of my colleagues, it could simply be my own inherent personality.

 Perhaps I can track down that book and try it over. I'm finding this frequent writing to be therapeutic, and I can also see how honing the writer's art  could be a source of artistic satisfaction. I ended up not following through back in college because I couldn't put my heart into it. People in my family tend to be isolated from their heart center. We tend to bottle up our emotions so tightly that we are not even aware they exist until they demand to be recognized. In me this manifests in periodic "crises" where the lie I have built up about myself and the world gets too out of sync with my heart and the rubber band snaps. My dad's psychoses tend also to come in waves, and perhaps something similar is going on with him. When he blew up and punched my grandmother, this was perhaps the outlet or repressed anger and frustration.

After I got sober the first time, having an emotional crisis which I needed to deal with, there was a period of time where I felt I was very open-hearted and in tune with the suffering of others. After a while I built up another ego shell around the soft spot in the middle, and I began to shut off from myself and others, losing my noble goals and thinking to manage samsara*. This cycle has repeated itself in smaller and larger waves since then. So the good news is that my inner wisdom is strong enough to periodically break through the shell cutting off my heart center and move me steadily forward in understanding myself and the world.

*Samsara is a Buddhist term which could be translated as "conditioned existence."  It refers to our tendency to grip onto phenomenal reality as inherently real, permanent and a source of genuine satisfaction.

Keywords from my childhood

Here is a list of words that carry sinister meanings from my childhood. They are just words now, but they certainly didn't seem so then. Indeed being with my dad was quite stressful as you never knew what random thing would set him off. I intend to keep editing and revising this as new words and phrases occur to me.

Spooks - the name of the people who were harassing us.

Commies - almost a synonym for spook. There was a vast Communist conspiracy, and we were fighting on the front lines.

Bugs - we were constantly under surveillance by bugs hidden everywhere. This was so the CIA could keep an eye on us, but the signal was also broadcast to everyday people all over the world in their houses.

Surveillance - see bugs.

Reds - another synonym for Commie.

Harrassment - my dad constantly referred to the harassment we were all getting. Best I can figure out, although maybe there is no rational explanation, he felt that he was protected in some way, so that the spooks had to resort to fucking with him in small ways all day long, rather than outright assassinating him as they wanted to.

Jax - one time my dad mentioned that this was the name of a demon, after seeing various trucks with the name on their side.

AIX - a run of letters in a license plate that my dad said was the CIA sending him a signal: "aches." My dad seemed to think most of the cars on the road were spooks, and they were sending harassing messages through the license plates. At one point he read in the paper that one of the local highways had seen increased usage of tens of thousands of cars over some period of time, and he intimated that these were all government agents.

Transpire - this one really drove him nuts. It was constantly being misused to mean "occur" by reputable journalists, who obviously knew better. (The actual meaning is related to plant breathing.) Since it was obvious that trained journalists would not misuse a word like that, the word had to be a coded signal (similar to the AIX example) meant to fuck with him.

Perverse - This was a hotbutton word. My dad was constantly railing about what he called "perverts" which among other things included gays. When watching a really bad  Doctor Who episode from the Sylvester McCoy era, he commented that one of the younger actors had not yet been completely recruited by the perverts, but he was on his way. My dad mentioned how the spooks were also a bunch of perverts. At some point when we were growing up, my dad became worried that I was turning gay. He once ordered me to pick out who I thought was the prettiest model in a catalog, a rather awkward experience to say the least, and at another point foisted pornography on me. I guess he thought this would convert me!?

Demonic - While we were visiting my dad over the weekend he got it into his head that we should all go see "Ghostbusters." My brother and I were highly skeptical and kept saying that we didn't think he would like it, but he ignored us. I remember cringing through the movie wondering how he was going to take things, and after it was over I asked him what he thought. Face stony with anger he just said "I thought it was demonic."

Jamming - My dad believed that the CIA could control our thoughts and behaviors through devices (microcircuitry) in our watches, belts and shoes. We were forbidden to wear watches and were supposed to wear plastic bags in our shoes. After a while we had to carry around batteries wired to speakers in our pockets to ward off the "jamming," which is what he called the mind control. Often I would have no idea what I was doing or saying that set my dad off, but he would inform me that I "was being jammed right now." I guess he saw the same sinister behavior in my brother and I as he did in the rest of the world, and in order to explain it he decided we were being "jammed" by the spooks. It ended up being the ultimate form of dismissiveness. If there was something he didn't like about me or my brother, he could just dismiss it as "jamming." It robbed us of our own personal agency. It was a theft.

