Writing digest

 [I am experimenting with a daily writing digest. Here is today's entry.]

I grew up, saw the tree of life. It was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Yet there is no good and there is no evil. And there is no God. But humans know evil and they know good. However so do other animals. Other animals just don’t mind being naked. There are animals who know shame. For example, dogs. If dogs can feel shame, so can other animals, they may simply not be able to express it to humans, nor would they want to.

So I grew up and I saw the world was something other than what was promised. I am still looking for the one that was promised. It’s not there. Suffering exists, and people die. So where can I find meaning? My mind wants to busy itself with antidotes. Death is the big problem. Therefore there must be a big answer. But there is no big answer. There are small answers. Being kind to each other, for example. 

And there is paying attention. Okay now I am getting drawn into an analysis of how to be. That is not what I need right now, nor do I believe it is strictly necessary. I caught myself, pausing, staring out the window, and searching for nuggets of significance to set down on the page. And then my thoughts grew turgid. They grow turgid now. I must be important and I must relay that which is important.

So continuing my brief life story, I grew up, then I became middle aged. At some point I will die. Right now I have too much gut fat, and I am listening to Pink Floyd’s album Animals. I am listening to the 2018 remaster which does have a lot of instruments that can be heard clearly compared to the original. I’ve been listening to this album non-stop for months. I don’t know what gives it such a satisfying strong hook. But I really love it. So anyway, continuing this story, I am listening to spacey guitar effects and a funky bass. Also, “ha ha, charade you are!” in harmony. What a beautiful song. It embodies angst, dissatisfaction, but also resolution. It is great.

Religious experience and hallucinations

I grew up in a house with a bible-thumping dad. He was also literally crazy, schizophrenic. He thought Jesus was talking directly to him. He thought that the CIA had his entire life bugged and that the surveillance footage was being broadcast to every American household. Whenever he visited somewhere new, he would scroll through the cable channels, hoping to catch a glimpse of himself. The fact that he couldn't was used as further evidence that it was happening. Needless to say life was trying at times. His strange logical jumps had me supplying rationalizations, missing bits of logic to get from A to B, but to him, I think it was just obvious that lack of evidence was actually evidence.

I considered myself devoutly religious, spurred by the ethos of my church, I preached to some students in 9th grade lunch. I mainly found religious girls attractive, and when I say religious, I mean Christian. Like probably even on the fundie side. I decided to read the bible all the way through, and after hearing about all the things that are unclean in Leviticus, I said, nope, that's not the inspired word of the lord. I continued thinking of myself as Christian for a while, but in the end I became an atheist.

I drank too much though, went to AA, and they said "you need religion." I said, "well, will Buddhism do?" They looked at each other uneasily and said, "we'll let it pass for now, but one day, boy, Jesus gonna knock you upside the head." Various others worried I might burn in hell. They were drunkards.

I began Buddhism on the philopsophical side, got drawn into the spiritual and magical. My dad was schizophrenic, so maybe it's not surprising that I can come up with my own sanctioned hallucinations, grade A approved by the rest of the sangha. I fit in. I felt special. Meditation helped me out. But my guru raped a woman. Supposedly he was divine. That didn't sit right. I tried a different guru, but in the end, my conclusion is that magic is all bunk. We humans are programmed to think this way, at least some of us are, and it is remarkable how easy it is to fall into it.

I was once falling asleep, subject to an increasing litany of doubts, when my guru appeared in my dream, knocked loudly on the outside glass, and I shot up in bed, startled. My doubts all dissipated immediately. Now I look back and think, wow, my mind was really intent on a certain path. It had set me on the path earlier, when I had a vision, or really more of a somatic experience. Before I met my guru, on my way to his talk, I prayed that he have happiness and its causes. Immediately I felt a surge of euphoric energy in my heart, the phrase "returned as wisdom blessings, the light is reabsorbed" rang through my head, and the energy shot up through the top ofvmy head. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. It was my own road to damascus story. Some aspect of my own mind set me on a path, and attempted to keep me there. Weird, right? 

