Gratification Lost and Found

What was lost in space has been found in Santa Barbara, CA. I’ve no idea how it got there, but my roller bag is on its way home, twenty-five days after we were separated between New York and Las Vegas.

I will be grateful to have my rakusu back; I had finally resorted to asking the Universe, very politely, for its return.

(A rakusu, according to the claim form I filed with America West Airlines, is a “handmade religious garment” valued at $248.)

More exciting to my housemates is the fact that the luggage contains a large quantity of Lithuanian chocolate. As my nearest, if not dearest friends, they are looking forward to this sweet, dark “sokolade” from Vilnius. Especially the dark chocolate filled with Camembert cheese.

There is some alchemy that takes place when this creamy high-fat cheese is married with chocolate. It’s quite intoxicating. After eating just one, your mind stops. You don't want or need anything. I mean anything. There is only complete hedonic overload. Every pleasure circuit is awake and humming. Of course as meditators we greet all phenomena with curiosity and gratitude. So it will be interesting to investigate this chocolate again.

I don’t have an easy relationship with extravagance, as I found out today on my first day of my first “real” job in ten (sorry, mom) years. I’m very happy to be at Golden Crane, a Corvallis store that sells beautiful, cute, flowy, creative garment–as well as gifts, jewelry, and house wares. If you need incense or Indonesian handicrafts or stained-glass Tiffany-style lamps, Golden Crane is your place. It certainly would have been mine a few years ago. It’s what I used to refer to as a “Delia trap.” (Nowadays, dharma books are my weakness.)

All my jewelry and vintage dresses and cute jackets are packed away, sitting in the damp silence of a basement in California. So I reported for work completely unadorned: no hair, no jewelry, no ruffles or furbelows-- a little Zen pinhead in the midst of all that opulence.

Ruby, the owner, is a good person to work for. She’s a Buddhist in the Tibetan tradition, and is very smart, trim, and stylish. In an earlier life as a computer programmer–a VIP in the days when almost nobody programmed computers–she wrote an assembly language. Her programs were stored first on punch cards, then on perforated tape, and finally floppy discs the size of LPs. (LPs, called “records”, were a music storage device before we had cassette tapes, CDs or iPods.) Eventually the discs would come in a stack of five, which you’d tote around in a big plastic case.

Ruby understands the practice of helping people connect with material objects. She wrapped a fancy scarf around my neck and put me to work doing something I know well: cleaning.

I swept and dusted and straightened racks of yoga tunics and spangly skirts. Lifted up crystal balls and Japanese bowls to dust underneath. All was peaceful –I was getting the hang of things, even enjoying the pretty scarf around my neck– until customers started coming in!

I was at a loss. What do I do? I'm a friendly person, but intruding on someone who is in their own space is not a skill we cultivate in Zen monasteries. Much easier to stand there looking vaguely beneficent. Or just looking vague. By the time my three-hour my "first day of work" was over, I was brimming with anxiety. Not believing it– but brimming nonetheless.

I walked over to the Book Bin and had two mugs of decaf coffee and a brownie. Read People magazine rather than dharma books. It was perfect, even though the brownie was old and dry and I recognize none of the current celebrities. I just felt so much better: the system was reset by polyphenols and sugar.

How wonderful to encounter relief, when so few problems are actually solved by food! Body and mind at rest, I walked home peacefully, enjoying my rare good fortune: o be saved by chocolate. It will not be so easy again. Next time, I’ll need the Lithuanian stuff.

Year-End Statistics

Holiday Cards Sent: 30

Holiday Cards Received: 4

Estimated Value of Lithuanian Chocolate I attempted to bring home: US$60

Cost of dental work in Lithuania, including one filling replacement, and large-scale repair of two teeth (just short of capping): US$50

Hours in the dentist's chair in Lithuania: 1

Hours in transit home to the US: 36, not including an unanticipated overnight stay in Las Vegas, NV

Books Acquired in 2005
(*)= currently reading

Ching……………Sutra on the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva
Dalai Lama……………The Universe in a Grain of Sand *
David-Neel……………Intiations and Initiates in Tibet
Emoto……………The Hidden Messages of Water
Harada ……………The Path to Bodhidharma
Hirschfield……………Nine Gates
Kennedy……………Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit
Keizer ……………A Dresser of Sycamore Trees
Kelly …………… Eleanor of Acquataine and the Four Kings
Kerr…………… Lost Japan
Larkin …………… First You Shave Your Head
Monks of New Skete ……………In the Spirit of Happiness
Oliver……………American Primitive
Nagao……………Madyhamika and Yogacara
Packer…………… The Art of Presence
Pine ……………The Heart Sutra *
Seife ……………Alpha and Omega
Stone …………… The Shadow King
Swaan …………… Japanese Lantern
Unno ……………River of Fire, River of Water *
Various…………… Pure Land, Pure Mind *
Waddell…………… Wild Ivy *
Watson…………… The Old Man Who Does as He Pleases
Wick ……………The Book of Equanimity