Don't take any wooden nickels - Early on, before my dad came up with the mind control theory, he accused me of working for the spooks. I remember the details somewhat. He was giving me a ride back from high school and I mentioned that I was thinking of buying a small motor. (I was a bit of hobbyist, and I had ideas about making a model car that would actually run, although this was beyond my technical expertise.) In any event, my dad got angry and asked me why I had said that? I was baffled, but it turned out that he thought I was deliberately harassing him. He had taken my brother to a science fair earlier, and the joint project that my brother had worked on with another kid had been scrapped by the other kid's father and replaced by his own. This had shocked and disappointed my brother, and my dad  felt the sting acutely. I either hadn't heard about it or hadn't given it much thought, but my dad was sure that I was deliberately insulting him by using the motor to remind him of this disappointing experience. Later he accused me of working with the CIA, believing they had instructed me to harass him. Despite my vehement denials, he took to telling me "Don't take any wooden nickels" during this period, as his reminder to me that he knew what I was up to. I was confused and angered. I remember pacing back and forth in the living room thinking, "I won't let anyone control me. Not the CIA nor my dad."  It was soon after this that he revised his theory to the one where we were being mind controlled. I brought up this whole "wooden nickel" incident to my dad many years later, and he didn't remember it. I wonder how much stuff he can remember. When my brother and I have confronted him previously, he's dug in his heels and tried to justify himself, bombarding us with web stories about "psychotronic" warfare. Whatever.

Gaza, the war that infected facebook

Normally my Facebook feed is fairly sedate. There was a time when it contained a bunch of irritating political rants, often fearful tirades against Obama and his perceived agenda. For my own sanity, I hid those people from my newsfeed. Most of the tirades people in my feed post now are antiGMO and the like, which, while annoying, are not nearly as laden with strong emotion, so they don't bother me at all. However, after the recent outbreak of violence in Gaza, many of my Jewish and Israeli friends have been posting highly emotional updates about Gaza. If I were to distill the message, it would be that Hamas is a deadly enemy that wants to kill all Jews, yet the world has taken their side! They feel afraid, hurt and betrayed. I believe that Palestinians probably have similar sentiments about Israel, although I don't have any Palestinian friends on Facebook, so this is an educated guess. Given the obvious deep anguish that my Jewish friends are feeling, it occurs to me that framing the debate merely as "Israel should stop killing so many civilians," is ignoring real human suffering on the Israeli side of the border. It's easy to fall into that type of thinking when one looks at the relative death tolls: far fewer Israelis have died than Palestinians, in both civilian and military categories. And it's also easy to fall into that kind of thinking when one sees that Gaza is a giant ghetto walled off from the rest of the world. However, Egypt is also culpable. They share a border with Gaza. The truth is that the Palestinians don't really have any friends, and they are fucked by their own leadership.
Despite the fact that Hamas is a bunch of murderous thugs, it is nevertheless saddening  to see the amount of hateful rhetoric coming out of the Israeli side. Israel is projecting an image of martialism and war, and whatever the cause, justified or unjustified, it is a real tragedy to see what should be a pinnacle of human understanding, home of some of the most revered religious sites in the world, engulfed by hatred and mistrust.

I hid my friends who were spewing anti-Obama rhetoric because I felt that it was simply a reflexive passing on of misinformation, and that it served no purpose. However, I will not hide my Jewish friends' posts about Gaza, despite the mental turmoil that it engenders. These are real tragic events that are happening in the middle east and, even though it would be easier to turn my head and not get involved, it seems to be that it is a moral imperative to understand not only what is happening on the ground (and try in my own way to contribute to peace) but also to understand the deep suffering that is going through the minds of my friends, and try to hold them in my compassion. This last idea is probably where I can have the most direct effect.

Baby crushing

I had a fairly disturbing dream last night. I was walking through a lecture hall and there was someone screaming at their child. When I looked closer, I could see that a woman had her hands on a baby's head and was crushing it. I couldn't believe it, and I couldn't believe that no-one else was intervening. I stepped up to the woman, although I was kind of afraid of her violence, and yelled at her to stop, trying to pry her away from the now dead infant. The rest of the dream was a little hazy, but it involved me waiting for the next person scheduled to teach to come so I could report what happened. When she came, she was a black woman, which is somehow significant.