Other apparent miracles are literally the appearance of rainbows in the sky on auspicious occasions. Let's just say that this is less than convincing. Rainbows are a natural phenomenon. I expect we see them more when we want to see them, because then we are paying more attention. Also, on days when a group is cremating a lama, everyone is outside, people are there for hours at a time. It's not so unexpected that rainbows appear somewhere in that window. 

So now, I see that a lot of the supernatural, well all of it, is completely bunk. Just my mind plugging into a collective mythology, cocreated my humans over millenia. It's a little sad because just praying to an entity is kind of easy. And if they have the power to bless you, wow,  you've got it made in the shade! Actually looking at my own life and deliberately acting in ways that I choose, that's hard. Also, people die. They die forever. Every one of them. That's not an easy biscuit to swallow either. 

So to recap, I was raised by a schizophrenic, fundy father. Then I became an atheist. Then a committed Buddhist. Then an atheist again. Where to from here? Hopefully a path with further clarity of thought and purpose.

Analyzing my religious beliefs

I’ve been thinking a lot about religious beliefs recently, and one of the first questions that arises is what distinguishes religion from philosophy? I would say religion has a supernatural or supernormal aspect. It is something involving entities or intelligences that are more powerful than us, which we can supplicate through ritual and prayer, and who have the power to intervene on our behalf. The Christian God certainly has this property. The so-called pagan Gods of the old Roman empire had this property. The Buddhist system which I spent a large part of my life in also has this property. Philosophy, on the other hand, is more of a rational method of inquiry and an attempt to understand the world. Probably there is a philosophical component to other religions. There is certainly one in Buddhism. The teachings of the Madhyamaka school and the Buddha’s original emphasis on anatman (no-self) are examples of this. The nice thing about the philosophical components is that they are subject to analysis and introspective exploration. The religious components are more problematic. While claiming a great degree of objectivity, asserting things like monks walking through walls or floating through the air, modern instantiations of religion turn out to be entirely subjective when analyzed with a critical lens, especially if I limit myself to what I can personally verify.

In more detail, for the religious components of Buddhism, I set myself the following test. Have I personally witnessed or experienced anything which had a definite or probable supernatural origin which, crucially, would be convincing to someone else not already predisposed to believe it? I have had multiple powerful experiences as a Buddhist, one even comparable to Saul’s vision on the road to Damascus, but looking at all of them, they have each been subjective and potentially explainable as a product of my own mind. I have not witnessed people floating, people putting thumbprints in rocks, evidence of foreknowledge, or anything along these lines. All of my religious experiences were entirely subjective, usually some type of interior vision with a somatic component like the feeling of energy moving in the body. Many of these experiences were deeply meaningful, but none stepped outside what you might consider the conventional laws of physics, and none of them would convince another person outside the system. So I must conclude that, no, despite the power of these experiences, none of them are truly evidence of the religious component of Buddhism. I think a good theory is that religious visions are a simply part of human psychology.  

So I find myself in the same place that many people have found themselves, trying to separate out the useful kernel of Buddhist teachings into a more secularized form. That is essentially the modern mindfulness movement. I guess I am late to the party. My initial thought when composing this text, was that having lived and experienced the religious side, I am coming to a more informed decision about things. That is, I wanted to say that my skepticism was somehow more genuine than the skepticism of those who had a priori doubt about the veracity of Buddhist religious beliefs. However, upon further reflection, I think I am just reproducing the standard hostility toward atheists and skeptics. Something along the lines of “I am a skeptic for deeply considered reasons. Those others are doing it due to their own character flaws.” This is of course deeply unfair and self aggrandizing. So let me say instead that skepticism of the supernatural is not a personal failing but a rational and normal state.

