Civil Union and Civil Discussion: Belfast 1, Oregon 0

Belfast is again in the news, and — no surprise to this news reader — it's in the news for its progressiveness and charm.

“Gay marriage,” which in the US is about the most divisive social issue there is, has quietly become legal in the UK. Everyone seems neutral-to-pleased about it, and controversy in the papers is limited to impish speculation about how splashy Elton John’s wedding might be. But before Sir Elton or anyone can tie the knot, there’s a mandatory waiting period, just like the straight people have.

Turns out Northern Ireland has the shortest matrimonial registration deadline of any of the provinces, so the first weddings will take place there. And so they did. Yesterday, Grainne and Shannon, two radiant ladies with big corsages and even bigger smiles, were the first to get married. They did it in style at Belfast City Hall.


Belfast City Hall and the Continental Market: Perfect for Your Wedding Reception

This momentous event occurred here in large part because Northern Ireland still languishes in a bureaucratic purgatory of not knowing—in many quarters, not really caring—whether it’s going to be an independent country or not. It’s provisionally tacked on to the rest of the UK, and in this case it’s borne along by legislation that it would likely never pass on its own.

Northern Ireland is now what the rest of Britain used to be, before money and technology and immigration, before new ideas and new values systems and all the modern realities of life. And so, living in another time, people are pretty conservative. Not in a rabid or confrontational way, mind you, but simply because their society has been in stasis for the past forty years.

It’s a charming place to visit, but maybe not an easy place to be different. Or gay. After a while the propriety and restraint can get to be too much. And then…I’m suddenly aware of being an American. Yes, there’s this rebellious and independent streak I didn’t know I had, the one that advocates jettisoning good manners and dignified discourse in favor of exposing abuse and discrimination and systemic mismanagement. In favor of shaking things up.

But things do not shake up easily. Because the sweet and polite Northern people don’t seem to complain. Confrontation is to be avoided; pointing out shortcomings is not the done thing. I’m not sure how that folds into—or perhaps arises from—the past forty years of low-level religio-politicial insurgency and counterinsurgency. If everybody knows their place and no one sticks out, you register your complaints —and a debate ensues—via explosives and assassination?

So here we are, in an old-fashioned backwater that’s already swaying in the tides of change. And here come Grainne and Shannon, the standard-bearers blazing the way for the 687 couples registered to be married in the next few days.

And look! There are protesters. Nowhere else in Britain would you see them, but that’s exactly the point: there is nowhere else like conservative Northern Ireland, where unusual bedfellows frequently join forces to advance an agenda of “traditional” (read: Biblical) values.

And nowhere else are there protesters like these ones. When was the last time you heard a protester say, “You have to repent, love. God bless you, but first you have to repent of your sins.” ? Or heard the object of this friendly warning come back with, “You would be so happy to have this lady, love. I’ll see you at the gates of heaven, mate.”

So—old-fashioned, restrained, even hidebound—Belfast is far more civilized than we are. Both for being the unlikely locus of a long-overdue matrimonial revolution. And for the relative warmth of the dialogue about that social change. Oregon was a bulwark of progressive values thirty years ago—about the same time that Northern Ireland turned away from the modern world. Now, Northern Ireland embraces same-sex marriage, while last year Oregonians amended the state constitution to declare it illegal. Perhaps it’s time to agitate for good manners, civil discourse, and an overall turning-back of the clock.

What Do Wrens Eat?

The blog works when the blog is fresh.

So what is real?

That there is peanut butter and warm oatmeal sitting solidly in my belly.
That I'm afraid of not having enough money to buy food.
That I'm curious what it would be like to feel that way.

That things happen in their time,
which includes getting motivated to do things:
there's some internal obstacle to overcome or processing that must happen.
And then it does.

That I'm feeling a maturity that comes with being seared and seasoned by heartache.

That there will be no Christmas presents this year, because my luggage vanished on the way home from Lithuania. An $800 claim to America West Airlines won't bring back my rakusu. (In the Belfast sesshin Kennedy Roshi asked me, "Do you really need that?" Now we'll find out.)

That there are lots of things I'd like to do, none of which pay.
But writing about my life is worthwhile anyway, because it heals and magnifies my soul, and somehow sets me free.

When it's this cold, my skin gets all shriveled and dry,
like it's trying to curl up and hide.
Heavy food feels good: soup and tea and bready things.

Rob is gone, and his room is so cold. Probably freezing, at least. I'll go stick a body part in the refrigerator and see how it compares.