One possible interpretation of this dream, or at least context for it, was that I was still thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when I went to bed. The baby represented the violence in Gaza, and despite the fact that it was unpleasant, I felt morally obligated to do something about it. Right before I went to bed, I saw a video of an Palestinian student in the U.S., who when pressed stated that she agreed with Hamas that it's better for all Jews to move to Israel so they didn't have to be hunted down. This was quite shocking. I don't know what caused the girl to have this attitude, she seemed pretty calm and collected, not someone deep in the grip of emotional pain, but she just cold-bloodedly announced her support of genocide. When I saw this video, all of the rampant hatred and stereotyping that I have seen directed at Palestinians seemed to have been realized in this individual. But I refuse to believe that it holds for all Palestinians, and I can't believe that peace is impossible. Anyway, this video occasioned some deep reflection right before I went to bed, which I think was one source of my dream.

One blogger in Israel put it quite eloquently, "I stand with moderates on both sides." And I do. How can the violence end unless enough people consciously choose not to perpetuate the cycle? I wonder if there's anything actually concrete I can do about it. These online political discussions can get intense and hurtful, driving friend against friend, forcing people to choose camps, but do they lead anywhere? It seems that any sort of lasting solution will have to emanate from within Israel and Palestine. Part of my upbringing (a very good part) emphasized the radical peaceful methods of King and Gandhi, and I've always thought that the american civil rights movement worked so well because of the nonviolent resistance movement pioneered by Gandhi in India. (When I say "nonviolent," there was plenty of brutal violence against the nonviolent protesters, and it boggles my mind how they stood by their principles and maintained their nonviolence.) If only a new Gandhi could capture the minds of the people of the region. 

On the future

Yesterday a friend posted a horrifying graphic image of a Palestinian child the top of whose head had been blown off, presumably by an Israeli attack. Sickened by this image, I posted a link to a Haaretz editorial by Gideon Levy calling for peace where he referred to Hamas's demands as "reasonable." More or less predictably a heated comment exchange ensued, leaving me feeling rather sick. As is so often the case with me, what starts with a noble impulse devolved into a defense of ego. That is, at some point my initial compassion changed into a mere desire to be right. After I had made my post, I went for a bike ride, and it was a little surreal. Certain tedious lengths of road went by in a flash, as I was occupied with thinking about the Israel-Palestine issue, and in particular constructing responses in my head to what I imagined future commenters might say. In some ways, it was nice for a tedious hill to essentially disappear as I was absorbed in a mental fugue state, but on the other hand the obsessing was not exactly pleasant. If I feel like there is territory there for me to defend, I can't relax. Best to abandon the idea that there is a me whose territory needs to be defended. Further, being lost in (contentious) thought is contrary to my self-professed goal of staying in the present moment!

Anyway, as I was reflecting on that, it occurred to me that my own troubles with my father are a window into the current conflict in the Middle East. When I imagine reconciling with my dad, there is a part of me which clenches down tightly, and says NEVER! And when I imagine that this feeling is shared in some form by so many Israelis and Palestinians, the problem becomes overwhelming and insoluble. To outsiders, the solution seems easy to diagnose and obvious. Just fucking quit fighting each other already. Yet, making contact with that deep feeling of resentment borne of pain that I have toward my own father, I can empathize with those on both sides of the conflict who feel a similar feeling toward each other. Just as I know that the mideast conflict can and will be ended some day, I also know in my heart of hearts that my holding onto a resentment is a deep mistake, much as I hate to admit it.

On the present

My dad's illness is a lot better than it was. Schizophrenia often has a spontaneous remission later in life. This is what happened with John Nash (who was the subject of the film "A beautiful mind"). You can have a conversation with my dad now in which he will touch on the government agents he believes are still watching him only once or twice. Their role nowadays is mostly to cause him computer problems. Other people don't have the same problems I do on their computer he says. Rather, it's the spooks fucking with him. I don't know how he knows other people don't have similar computer problems. He never asked me for instance.