I heard the following sentiment attributed to William James. It is important to disbelieve things which are false, but it is also important to believe things that are true. For me, the Buddhist philosophical teachings and many of the meditative practices still hold a lot of value. Despite the fact that the Madhyamaka teachings don’t seem to make a lot of sense on first hearing, and many people have a strong antagonistic reaction toward them, I think they have something profound to say about our world. The various forms of meditation serve as a vehicle of exploration of our internal landscape and a method of sharpening our focus. So even though I have come to the conclusion that the religious aspects of Buddhism are not objectively true, I still feel that there is a lot here which is good and useful both as a framework for understanding reality, and as transformative practices for training the mind.

Memories

 As I was lying in bed this morning an, old memory surfaced. When I was in middle and high school, I was an extreme fan of Dr. Who. Whenever we would go out as a family, I would let everyone know that I needed to be back by whatever time in order to catch it. Growing up in NJ, we could tune in to multiple PBS stations from around the area, and as a result, I was able to watch Dr. Who on many different nights of the week, including both weekend days.

Now at this time, my dad would often take my brother and I hiking. We lived with my mom and stepdad, but our dad would get to see us on the weekends. He later told me that he had no particular interest or love of hiking, just that it was something cheap he could do with us.

Normally I would also insist on getting home in time to watch Dr. Who to my dad as well, and indeed, he sometimes enjoyed watching it with us at my grandma's apartment where he was staying. However, one time, I mentioned to him that we needed to be back in time to see the day's episode as we were about to depart, and it irritated him deeply for some reason. After that he turned the full weight of his anger and paranoia on my obsession with Dr. Who, periodically telling me how it was perverted, demonic and/or satanic. I couldn't put up with it and I actually stopped watching after that.

What a fascinating look into the inner workings of my dad's mind. I mean, he went from being positive and enthusiastic about the show to deeply antagonistic, all because dared to inconvenience him. It's too bad I had to get caught up in all that. It actually is a classic case of abuse, where one party abuses the other, psychologically in this case, in order to get their way. It resonates quite a bit with the depiction of abusers in, for example, this book: Why does he do that? Inside the minds of angry and controlling men. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about abusers.

Quarantine time

I am sitting here at home on my couch typing at my computer. I'm listening to Yes's album Relayer on my headphones while my wife works remotely at her standing desk. The embers of my morning Buddhist fire offering smolder on the patio. Normally I like to sit on one of my two chairs. I have a cheap cloth-over-wood-frame reclining chair where I like to relax, and in our former dining room, I have my teaching-from-home office set up, complete with adjustable office chair. Right now each of our two cats is neatly occupying one of my two favorite chairs, so being the soft-hearted guy I am, rather than kicking them off, I am relegating myself to the couch.

I'm finding quarantine time to be rather refreshing, somewhat of an improvement over my previous life! Yes, I can't leave the house, and I miss being able to go hiking in the desert, but actually inside and outside are just states of mind. My mind sitting here on the couch is no different from the one outside in the desert. I don't need to cling to the concept of outside to enjoy myself, and in fact, with the reduction in available options, I find the simplicity of life refreshing. Less stuff to cling to.

This winter I went for a two week solitary retreat at Tara Mandala retreat center in the mountains of southern Colorado. They are not as rugged and imposing as the Rockies further north, but there was still snow and very cold conditions. My cabin had a wood stove and I was provided with as much wood as anyone could possibly need. Every day I used a small hand ax to chop it into manageable pieces complete with enough for kindling. I would make a fire early in the morning upon rising and then another one at about 7pm at night which would keep the cabin cozy until the next morning.

My current quarantine situation is very much a relaxed version of my retreat over the winter, and there is a definite sacredness to it. As a result I am doing my best, despite recalcitrant streams within me, to make this time meaningful and do a lot of Buddhist practice.

On the whole, I am finding life a lot less stressful. My wife and I get to see a lot more of each other. Back when we weren't telecommuting (remember that old term!) our work schedules were pretty out of synch with each other. I would get to see her a little in the morning and a little at night, but not very much. We didn't have a single day off together! Now things are a lot more like they used to be a long time ago when I would make us dinner each night. I am enjoying this aspect.