At Tassajara the mice used to come into the walk-in fridge in the wintertime, because it was actually "warm" in there: 4°C inside vs. 2°C outside. No mice here, but a tiny wren at the window, inspecting the leafless fig tree, with a red spot like paint on the crown of her head.

That's all.

Mind=Life

In the last century, the brilliant theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger turned his thoughts to philosophical questions. He is one of the deepest philosophical thinkers of all the physicists who brought us quantum physics. He wrote:

The reason why our sentient, percipient, and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words, because it is itself the world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as part of it.

Thanks to Josh Bartok for sharing this with me.

The Wind Master Walks the Sky

Patch-robed monks practice thoroughly without carrying a single thread. Open-mindedly sparkling and pure, they are like a mirror reflecting a mirror, with nothing regarded as outside, without capacity for accumulating dust. They illuminate everything fully, perceiving no "thing". This is called taking up the burden from the inside and is how to shoulder responsibility.

--Master Hongzhi, from Cultivating the Empty Field, trans. by Taigen Dan Leighton

If I'm Fundamentally Unhindered...

If I'm Fundamentally Unhindered...
Originally uploaded by Shugetsu.

...why do I miss myself?

Choosing a Path/Becoming Yourself

I was touched by these words from Rev Daizui McPhillamy, excerpted from a broader (and very helpful) discussion in Northwest Dharma News, which can be found online at:

http://www.nwdharma.org/guidance.html

Buddhism, when properly taught, cuts away at the roots of the things that make people strange, aloof, proud, etcetera. What typically arises when these roots are cut is a warmth, gentleness, generosity, empathy, and genuineness that make someone a pleasure to be around. These qualities are the only outward signs of enlightenment, and they are a long way from the penetrating stares, self-important speeches, demonstrations of personal or psychic power, and other magic tricks which the misguided occasionally come up with.

...

Once you have found a suitable tradition, group, and teacher, stay with them. Things will not always go well, and not everything will please you or be as you think it should be. That is inevitable for two reasons. First, because each of us brings to Buddhist training our own set of attachments and delusions, they are bound to ‘rub the wrong way’ against parts of a genuine practice. Second, even the best teacher and group are human and they will make mistakes from time to time. The fact that they sometimes ‘mess things up’ does not mean that they are unworthy of being your teacher and fellow students: it simply means that their personal training is ongoing. Since enlightenment is not a finished thing but rather an ongoing process, and since even the continuous enlightenment of the arahant does not confer omniscience or infallibility, mistakes are going to be made. If seekers after Buddha’s Way require that their teachers or religious groups meet the ideals floating around inside their own heads, they will never find what they are looking for.

from Buddhism From Within: An Intuitive Introduction to Buddhism, by Rev. Daizui MacPhillamy, Mount Shasta, California: Shasta Abbey Press, 2003.
© 2003 Order of Buddhist Contemplatives.

Rev Oswin Hollenbeck of Eugene Buddhist Priory adds:

There is nothing that does not resolve itself through continued meditation, faith, and training.

"AMEN" say I-- and three cheers for the Shasta Abbey Lineage.

Poetry, And Life When Words Fail

Ireland is a civilized place. You can tell because the Irish consume poetry like no other nation, and they even have poetry on the radio. And it’s no surprise. Blown about by the wild winds at the Giant’s Causeway, I said to Michael (my friend and host): “I can see why the Irish are so poetic. Everything about the land here just calls out to the human heart.”

It’s somehow natural to want to capture the seething waves and roiling wind, or dark hedgerows and ancient stones. More difficult to celebrate uncontrolled growth at the edge of cities, and the march of ridiculous oversized houses into the countryside. No romance or history there--we’d rather bemoan the loss of the picturesque rural modesty. Thomas Kinsella says,

Constantly the heart releases
Wild geese to the past
Look, how they circle poignant places.

The geese were wailing ferociously when I went to visit old haunts in Galway and Cavan; I was shocked to see how things had changed in just six years. Casting about for a way to frame this inexorable ugliness, I sought solace in the verse of the Diamond Sutra:

A star at dawn; a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightning in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp; a phantom, and a dream—so is this fleeting world.

Oh lovely, lonely fleeting world…. Things we like just aren’t going to stay that way! To see that there is a choice, to embrace the evident dharma of this life, to regard the world with a broad view—this brings us to a silent (if rueful) wonder. What use now is grief for the past—six years ago when the pubs were full, the city outskirts uncluttered—six years ago when things were still the way they’d been for years? “Gaté, gaté,” as Yuko used to say.

