A point of perfect balance

The other day I was riding my bike along the bike path and I had to slow down to go around some people. As I was cruising at ultra low speed, I felt perfectly balanced, completely content and at home. No anxiety about possibly falling over despite the low speed. It was a novel experience and it got me reflecting on when I first learned to ride a bike as a kid. This was a painful, slow and frustrating experience. I don't retain very many early childhood memories, but I have a glimmer of that instant when, contrary to all of my expectations and all my experience, I was suddenly balanced on the bike and cruising down the street. How awesome a gift of the person who taught me! That person was my Dad, and that moment I experienced just the other day would never have been possible without the patience and kindness he showed me in teaching me.

Motivated by my reflections, I posted the following to Facebook that evening:

 My Dad and I may not see eye to eye, but I am grateful to him for 
1. teaching me to read
2. teaching me to ride my bike
3. teaching me to drive
4. helping to instill in me a love for mathematics
The first three all seemed interminable and frustrating as I went through them, but that moment when I finally mastered each of them was quite satisfying. I doubt I would have had the patience to put up with me as a student.

Indeed, he showed similar determination and patience in teaching me to read and to drive. These are, without question, immensely beneficial skills to have.

Regular readers of my blog may know that I have had issues with my Dad and may be wondering about the change of tone of this post. Both sides are true. He was a source of immense pain during the very impressionable formative years of my life, but he has also been a source of immense benefit. It's good to be able to see both sides.

Some short poems I wrote earlier this year

June 26, 2015
Enlightenment reveals itself in an
unexpected patch of brown fur
as the cat's legs move while she cleans herself.
Nothing complicated.
Just that.

July 8, 2015
Melancholy filled the space of my mind.
I was startled to see it punctured by two magpies.

July 12, 2015
The rhythm of a dream.
Eyes open.
The cawing of a crow.

July 14, 2015
Three times arising to consciousness.
The initial sensation a tingling on the face.
The third time, I saw the fly.

A quickly composed poem

Years ago
Something shifted within me
Looking on I was puzzled and disappointed
Seeing what appeared to be a degradation
A lessening, a falling apart.

Now, seeing glimpses of Jim before the fall
I remember a bit of that time.
It was an odd time
Growing and shrinking simultaneously
I am still in a process of change

It is very interesting to observe my own mind
To watch emotions arise and depart
Like tides on the sea
Sometimes deducing their origin
And often being surprised by their appearance.

Emotional knots constrict the flow of prana
Untying them can be painful and explosive
But what other way is there than up?
Tightening the knots leads to a loss of consciousness
Which is the pain of denying  pain.

Aspiration

Confronting this new sense of reality of the Buddhist path and its explanation of how things work, the potential fate of myself and those I love, not to mention that of the countless other sentient beings out there, becomes pretty scary. Without realizing the truth of what's going on, veiled by ignorance, so many will be reborn in the lower realms, and those that attain higher rebirths will eventually fall. May I be like Chenrezi with his countless arms rescuing beings from their fate. May I not lose this sense of urgency.

This Shit is Real

Well, I returned from India and Nepal over a month ago. It was a productive journey. I changed, although as I remain connected to samsara, it does wrap its tendrils around me. One sign of change is my deepened practice commitment. It happens with some regularity over the years that I will drift out of practice and end up not doing any at all for months at a time. One way or another,  I always connect to it again. This had happened to me for about a month prior to going on the pilgrimage. and indeed for the first part of the pilgrimage, although I was participating in dharma activities (like sojong vows at the Kagyu Monlam) I was still neglecting my daily commitment. Somewhere toward the middle, when we got to Nepal, I became inspired to start it up again, and on one free day I hiked up to Pullahari Monastery and sat and did my practice for a while. My current practice is called  Lha Shi (Four Deities) and the instruction we were given were to chant 125 Vajradhara mantras followed by 100 mantras each for each of the four deities. While at Pullahari (which I was drawn to since it is Jamgon Kongtrul's monastery and also because he is a holder of the Shangpa Kagyu lineage, of which Lha Shi is a practice) I decided to do 5 times as many mantras, and that felt so good that I've been keeping to that number ever since. Rinpoche told us that the Shangpa Kagyu practices are very special in that they are easy to do and carry a lot of blessing. I certainly feel that way about Lha Shi.  Very often I get a tingling at the top of my head when I do it, even when I am very distracted. Once I did it and it dissolved a bad headache. The pain turned icy and seemed to melt down my scalp and dissolve. It is therefore obvious to me that the vajrayana vehicle is not simply superstition and that scientific materialism is simply not correct. How could the chanting of certain words and creating certain visualizations cause physical changes in the body otherwise? Of course, skeptics will not find this convincing. Indeed I would not find it convincing if someone told me about it. The argument would be that I am somehow creating the sensation myself, and maybe the headache thing was a coincidence or perhaps even by bringing attention to my scalp, I caused my muscles to relax. Possible, I suppose, but I don't think so. As I was reflecting today while doing the practice it brought to mind an even more convincing experience I had and which I've mentioned previously on this blog  associated with me meeting Rinpoche for the first time. When negative thoughts started to appear, I prayed that he would have happiness and its causes as an antidote--this was on my way to his talk by the way--and I had such an intense and powerful physical experience as a result of this that my behavior has been forever altered. I immediately became a devoted student and joined the Dharma Path program. Again, since this was an internal felt experience (albeit like nothing that had ever occurred to me prior), skeptics will not be convinced. However, consider that the experience I had, knowing next to nothing about Buddhism, matched very well experiences I would later read about when students first met or heard the name of their teacher. At least one text refers to the sense of having all of one's hairs stand on end, a text I only read later. As I succinctly put it to myself while practicing today: "This shit is real." And that brings about a reminder not to let my habits and distraction carry me away from the path that will take me and others out of samsara.

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.