I also never fully appreciated how strongly introverted I am. Being around other people and in social situations exerts a profound amount of stress, an amount I was not fully cognizant of, until now. I may have been a solitary meditator in a previous life, or perhaps in many previous lives! That would explain this tendency in myself somewhat.

I am also really enjoying teaching online with zoom. I have a nice home computer setup with a dual screen and touchscreen so that I can write out math for the kids. This aspect of the job is also significantly less stressful now! I normally teach middle school kids and classroom management is so much easier online than in person, thanks to a faithful mute key! I am also finding that many of the kids are themselves concentrating better in this context.

So who knows what the future holds? I know a lot of people are itching for life to return to normal, but of course life never returns to exactly where it used to be. Things are in constant flux, and now is a perfect opportunity to see this fundamental truth clearly. Personally, I wouldn't mind if things pretty much continued as is for the indefinite future, though I understand that I am not an island and that I rely on all of you for my survival. I am still using internet, electricity, water, and food (which we get delivered.)  I still rely on my job, which in turn relies on countless other people, customers and employees, and these interconnections ripple outward to encompass everything and everyone.

So I see that the current oasis is just as impermanent as that which preceded it, and it will change into something else sooner or later. Just like a tide slowly rising to envelop the beach, new reality is flowing in, and will soon envelop the existing one. I am taking this time to delve deeper into myself, and I hope that others are too. On the other side, many of us will emerge older and wiser. Perhaps we can attain a critical mass to fundamentally change society into something saner. The planet is happier now that we aren't spewing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The rat race has slowed to a crawl. Stepping outside of the machine, as we are now forced to do, we can more easily appreciate how deeply insane the current cycle of meaningless destruction is. An apt quote of favorite author Douglas Adams comes to mind:

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. - Douglas Adams,  The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Reflections

I wanted to write this post because an interesting thing happened. Lama Tsultrim Yeshe visted us from Wisconsin. He is an amazing teacher. He's done a three year retreat and obviously has a lot of experience and meditative realization. On the other hand, he is very plainspoken, very midwestern, and uses a lot of AA analogies. He has served as a prison chaplain and worked with a lot of prisoners in a great deal of suffering. Talking to Lama prior to the teaching, I mentioned that my Dad was a Vietnam vet with service-related health issues (leukemia traced to agent orange exposure.) He asked if my Dad had emotional problems stemming from the war, and I said yes, he does. I also offered my opinion that Dad has schizophrenia. Lama, who is about the same age as my Dad, mentioned that he has worked with a couple of Vietnam Vets, and moreover one of the themes of the retreat would be healing from trauma. This was good for me, due to traumatic experiences in my past stemming from my Dad's interpretation of the world and his reaction to it, while Lama thought it might be good for Dad to help heal from whatever trauma he had experienced. Moreover, Lama presented his material in a very secular, psychological way, though it was all true dharma. It would be appropriate for someone like my Dad who does not 100% sign on to the Buddha's teachings.

So an amazing thing happened during the retreat. My Dad actually did an interview with the Lama, which was a very brave thing for him to have done. I am quite impressed. Their discussion was private, but just the bare fact of it is pretty amazing. (Tears appear in the tear ducts as I write this.) Moreover, as I was driving my Dad back from the first day of the retreat, he sincerely apologized to me for what had happened when I was younger. He didn't frame it the way I might have done; he still believes the things that I characterize as delusions, but he did sincerely apologize for the hurt he caused me. He said that the anger he experienced at the time was not directed at me, but I bore the brunt of it anyway. He remembers it as being for about a year and half when I was thirteen, and that he consciously dialed it back after that point. I thanked him for his apology. Most of my anger seems to have dissipated now. My letting go of anger seems to have been due in large part to Lama Yeshe's skillful teachings. We opened ourselves up to a very tender spot during that day, using tong-len and  listening to Lama compassionately describe the suffering he has witnessed in himself and others. As a result, I was much more open to receiving the apology. I'm not all the way there. I can feel some resistance in me, but in large part it is gone.