Fleeting too are a host of precious new connections and memories. Wherever I went, there was the most incredible earnest rapport with other people. To talk about one’s spiritual life is a great healing thing…which we don’t get to do nearly enough. This brief little trip was full of such connectio, both with new Zen friends, and with family: Maeve and Tommy, and Maugie (eighty years old, we think—she’s not saying). What incredible great hearts they have. I went to visit Maugie, and two-and-a-half hours later, we came up for air—exhausted but with idea of the time.

Winning the prize for Most Likely to be Circled by the Geese of the Heart: meeting Taigen. Every once in a while, I “recognize” someone. It’s humbling to be thrown into unknown territory, but I’m grateful beyond words for the chance to know myself better through him. Good, too, to have time and space to process that which is beyond understanding. How nice it would have been to be articulate and capable; instead, I can hardly remember anything I’ve said to him. There’s just this great heart, warm, universal and true. And, having been knocked for a loop, renewed humility and wonder.

It’s the kind of thing that you could write poetry about. But no words to my diary. I drew pictures instead—not my usual style at all. But language would just... fail, for great swaths of time. All I had to report would be: “I’m right here/ and I’m really lost.” Later, out of sleep, words came, sounding like some Zen death poem:

In grief, obliterated by grief
In joy, obliterated by joy
Leaving here, only gratitude remains.

Those satisfy me. I have no idea if they’d move another human being’s heart, and I can’t say why they move mine.

Do we actually know where poetry comes from? When you consider the abundance of bad (often teenage) poetry in the world, it’s evident that humans deeply want to express some truth, to put what affects them into words. But why? Why should we be made whole by words that capture our experience?

I have no idea; I’ve just been keeping a journal since I was eleven years old.

Seeking direction in the midst of destabilization, here are a few simple resolutions to myself. And gratitude, gratitude, gratitude—losing what I thought I was, and feeling deeper than words can go:

I must live the life of Shugetsu.
I agree to be transformed in the service of the world.
I will feel deeply, without design, having faith in the life that brought me to this day.

Mind & Life XIII--Day 3 Overview (part 1)

In this final session, noted researchers, including the heads of some of the most renowned medical centers in the US, synthesized and presented what they had learned during the conference, and presented their visions for the future. These talks were, without exception, heartfelt and quite moving.

Ben Shapiro noted some issues in studying meditation using scientific protocols. One type of obstacle involves credibility: there remains some skepticism of psychosomatic illness as somehow “not real”; and there is a tendency to disregard the expertise of meditators.

When actually conducting a clinical trial, such standard procedures as randomization and proper controls are more difficult when the “treatment” is meditation practice.

From an ethical standpoint, meditation practices are grounded in religious tradition, which provides a framework for ethical behavior. He wondered how to maintain a standard of morality in meditation research when these techniques are figured for mass consumption. We are dealing with the deep structure of the human mind, after all.

Ralph Snyderman of Duke University noted that medicine and Buddhism have a shared goal of healing and freedom from suffering. It is stupendous to learn that mental training affects both the structure and function of the brain, and through regulation of hormone levels, impacts a person’s physiology. By the same token, repeatedly entertaining destructive emotions also remodels the brain to perpetuate same, and causes health problems in the body. Even in advanced cases, symptoms can be alleviated by mental training.

Buddhist technologies of mind can alleviate mental and physical suffering in otherwise “normal’ people, by attenuating the pathology as well as the pain of a condition (e.g. psoriasis).

He noted a few milestones of medicine: in the 1600s the heart was understood as being a muscle that pumps blood; previously it was more of a magical object. In 1847 Dr Somelweiss developed a germ theory of disease in response to the scourge of “childbirth fever”, and was enthusiastically reviled for same.

The current shortsightedness of medicine, he said, is in imagining disease has having a) a single that b) can be “fixed”. Contact with a doctor is sporadic: it happens when one is ill, and in response to a problem. Furthermore, the doctor is held (by all parties involved0 to be the authority on a person’s health. People often can’t or won’t assume responsibility for their own well-being.

Right now two major public health crises are going unmet. One is the prevalence of drug use and violence in our society. Another is the ubiquity of chronic diseases caused by lifestyle. Among the ethical values we should incorporate into our lives, we should avoid abusing our own bodies.

