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!


  

"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.

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!