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!


  

"Mindwarp influence"

I was recently going through some papers I have when I came across some childhood drawings that my brothers and I had made which my dad had saved. Of note is this one, an innocuous picture of a dog, annotated by my dad "Jus, Feb 90 (under mindwarp influence but it doesn't matter much)."

I have no idea what my dad saw in this image that led him to this conclusion that my brother was "under mindwarp influence," but this sort of thing happened to us constantly during this era. My dad claimed that we were all being "interfered" with by nefarious forces. For example, one of us would be talking to him and he would announce "you're being interfered with right now." (Another term he used was "being jammed.") I remember another picture my brother made which my dad claimed was a picture of "demons." Another time, he didn't like a picture I made in which I had tried to make cloud effects in the sky using pastels. He pointed to the clouds and asked pointedly and angrily "what are these?" Defensive, I said "clouds," but he was unconvinced.

Recently I've noticed in myself a deep well of hatred that has built in me over the years, something that I didn't want to acknowledge. Every time my dad would contact me, or there would be a particular childhood incident I would recall, my mind would reflexively formulate a thought like "Fuck you!" which barely grazed conscious awareness, but had a strong emotional contour. It was only when I began meditating that I even noticed this process was happening.

I think one explanation of this resentment was all of the incidents similar to the one illustrated above, in which my dad would first accuse us of engaging in some negative behavior which he had hallucinated, and then to top it off, rob us of any personal agency by claiming we were being manipulated by outside forces. In a nutshell the message was "you are bad, and also powerless."  This message was repeated over and over, and as kids, we had no way to fight back. Now that I'm an adult, I'm still stuck with the legacy of these events that happened 25 years ago, and as the trauma occurred at such an early stage of my development, my mind wants to fight back with a child's tools. It is a thorny problem to unravel. Writing entries for this blog is part of that process, and I think it helps serve that purpose, but the trauma seems so solid and entrenched, progress is slow. I guess I have a couple of options moving forward. Definitely staying with meditation is super helpful, and I know that I am making progress in dharma even if my path is erratic. This spring I attended a meditation retreat with Lama Karma of Tennessee, and had some very profound meditative experiences, much more so than previous retreats, and I was able to maintain a meditative state on and off for weeks beyond the retreat. As such, I feel like these are definite signs that I actually am making progress. During the retreat, it occurred to me, with the help of Lama Karma, that the chöd practice pioneered for westerners by Lama Tsultrim Allione may be a good practice for me to do. While I did read a little bit about this, I have yet to actually implement it with regularity. Writing now, I feel like this, together with regular sitting meditation, is a likely path forward.

My dad has never apologized for this in any meaningful way. One time when I recounted a particularly painful incident to him by email, he claimed it never happened, and while accepting some responsibility for subjecting us to a stressful childhood, he claimed he was "under a lot of pressure" and that we were too young to understand what was happening. I tend to believe that he doesn't remember what happened. He probably doesn't want to remember, and furthermore he was much deeper in psychosis back then, so it may be hard to access those memories. Still, his gut reaction is always to double down and try to justify his actions, while at the same time pushing blame off onto others. (For example, pushing some of it off on to me for being too young to understand.) He still sends my brother Chris articles about "psychotronic warfare" in an effort to bolster his claims that thoughts were being implanted in our minds by the CIA were not pure insanity.

I'm glad to have found the picture above because it provides clear documentary evidence of my brother's and my childhood experiences, so even if my dad claims they didn't happen, we know that they did. Not that there was any real doubt, as the three of us all share similar memories, but there is something very satisfying about an actual piece of paper. It might not satisfy my dad though, come to think of it. He once recounted to me how he would sometimes read a page, then turn back to it and the words had changed. To him this was evidence that the people harassing him were capable of magic! He often would complain of demons and so forth.

In actual fact, I don't want my dad to apologize. On the one hand, I've never seen him make a sincere apology for anything, but on the other there is such a deep resentment that I've built up over the years, it prefers to have him still there as a target. It doesn't want resolution. It wants revenge! The best way I've found forward is to simply ignore him and try not to interact with him. Every single time I've tried in the past few years has ended with me becoming furious at him, so simple avoidance seems best.