The next commentator was Wolf Singer, who had earlier presented research describing coordination and synchrony of brain activity as a possible mechanism of attention, intention, meditation and “eudemonic well-being”.

I must admit that I have exhibited some bias in not including this data in my summaries of the meeting. To be honest, I was not able to follow his presentation-- the most academic of them all—well enough to feel comfortable either summarizing or evaluating his findings. Really, material at that level merited a more in-depth discussion than was possible given the constraints of the presentations.

No event on the scale of Mind & Life XIII can be all things to all people, and in this case the technical aspects of experimental design and findings were sacrificed in order to present material suitable for not a just a scientific layperson, but a completely naïve audience whose main experience with the material lay in having minds themselves.

Those of us with some experience in scientific discipline would have appreciated a more thorough discussion of the research. At the very least, a poster session would allow the aficionados to engage with the material on a more technical level.

But I digress. Here are my notes, which paraphrase Dr Singer’s words, hopefully to some degree of accuracy:

Brains aren’t omniscient by have evolved to optimize survival. They focus on material objects in the relative world. We have a poor understanding of complex systems; rather we focus on models that allow useful predictions about the future. We preconceive the world as simple and linear, and imagine the brain to contain a “mover” and to function like clockwork.

The assumption of linearity leads to the conclusion that there must be a “mover”. How incredible the internal misunderstanding by which we can’t see our own functioning, and can’t see how our minds really work.

One of the Commentators: There is a focus on analytical sciences in the West, which purport to study reality from outside the system, from a “third person” perspective. In the East, the focus has been on developing an understanding of the inner world—working from a first person perspective.

Wolf Singer: Which view is correct? A scientist has means at her disposal to confirm her findings. From an intuitive approach, how does the brain know it’s right?

(From here there followed a discussion of the neurobiology of “a question being answered.”

Commentator: Perhaps “result” states correlate to a sustained pattern of synchrony (the topic of Dr Singer’s presentation) that persist long enough to convince the intellect that an answer has been reached, via that pleasant “Aha! Yes…” feeling.

Perhaps we strive for those pleasant (sustained synchrony) states when controversies are resolved. Perhaps meditation allows various agents to become parallel and find peace, and a sense of “answer.”

Singer: Do we rely on the wisdom of the ages, relayed by meditation practitioners, to find answers to the nature of Mind?

His Holiness; Brain and Society are two complex systems on different scales. A single neuron has no notion of generating consciousness or being part of a broader process. Just as the individual sees only the local environment and the limited scale of immediate experience. There is a similar lack of comprehension of what it means to be embedded in the great body of life. We have not been “built” to understand such things. And we cannot deliberately steer a direction by means of linear thinking and action. Sensing the complexity of the system, we feel despair that the much-loved Self cannot control everything. There’s the danger of a collective depression…and concomitant delusive behavior.

We must see beyond the Self…and embrace uncertainty. Long-distance compassion is now necessary in a global community.

This is not to say we should abandon the Western notion of self and the scientific attitude, but we can see through the selfish self, and foster a view of science as one discipline among many.

Asked to account for the emergence of consciousness and mental processes, His Holiness said, ”There is no fixed, unchanging ‘I’.” Rather there is a coming-together or two things: brain and mind. You cannot find the self within its own reality.

Ancient Indian thought (Buddhist and otherwise) supposed that, besides the physical and mental bases of the self, there are constructs, whose reality can only be understood on the basis of something other than itself.

In asking, “how do we know things are true,” His Holiness noted that there is a distinction between sensory perception and mental understanding. According to Madhymaka philosophy, a valid mental event must a) relate to the object and b) not be contradicted by other valid experiences. To that the Buddhist worldview would add that c) it should not be controverted by insight into the deeper nature of reality.

Mind & Life XIII--Day 3 Overview (part 2)

Matthieu Ricard explored the concept of Sukkha as well-being, an optimal state, a healthy quality that suffuses all emotional states and conditions. It is a wholesome way of being that endures in all conditions; regardless of the weather at sea, the sea itself is clean and unpolluted.

Hedonic pleasures: get old and eventually prove exhausting.
Well-being/sukkha: confers strength, freedom, compassion; continued experience and understanding of it allows it to deepen and endure.

Exacerbated self-concern is a prime source of insecurity. (Remember, we learned that perceived attack on the “self” leads to physical pathology.)