He knows I don't believe that stuff anymore, so he has taken to saying that the harassment comes from "wherever." That may come across as an improvement, but actually to me it is just him being an arrogant prick. I mentioned an image of myself stabbing outward in a previous post, but it occurs to me that one of my dad's primary modes of communication is needling other people. I've seen him do it to other relatives as well. Telling me that he is still getting harassment from "wherever" is a symptom of him needing to dominate with his world view. Similarly, after I stopped being a Christian, he would start talking about God as "whomever." I'm content to let our differences drop on this one. I told him I don't care if he talks about God. It doesn't bother me. But I think the problem is that he is not content with us having differing views. He feels a need to establish his own views as the correct ones, so he ostentatiously draws attention to the fact that he is mentioning God. When I've pointed out to him that it seems pretty arrogant to think you have a monopoly on the truth, he responds by saying that his spiritual insights come directly from Jesus, who he actually talks to like a person. That's great. Why does Jesus tell him to be such an asshole?

These verbal affectations say a lot about his mental model of me, now that I think about it. Either he thinks I am an idiot and won't know what he's talking about, or he is deliberately pushing the boundaries in an attempt to needle me. I don't feel bad at all about avoiding him now that I see this. Why should I subject myself to it? I used to give him a pass and blame all of his negative characteristics on his illness, but now that his illness is significantly lessened, it has become perfectly clear that many of these traits were simply his own nature.

"We can't lose, because 22+78=100."

Round about the time I was in middle school and high school, when my dad was living with my grandmother, and we would visit him on weekends, he began doing a newscast. He was being watched all the time by some bad guys, but the surveillance feed was shown on TV to the masses. Some brave good guys in the TV industry had arranged for it to happen. He explained to us that we could never see it on our own cable, or the TV of any house we ever visited because the signal was always jammed. It's amazing how such a belief could persist in his mind with only negative feedback. Of course, he  claimed the evidence was all over the place. We were walking around with our eyes shut, he said. Anyway, back to the newscast. He would periodically sit in his room and do a newscast to thin air, imagining that the bugs were transmitting his signal to the world. He had handwritten headlines taped up all over his room. His comments on world affairs. I don't remember most of them, but one sticks out in my memory:

"We can't lose, because 22+78=100." 

This may seem totally random, but part of the disease was that my dad would see sinister patterns everywhere. He believed that 22 was a spook (or commie) signal. (Spooks being the name he gave the people who were surveilling and harassing our family.) Sometimes it seemed like he felt it was a code used by commies/spooks/reds (interchangeable names) to communicate with each other, while at other times he felt like it was something that the spooks were deliberately introducing into his environment to taunt him. When we passed a mall that said "22 stores" on the sign, he expostulated about how that was a signal by the mall owners that this was a communist enclave. The fact that JFK was killed on November 22 was significant in this as well. On the other hand, my dad felt like 78 was the opposite of 22. It was a signal from the good guys, and had almost magic powers. At some point it must have dawned on my dad that 22+78=100, and that this was of numerological significance. My guess is that he noticed this when paying for something at a store. I'm guessing something cost X.22 and he got 78 cents in change, and a lightbulb went off.

I'm offering this anecdote as a small window into my past.

Reflecting on writing, mental archaeology and bodhicitta

Well, having read over what I wrote yesterday, it's interesting to see how it compares to the experience of having written it. Putting it down in print like that was a highly emotional experience, with at least a high level of elapsed perceived time. However, reading it now, it comes across as fairly mundane. Also there were a few typos, stemming from the fact that I didn't have the fortitude to reread and relive what I had just written in order to edit it. I will leave it the way it is as a snapshot of my state of mind when I wrote it.  One of the things that was interesting to me was the strong emotion and spontaneous crying that occurred when I wrote about loving my grandmother. Her memory often brings up strong emotions with me. I was very upset when she died, and I often sadden when I think about her. We apparently formed a very strong bond when I was quite young. (I can still fondly remember when she bought me a nice Schwinn bicycle.) Yet it was still a surprise when this spontaneous upwelling of strong emotion occurred. It is like I need to use inference to understand my own interior workings. I can't actually say what's going on deep inside me and motivating me directly. Apparently I need to observe the way I react to the world to infer what's going on internally.