My Dad says that he had resolved to apologize earlier, after he had gotten out of the hospital most recently. He had indeed sent me a text saying he wanted to talk to me about something important. I had ignored this text. At that point, I simply did not want to deal with him. With Lama Yeshe's compassionate help, this obstacle seems to have resolved itself with very little resistance.

Dreams and the Bodhisattva Vow

According to Kalu Rinpoche, the mind has three qualities: emptiness, luminosity and unimpededness. I had a dream last night in which a woman was explaining something about the mind, and I immediately recognized what she was saying as a description of the mind's unimpededness. I had a kind of image of a boulder grinding to a halt in a tunnel representing the material aspects of the mind breaking down, but that mind itself streams on unimpeded. Tibetan lamas do not recommend putting too much significance in dreams, but I do believe that I was benefitting from the wisdom mind of the lama. 

Yesterday I took the Bodhisattva Vow with Lama Kathy Wesley, a student of Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche and a wonderful and gifted teacher. During the vow, she relayed a story from when Rinpoche was giving the vow. He passed around a tray and asked people to put something precious on the tray that they did not want to give up. As the tray went around and he put it on the shrine, Lama Kathy said that there was a lot of palpable tension in the room. People were not sure if they would be getting their stuff back! They did, of course, she said, but after that Rinpoche no longer included that step in the ceremony because people misunderstood it so much. However, Lama Kathy, said, we should imagine giving as an offering the one thing we find most precious. I offered my sanity and ability to reason clearly. This is something that I do not want to lose, and so I offered it to the Buddhas. I find it very interesting that I got a teaching in my dream reminding me of the unimpeded nature of mind, whose gross aspect, as explained by Kalu Rinpoche (see this link), is essentially the ability of mind to discern and make judgments. In other words, I can never really lose the thing that I was offering. The thing that I can lose is the "I"!

I also find it interesting that when I woke up, I found a story in my Facebook feed written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse explaining how the obsessive veneration of high Lamas is actively hurting the Tibetan tradition. This was in response to Jamgon Kongtrol's tulku's recent announcement that he is giving up the monastic life to become a doctor. I highly recommend reading Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse's article. It is posted on his Facebook page at the moment. During Lama Kathy's visit, I had been trying to help maintain protocol, which I think is fine, but examining my own mind, I have to admit, there was a whole bunch of self-righteousness there bound up with that. I think this is close to the point of why obsessive veneration can be bad: it's not motivated by good intention. Obviously sincere respect is fine, and in fact it is often mentioned that one's relationship with one's guru undergoes a transformation as you progress along the path. At first, there is a kind of abject suspension of judgment, as the guru takes on the aspect of a parent telling you what needs to be done in order to further your development. However, this sort of relationship can have problems, for example, by looking for self-affirmation externally. (Maybe if I do this thing, the guru will be happy, and that means I'm a worthwhile person.) Chogyam Trungpa talks about this a lot. It's a good first step, latching onto someone who can guide us out of suffering, but after a while, we relate to that person in a more conscious (the overall goal!) and less child-like way.

I am excited to be maintaining the Bodhisattva vow (which I had also previously taken with Lama Norlha Rinpoche).  It's all about watching your intention throughout the day, noticing when negative intentions and mind states arise, and then going through the four R's:

1. the power of Reliance on enlightened beings as witnesses to your confession. (The 35 Buddhas are suggested.)
2. the power of Regret at committing the negativity. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche said this regret should be just as if we've swallowed poison.
3. the power of a Remedy to counteract the wrong we have done. The recitation of the prayer of the 35 Buddhas or reciting of the Vajrasattva mantra are good remedies.
4. the power of Resolve never to commit the action again. (Though this may seem unrealistic in the moment, Khenpo Karthar has stated that it is still best to resolve in this way. It effectively slows the momentum of the negative habit.)

In fact, I am about to have a second cup of java, and will then recite my morning supplication to the 35 Buddhas. May all beings benefit!