Genuine self-confidence in not about a triumphant ego, but lies in breaking the bubble of the Self, dissolving the target, and gives rise to a deep compassion, work for the benefit of others, and an end to hopelessness.

(I love this guy!)

Sukkha, as a particular kind of well-being, addresses themes of self-interest, anxiety and true health.

Practice progresses slowly—like watching the hands of a clock. If the hands haven’t moved after some time—if you aren’t more compassionate and less anxious, then the practice isn’t working!

Father Keating: Early Christians accepted two types of revelations: scriptures and nature (!) He said the proceedings are “telling me more about G-d than anything else. Because I’ve read the scriptures.”

The Garden of Eden story is fundamentally about humans tempted to become G-d. Do you want to become G-d on G-d’s terms? Or on your own terms? If the latter, you’re out of paradise, bereft, and don’t become G-d at all.

This is very significant for the health professions: life “on my own terms” is an illusion that doesn’t work, and doesn’t make us healthy or happy. People have no idea where true happiness is to be found, and are seeking in all the wrong places. Or if they find some truth, the person is too morally weak to do anything about it.

To be “healthy” is to accept our weakness, to acknowledge that we need others, and to see the fate of others seeking happiness in all the wrong places.

He spoke of the “post-conceptual, intuitive presence of Reality,” called Love. Love is knowing at the deepest level, beyond a “self.” This is seeing G-d (however you name It—“God has been called a lot worse things than ‘God’!”) on its own terms.

Our whole being emerges from this presence—this is tender, loving, motherly, concerned—health-giving—and given gratuitously, with the invitation that, as G-d is our host, so are we to pass on to humanity the great truth that we are receiving.

Fr. Keating continued by saying that his work now is in recovering the Christian contemplative tradition, which has fallen into neglect, and some opposition. Christians need to be converted!

Of the practice of Silence, he said this is listening more deeply than ears or heart can go. Listening to that energy which is everything, and nothing.

It doesn’t matter how you sit, but you must discontinue habits of looking for happiness in the wrong places. It is this which makes us ill.

Someone at this point noted, “The greatest impediment to knowledge is not ignorance by the illusion of knowledge.”

His Holiness: The validity of a moment of cognition can only be determined in relation to other elements.

A theory or discipline should be checked-out by comparing notes with other, perhaps radically-different, perspective.

Some misconceptions about religion, and interreligious dialogue:
-- That religions contradict one another, and “cancel out”, leaving only science as a measure of truth.
-- that the contemplative traditions involve progress towards some “right” answer, to be verified or rejected by one’s teacher

He further advocated a return to empiricism, not resting with doctrinal answers, but comparing notes on the deepest experiential level to see if a convergence between religions can be found.

Sylvia Boorstein: Compassion is easy to hold as an ideal, but kindness, its active manifestation, is often held to be a secondary virtue, something to settle for if you can’t have power, etc. In fact, kindness is a major force for wholesomeness and good!

She then asked the Dalai Lama how compassion related to one’s ability to do something about a problem.

He responded that compassion is about more than empathy; aided by wisdom, it also involves seeing the causes of a situation, and the possibility of freedom from suffering. Compassion as the simple wish to not see others suffer can lead to a sense of helplessness. Insight into the situation enables us to see how we can help. The apogee of compassion is “Great Compassion”, the motivation to seek enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.

Jon Kabat-Zinn wrapped things up thus:

we have a fleeting chance in this human lifetime to move closer to What We Actually Are, to really embody mindful awareness.

”The bell has rung,” the reverberations will continue, and their impact is yet unknown.

Your job is to ask where your deepest questions come from—What is my job on this planet? As a sentient human, awake to my own awareness and vast potential, how can I be of service?

Letter from Nothern Ireland 2

11-24-05

Hi Meave,

The task of charming my way through the North of Ireland continues. I had the pleasure of spending the first part of the day with two gentlemen I met last night at a small zen sitting at a “Peace Farm” outside of Portstewart. Michael met me in the morning and took me out to see Giant’s Causeway. The stepping-stones themselves are not as dramatic as they make it look in the postcards, but everything else was just tremendous.

The day was so windy and blustery that the sea was a mas of white, just roiling and sudsy. Gusts of wind would fling clouds of sea foam in to the air, and they’d be airborne thirty feet up, and land like little jellyfish on the heather. The path wound around the side of a cliff, and the wind was so strong that it was hard to walk. I never thought you could be blown backward while walking downhill! It was quite exhausting.