An example of this sort of inner inference is the incident I mentioned in a previous blog post where I saw myself stabbing outward toward the one who hurt me.  It was really just in observing that process that I realized the sort of deep hurt that was driving my behavior, although I actually hesitate to write "my" because the experience was somewhat dissociative. I actually did not identify with the hurt individual. Rather I saw myself as caring for that individual whose motives I could see but had no direct access to! Other revelatory experiences of this nature have occasionally occurred with me over the years. Many years ago I was watching the movie "Monster's Ball" with my wife. The main character, played by Billy Bob Thornton has a bad relationship with his son, and in one scene, Thornton's character arrives to see his son in a room with a gun. After the son gets the father to admit that he had always hated him, I expected the son to strike back with harsh words or fire the gun which seemed thematically right and I suppose what I identified with. Instead the son points the gun at himself, and defiantly says "Well, I have always loved you," at which point he pulls the trigger and kills himself.  Immediately I broke out in uncontrollable sobs (which upset my wife, because she had no idea what to do to help me). I'm still not exactly sure what the scene triggered within my psyche, but it was certainly a revelation to me at how deeply my relationship with my dad had affected me.

There's not a lot in Buddhist psychology that is similar to the Freudian or Jungian unconscious, but it seems clear that the Freudian school is onto something real and that it is a useful and valid mode of probing one's own interior. Obviously there are dangers. Because of the inherent subjectivity of this mode of analysis, it seems like it would be easy to confabulate all sorts of specious explanations. Freud himself seems to have done this. I suppose with the stability of meditative experience, it becomes easier to see which experiences are "true" and which may trap you in a web of ideas and further problems.

In any event, I think continued meditation and openness to inner experience are the key. Now that I am grappling with my issues openly, it's actually possible for me to meditate well. I've also noticed that my compassion and empathy for others is increasing. Pema Chodron talks about how bodhicitta is a tender spot which is your gateway to compassion for others. I can see the truth of this. The rawness and tenderness of my own wound are indeed a gateway for me to become directly concerned with the feelings and happiness of others. Seeing and acknowledging my own allows me to also see and acknowledge others. Wanting to heal my own, openly and consciously, allows me to spontaneously think the same of others. When I started the blog back up, one of the things that deeply bothered me was that I seemed to have lost touch with my compassion. Thankfully, I seem to be regaining contact. 

Wow, it's a miracle I'm not more f*cked up!

My first memories from my childhood are growing up with my dad, and those memories are relatively normal. The first sign that something was amiss came when my dad told my brother and I not to read out street signs as we passed them. We didn't know it at the time, but this was because he thought our car was bugged, and that by reading out the  signs, we were letting the people surveilling us where we were. Things escalated from there. My dad announced that people could watch us through the TV set, and became fixated on the word "spook." One time I brought home a comic book that I had purchased with my own money, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and when my dad saw it, he erupted in rage and tore it in two. I'm guessing he thought the spooks were fucking with him. At some point, he up and left his job, left us with my mom, and went to Dallas to research the JFK assassination. At some point he returned, now in the depths of a very strong delusion and moved in with my grandma, where he lived on and off for a while. We began to visit him on weekends. My mom was not aware of how crazy he had become, and we as kids did not understand enough to make it clear to the adults. I guess some measure of blame should go to my grandma, who did understand how crazy he was, witnessing it on a day to day basis, but she had a habit of looking the other way and not acknowledging it. I love her dearly, and bear her no ill will. Eventually she did kick him out after he punched her in the face. But even then, with the passage of time, she softened her recollection of that incident. I cannot be angry with a mother's love for her son, and she always loved me fiercely, so I cannot even formulate an angry thought in her direction.

Our dad's delusions were intense and we were brainwashed through repeated exposure to believe them. I accepted at face value that all of the people in red shirts were part of a conspiracy to harass our family, that we were on TV and that all of my friends were watching me. My dad explained that nobody would admit to seeing us on TV because they were too scared. But he claimed my mom and stepfather could see us. One time my stepfather talked to him on the phone, and my dad was sure he had caught him in a lie when he admitted to knowing that our family dog had returned. My stepfather explained that he heard his collar clinking, but to my dad the only possibility was that he had seen it on TV. It was a rather dark place for me to live, with constant suspicion, believing I was being watched, and not even able to fully trust friends. At some point, when I was in high school, my dad started believing that we were being controlled through our watches, belts and shoes by the CIA. They had technology to control our thoughts and were actively manipulating us all the time. Being a problem solver, I tried to think of a way to solve this problem. With my help I'm afraid we decided that we could interfere with the signals that the CIA was sending by setting up some simple electric device that we would carry with us. My dad walked into a radio shack with my brother and I in tow, and proceeded to buy several nine volt batteries and a few little speakers. He then attached the speakers to the batteries (which basically just made a short circuit) and we were to carry these around with us in our pockets throughout the day. Occasionally the speakers would randomly start making noise, which occasioned some embarassment.  My brother and I finally got some relief after my grandma kicked him out, and he became homeless. He traveled to California by hitchhiking and we got a much-needed reprieve.

