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.