The columnar basalt hexagons that make up the walkway pavers are about the size you could wrap your arms around, but in places they reach up to the sky, it seems.

My camera batteries chose this time to expire.

Michael and I walked back uphill, knowing we’d have some help from the wind, but never suspecting what would happen. You stretch out your arms, lift up your feet and…you’re running. Running out of control, pushed by the wind. Up a very steep hill!

We had a snack of bananas and yogurt looking at Dunluce Castle, and talked. Michael was born in the Bogside in Derry and was sent to live with relatives in Donegal when he was little. Before television came, nobody in this little fishing village knew they were poor. They had thatched roofs and cooked in kettles hung over the fire. At his uncle’s place, fish hung to dry in the rafters. At night, people would leave their doors open and go visiting up and down. In the late 50s his aunt got one of the first televisions. When a program was over, they’d look up and see that the room was full of neighbors who’d crept in to watch.

Although Michael never thought of himself as disadvantaged, there was one time he caught sight of a little Protestant boy with huge shiny cheeks on him, and Michael remembers thinking that nobody he knew was in a position to have extra fat like that.

When he was in Donegal his uncle arranged for him to meet the oldest man in the area, who was 108. Little Michael was met by the man’s son, who had come to town with some money his father had given him in order to buy shoes. The son was 79 years old, with bleary eyes, and Michael could hardly fathom that this very old man himself had a father. The oldest man turned out to be tiny, just a wee shrunken man with bright eyes and a long white beard. He was so happy to have a guest, and he chattered away at the little boy.

On our way too and from the Causeway, we passed through the town of Bushmills. Although it’s seen as a quintessentially “Irish” whiskey elsewhere in the world, Bushmills is so Loyalist as to be Scottish. The town had that hard edge of a community that is fighting against something; there was a tangible forbidding air to it. It wasn’t a place you’d want to stop for tea.

Michael said when he went to Israel, he was told, “if you get a Palestinian guide, you’ll be Palestinian; if you get an Israeli guide, you’ll be Israeli.” After a morning hearing about life as a Catholic in an era when Catholics were poor and had no civil rights, I was about to visit the other side.

We met Billy, my other host from the meditation group, at a café with a sweeping view of the Portstewart waterfront. The wind was still whipping things up, and the waves were crashing over the sea wall in places.Time for a cup of tea.

Billy and I drove to Derry, through Limavady, the area where he grew up. It was some of the most beautiful farmland I’ve ever seen. We went for a walk round Derry’s town wall, which is a stunning piece of human work. Really worth a visit. The walls held King James at bay for over a hundred days, and the people inside were eating dogs and rats and whatever they could find.

Billy told me about being a little boy and how exciting it was to see the marches and merriment leading up to Christmas. Right outside his house in the town, they would burn a thirty-foot effigy of the man who tried to sue for peace during King James’ siege of Derry. A group of apprentice boys grabbed the keys and prevented him turning over the city. Finally the king left, and the apprentice boys were heroes, the peacemaker the villain. It was thrilling to see that burning man every year-- no trip to a remote desert required!

As we got over to the Bogside area, we could look down from the wall and see some of the murals and the back of the“You are Now entering Free Derry” sign. Billy pointed out the Catholic cathedral whose courtyard figured in Bloody Sunday, and the mural of Bernadette Devlin, the Republican who bodily attacked the Home Secretary on the floor of Parliament the next day. The shock of those events was still evident in his voice.

Everywhere there are survelliance cameras, even more than in most towns in the North. A looming radio survelliance tower on the Bogside side of the city wall is to be torn down; it really is a threatening-looking behemoth of fear. In any public place, you are on at least five cameras. It's quite disconcerting, and I'm thinking I won't go back there after my sidetrip to Galway.

I find that I’m not very interested in visiting “political” hotspots. Driving through Bushmills was enough to remind me that partisan graffitti, murals, flags, etc. are all hallmarks of a festering wound. Investigating the wound and renewing its sting in my own heart doesn’t interest me. I am very interested, however, in how people turn towards healing it.

It shouldn’t be surprising, but I am quite impressed that the Zen pracitioners I’ve met are a mixed-background lot, and that they are able to talk about the rhetorical excesses of each side with equanimity and humor. To pursue an interest in meditation seems to require a proclivity for thinking outside the confines of sectarian boundaries. To hear the practitioners in Belfast talk about the well-meaning missteps of the Ulster-Scots language movement was like hearing Portlanders discuss the bizarre habits of stereotypical small-town Oregonians.