At some point I got a call. He was back and he instructed me to give him a ride. I went and got him, filthy from being on the streets for weeks and months, and he was just as caught by his delusions as ever. He ended up living under a bridge, and I and my brother had to go and pick him up every weekend to spend time together. We got into a routine where we would stop at a convenience store, we would get coffee and rolls, and I had to buy him cigarettes, which he had taken up smoking again. We would then go hiking up in the mountains, where he would rail against all the harassment he was getting. I tell you, when I finally went to grad school 3000 miles away, and my mind began to flex itself a bit and breathe outwards without his oppressive influence, it was amazing. I could finally start to become my own person. It took a while. Even as a first year grad student, some of the brainwashing persisted. I still felt that I was being watched on TV. I recall clearly one incident where I was hiking and I just announced to the air (the CIA who was watching me) that I was going to return to my apartment via a certain route. Then I went back a different way. Ha ha! Got you suckers! But after a while his projected reality lifted and I life has been calmer, more peaceful, saner, more rational since then. It's a long and continuing journey.

Apparently I decided to cram tons of stuff into this post. I apologize to the reader if this seems self-indulgent. It's been helpful to me to help me get my thoughts straight, and it may have archival value.  Hopefully also my honest sharing will resonate with others who have had similar experiences.

On the past

So I was emotionally abused as a child. By a parent. This is not a fact I like to think about, but as I have been contemplating ans struggling over the past few days, it's emerged enough from the shadows that I realize that I need to deal with it openly. My brother and I lived with my dad when we were young. My mom was suffering from severe post-partum depression, and when my parents divorced, the judge awarded my dad custody. But the problem is that my dad is mentally ill. I don't know if has ever been officially diagnosed, but the symptoms that manifested themselves when we were kids fits paranoid schizophrenia. Add to this someone who is ultra-controlling and prone to random fits of rage, and my brother's and my childhood became confusing at best, painful and terrifying at worst. Normally I like to downplay the effect this has had on me, or try to romanticize it and ignore the negatives, but recently my dad has come back into my life, and it initiated a strange struggle within me. On the one hand, I want to be a pleasant person and I hate hurting the feelings of others. In particular, I find the notion of "dislike" or "hatred" to be such an anathema, that I tend to repress those feelings when they arise. But in this case the wound is very deep and I feel so uncomfortable and unpleasant when I am with my dad that I have taken to simply avoiding him for the sake of my own mental health. But then another part of me is ashamed that I am doing this, knowing that my ideal is to love everyone. How can it be right that my own father causes me such pain? But the current situation is untenable. It's one of the reasons my consciousness was tuning out. I couldn't accommodate the mental dissonance of on the one hand having the ideal of lovingkindness for all sentient beings, but on the other hand simply being unable to be in the same room with my dad. Last night as my meditation was drawing to a close, and thoughts of my relationship with my dad came up, I had the image of me as a black sphere stabbing outwards with a stubby sword in an attempt to injure the one who had hurt me. And looking at that image, I realized that there was a genuinely hurt individual within me that was deserving of my compassion and love. Whether or not I think that's the way it should be. That realization helped and I visualized holding that individual in my compassion and surrounding him with warmth and love. It called to mind teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh about holding your anger with love and care.

I realize that there may be a dangerous flip side to my admission. It seems like it would be easy to, once I acknowledge my pain and anger, to actually feed it and try to blame all of my problems on my dad. This is a route I don't want to follow. However, pretending something doesn't affect me when it affects me almost to the core of my being was not, shall we say, working out well.