Among the more charming un-PC missteps involved in transalating offical government documents into Robert-Burns-style dialect: "disabled children" comes out as "wee dafties." Modern terms are a challenge as well. For "telephone" they came up with "langblather"!

I have a sore throat and have been losing my voice. Interestingly enough, this makes my accent much less prominent.

Take care, sweetie,

Delia

Letter from Northern Ireland

11-23-05

Hi Meave,

I didn't like Lithuania at all. I didn't know such a thing was possible.The people are pretty harsh and restrained in public, although they are very helpful if you ask for help, and blush slightly when you compliment their english. They do speak very well, and it’s no wonder Delta airlines and other complanies are opening customer service centers there. People might work like the dickens for $600 a month. Adds up to good business sense, eh? There just seemed to be an atmosphere of fear in the place. LT itself is like a dark fairy tale, and just feels...fearful. This may have something to do with losing a third of their population during the Nazi and Soviet occupations………

I am supposed to go back for 2 days and 3 nights before flying back to the states with Dan (on all the same flights) and I really don't want to. The original idea had been to go back to LT to follow up on whatever dental work needed to be done: to install caps on my teeth that would have been fabricated while I was in Ireland, for instance. But I don't need to go back to the dentist: everything was done with in under 90 minutes (combined) over two visits!

Belfast was a breath of fresh air. Everyone is so incredibly sweet. I saw the Dalai Lama (again) at the big cathedral here. People packed in, and waited outside in the cold for two hours after the doors were closed. Their earnestness was just incredible. The visit has huge significance for them. Belfast, meanwhile is blooming and catching up and looking really good. Everybody is optimistic and happy.

The Zen folks here are very nice. I stayed out late with two very sweet guys my age, visiting the holiday night market and talking till late over hot cocoa and tea. in a minute, I'll collect my bags at the visitor centre (they're holding them for me) and take a taxi to the bus station for a visit to Portrush and Giant's Causeway.

Lots of Love,

D.

Dalai Lama: “The Universe in a Single Atom”, Chapter 1

The following is from the Dalai Lama's newest book:

For me, science is first and foremost an empirical discipline that provides humanity with a powerful access to understanding the nature of the physical andliving world. It is essentially a mode of inquiry that gives us fantasically detailed knowledge of the empirical world and the underlying laws of nature…. Within this model, many aspects of human exsitence, including values, creativity and spirtuality, as well as deeper metaphysical questions, lie outside the scope of scientific inquiry.

Though there are many areas of life outside the domain of science, I have noticed that many people hold an assumption that the scientific view of the world should be the basis for all knowledge and all that is knowable. This is scientific materialism. Although I am not aware of a school of thought that explicitly propounds this notion, it seems to be a common unexamined presupposition. This view upholds a belief in an objective world, independent of the contingency of its observers. It assumes that the data being analyzed within an experiment are independent of the preconceptions, perceptions, and experience of the scientist analyzing them.

Underlying this view is the assumption that, in the final analyisis, matter, as it can be described by physics and as it is governed by the lawsof physiscs, is all there is. …The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.

One of the principle problems with a radical scientific materialism is the narrowness of vision that results and the potential for nihilism that might ensue. Nihilism, materialism, and reductionism are above all problems from a philosophical and above all a human perspective, since they can potentially impoverish the way we see ourselves. For example, whether we see ourselves as random biological creatures or as speical beings endowed with the dimension of consciousness and moral capacity to make an impact on how we feel about ourselves and treat others. In this view many dimentsions of the full reality of what it means to be human—art, ethics, spirituality, goodness, beauty, and above all, consciousness—either are reduced to the chemical reactions of firing neurons or are seen as a matter of purely imaginary constructs. The danger then is that human beings may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction.

It is difficult to see how questions such as the meaning of life or good and evil can be accomodated within such a worldview. The problem is not with the empirical data of science but with the contention that these data alone constitute the legitimate ground for developing a comprehensive worldview or an adequate means for responding to the world’s problems. There is more to human existence and to reality itself than current science can ever give us access to.

By the same token, spirituality must be tempered by the insights and discoveries of science. If as spiritual practitioners we ignore the discoveries of science, our practice is also impoverished, as this mind-set can lead to fundamentalism. This is one of the reasons I encourage my Buddhist colleagues to undertake the study of science, so that its insights can be integrated into the Buddhist worldview.