A carefully constructed title

Well, I feel like I'm making progress. I woke up this morning feeling pretty buoyant, after a night full of dreams (most of which I can't remember.) I have the sense that my mind is more awake, active and engaged. Dealing with my life head on as well as more meditation seems to be helping. I recently upgraded an app I have for my phone called Insight Timer to the full version (which cost 2.99, not a large expense.) It has a library of guided meditations and I have been using some of these. One issue that I have been having with my meditation and my chanting practice is a lack of presence. While meditating or chanting my mind tends to go and wander off almost unchecked and the practice seems to have devolved into a kind of empty form. These guided meditations have been great in that I have been able to concentrate and relax more deeply into the meditative state. My mind still wanders but because of the narration it doesn't get quite as far before my attention is returned to the meditation at hand. I also find that having it narrated helps to bring me out of my own self and point me in directions that I wouldn't otherwise have gone. So I credit a lot of my buoyancy to this new practice. In fact, I can probably look up the dates, but thinking back on it, I believe that my idea to renew this blog came after starting to meditate longer each day. Perhaps that gave me enough mental space for that idea to germinate.

I don't want to say that things are absolutely good for me. I think some people, myself included, tend to only show the world a carefully constructed image of themselves, and I don't want to fall into that trap. I want to share what's happening with me both positive and negative, and maybe even neutral. Obviously someone who is feeling down or depressed will not make a serious permanent rebound instantaneously. I feel like I am on the right track, but there are still aspects of my life, especially involving how I relate to those close to me, which are tough nuts to crack. I will continue to try to keep an awake mind, and remind myself throughout the day to engage openly and without reservation with the present moment, and see what happens from there.

Grasping blindly in the dark, and it feels good

In a previous post I came to the conclusion that I should contemplate where meaning comes from.
I did keep this in mind while meditating, and I even went so far as to ask my friends on Facebook where they find meaning in their lives. This has been a very fruitful exercise, and I really appreciate the people who took the time to respond and share a bit of themselves. A couple of things occurred to me after this contemplation and discussion.

One is that I find meaning in making progress. I like to feel like I'm heading toward something. This may have something to do with my "block," in that I think I probably felt in various ways that I was not progressing, that I had already done all there was to do, both in my work and my meditative practice. I think that fixating on progress and becoming discouraged at setbacks is not a good thing, but still it feels good to be heading somewhere.

I also recalled a heartfelt aspiration from my past:  I want to be as conscious as possible. I don't want to operate on auto-pilot all the time. When reality happens and choices are made, I want to be there fully present. I still find this to be a laudable goal and I definitely want to continually increase the duration of my fully conscious episodes throughout the day. I realize now however that I need more mundane goals to sustain me along the way, since I can't get to the fully conscious state easily or quickly. It's like I want to travel to a certain place where I won't need certain items, but I can't get there without those items. I can't say exactly what those items are at the moment, but maybe a sense of progress is one of them. My state of mind as of last week was perhaps more like, "I should be in a certain place, and I refuse to admit I am not there, so let's shut down consciousness a bit so as to accommodate the lie." I still feel like I'm grasping blindly in the dark here, but I am enjoying the process of trying to get it out in the open, and searching with a "beginner's mind," not knowing the answer ahead of time.

Cheers!

Reading, loneliness, obsession and the acceleration of time

One of my character traits is that I tend to grip onto things tightly. For example, if I am thinking about a math problem, I will have a very difficult time transitioning to other activities, like interacting with others, eating and sleeping. Or, I will get into a series of novels and then spend eight hours a day reading through it for weeks on end. It doesn't help that I have a kind of low-level persistent social anxiety and that I find interacting with people stressful either. That tends to reinforce my reclusive tendencies. Interlaced with this tendency to engage in obsessive streaks (which might make you think of someone on speed) is a tendency to withdraw from the world through vegging out and sleeping a lot. Just this afternoon, I decided to take a three hour nap, not because I really needed it, but because I like to sleep. In analyzing this seemingly unhealthy behavior of mine, I am drawn to the question of whether it really is unhealthy or unwise, and to make basic judgment calls like that, one has to have some idea of what the purpose of life is, if there is a purpose. In the past I've subscribed to the belief that the purpose of life is to help others and to increase the happiness level in the universe for all, and I still think this is true, but somehow it is not informing my actions on a gut level. I have some kind of block that I need to process that is keeping me from connecting to this feeling. As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps a good focus of at least a portion of my meditation sessions each day might be to ask the question "what do I want to do with this life?" That might be a good way to deal with this block.

Looking back just a few minutes to the title of this post, I see that I still need to hit on the acceleration of time. This is a phenomenon familiar to all who are old enough. The amount of perceived time each year keeps going down. It is a stark reminder of my own mortality, a kind of gut punch that my life is over far more quickly than I anticipated. I know that this is just the natural way of things, and that everything which is born also dies. Buddhism encourages the contemplation of death so that when it happens, you will have familiarized yourself with it, and it won't involve as much suffering. One of the ways of rooting out a fear of death is to realize that we are actually dying all the time. When we transition from one moment to the next, there is a real sense in which one person has died and another was born. The idea of a continuous entity called me which persists from moment to moment is demonstrably illusory. There are two issues that I have with this completely accurate analysis. One is that it is difficult to maintain a perception of the illusory nature of reality. The habit of imputing a solid I onto a string of experiences is very strong and not easy to break. It doesn't help that 99.9% of people share the delusion of solidity and that it is strongly reinforced by our culture. The second issue is that the illusory nature of reality can so easily turn into a feeling of hopelessness that there is no inherent meaning in anything. This is a kind of nihilism, which is often warned about in Buddhist texts as being an incorrect view. I myself have entered into this region, and I think it may partially explain the "block" I was talking about in the first paragraph, and the "ennui" I referred to in a previous post. I asked my mentor about this and his suggestion was to concentrate on the emptiness or illusory nature of nihilism, which makes sense as I think about it now. (It sounded a little trite at the time.) I really am clinging in some ways to this sort of self-analysis and the image of hopelessness, which means I am imputing reality onto something. Perhaps this is a good second focus for daily contemplation and meditation:  the emptiness of nihilism.

Will report back!

Starting up the blog again

Hello dear reader. I have decided to start up this blog again after coming across it randomly while surfing around on the web last night. I realized that it is good not only for organizing my current thoughts and ideas, but also as a reference point for me to look back on when I'm older. It's fascinating to read what I wrote several years ago and see how much I have changed and which traits resonate with my current self. One thing that doesn't really appeal to me about the writing on this blog so far is my tendency to launch into little explications of Buddhist philosophy in a way that, looking at it now, doesn't seem totally authentic or genuine. I admire many of the thoughts my former self has recorded here, but much of the Buddhist overlay seems artificial, more like the recounting of dogma then genuine sharing of experience. I still consider myself Buddhist, and I do want the revamped blog to be a venue for me to talk about my experiences and struggles in this area of my life, but I aspire to make this more genuine and try to lay my soul bare to all including myself. Encountering life issues and responding with mini-sermons (to whom exactly?) is not a good way of dealing with the rawness of life.

The other main theme of this blog has been my struggle with addiction to alcohol. Reading over my posts, this seems to be a place where I have been able to genuinely open myself up in a healthy and sustaining way. Since I stopped posting in the blog, I started and stopped drinking a few times. It was an ongoing process. At times I felt like things were okay and at times I felt miserable and desperate to quit. After one serious incident I asked a Buddhist teacher who is a friend and mentor to me for advice on Buddhist techniques for dealing with alcoholism. He responded by mentioning Genyen vows, which are vows lay practitioners can take. Most of these (there are five) are relatively straightforward, like not killing, but the one that was of most interest to me was the vow to not imbibe intoxicants. At that point, I decided I wanted to take the vows. I asked my guru for the vows, and twice he was not able to give them to me, and actually in the mean time I started drinking again. However, during a retreat at the monastery, while deep in the middle of a spell of meditative clarity, I gave birth to the renewed idea that I wanted to take the vows. While in this state of clarity, I examined the idea and saw no negatives, and I asked Rinpoche for the vows within a state of mind where I had absolutely no reservations. I have been sober now since April 2013, and it is a very different kind of sobriety than what I had experienced previously. It is almost effortless, and I think is part of the blessing of the vows and of Rinpoche.

 This is not to say that my life has been effortless or that I have not experienced problems. In fact, I have been wrestling with significant problems, such as a kind of pervasive ennui, but they aren't related to drinking at all. Or rather, my drinking may have been a form of self-medication, and now that it is no longer there, raw problems emerge from my psyche that need processing. In future posts I will surely touch on what has happened to me over the past several years and some of the journeys that I went on and some of the issues that I currently face. However, I don't want to tackle everything all at once right after restarting my blogging, so I think I'll leave it at that for now. I actually have no idea if anyone will be reading this. I had about five readers when this blog was formerly live, most of whom were family members. Even if the number is zero, I still think these posts will be beneficial to me.