Year's End, And All's Not Well

It’s Christmas and some things are wrong. In a season of goodwill, where Christians celebrate the story of a little baby born in a stable, thousands of souls are homeless, and thousands of children need food and shelter. Not just for today, but in their lives. We think nothing of taking care of a child’s needs: how are adults different? An adult who cannot look out for themselves needs to be helped, regardless of whether their inability is due to mental or physical disability, or a really bad string of luck. The stories a person tells, or the irritating things they do, don’t sway us from helping children. We aren’t offended when a three-year-old screams, “I hate you,” But an alcoholic adult is on their own, for some reason, is too much trouble. Jesus cared for, and ministered to, the most unfortunate in society. Why can’t we do the same?

I mean the question as more than a rhetorical one. On an unusually balmy morning, my mom and I went to the quaint little Mt Vernon shopping district to soak up some holiday atmosphere. The streets were quiet, even though most stores were open. It seemed that most of the holiday shopping was done. And sharing the street with us was a sober, kind-looking brown-skinned young man, wearing several layers of clothing, a tie-died floppy hat, and a huge backpack. He watched us walk by. We went into a store. We emerged, and he walked next to us for a while. I felt his eyes on me. We ignored him. I could feel myself retreating into a certain prim oblivion: I am at ease on this street. I do not see the man in transit, the man who is looking for nothing, the man who might need help on Christmas Eve.

Travelers at the inn. In the Old Testament, welcoming travelers who turn out to be angels. Over and over, through various means, the message is clear: virtue lies in helping the less fortunate. These are meant to be taken seriously, as guidelines for life. If we don’t bring the myths into our lives, what do they mean.

We ignored him. And we went to go buy a chicken to roast. The natural foods co-op was packed with people who had turned their minds to the culinary side of the holiday. 2006 calendars are on sale. Here’s one for the Tibetan’s Nun Project. Another called “A Simple Monk” celebrates the Dalai Lama. Photos are accented by quotes. His Holiness says: “Once we have enough to live, we must turn and help others.” I put the calendars back on the shelf.

I might have bought the calendar if I’d been feeling flush. But times are very, very tight. I’m living off of credit, which is running out, and running into debt. Just before I left to come to Mt Vernon, however, I had a job interview. It’s nothing glamorous, but it’s a good foray into social services, and satisfies the career-seeking side of myself that contemplates being a therapist or social worker. But what is real right now is: I need money. And this job helps people. So for $8 an hour I am both getting enough to live on, and I am turning and helping others. The way I did not do today.

Another thing that is wrong: the Portland panty bandit is going to be in jail for decades. Because he’s a sick guy who has a thing for women’s undies. Meanwhile, a white collar criminal who did far more damage to society is back on the job. Undismayed by having enough to live on, he kept on going, causing harm in all quarters. With good lawyers on his side, he served very little jail time and is now tangling with the exclusive Multnomah Athletic Club—focus on the “Club”—it’s a networking venue for Portland’s high society, an indoor country club for those who have arrived. Seems jailboy wants the right to rejoin the club, after his criminal activities got him booted out.

Something’s not right here.

Go another level down, and things twist, while injustice is maintained: the panty pilferer is indeed man with a problem. Just look at the over 400,000 pornographic images on his computer hard drive. They’re what got him in jail. Thousands of them depict women being raped, tortured, killed and otherwise debased. It’s enough to make your blood run cold, and to wonder who else might be out there. But the photos of women are not what will put this man behind bars until he’s an old pervert instead of a young one. It’s the eight images involving children, that provide the basis for his conviction and sentencing.

Not to minimize the destruction and tragedy of child pornography, but why is it OK to profit from violent images of women? Again, why are children more sacred than other humans? Why are women on their own in a barren field of social outrage? Isn’t a dead woman as dead as a dead child? A raped and beaten woman as raped and beaten? We assiduously protect the rights of children everywhere not to be turned into sexual objects. Brutalizing women, on the other hand….

So, children, the sacred little things. Sacred enough that child molesters are routinely victimized once they make it to prison. Raped themselves, because rape is so terrible. Does that make sense?

Whatever is going on with our protective attitude toward children, it’s not a rational thing. Somewhere, we identify with the unguarded vulnerability of children. We access our own buried child self that way, and what we fight fiercely to protect is some part of ourselves, witnessed and made real by another person’s life. But we’re not seeing that child. We’re seeing ourself, and we’re mindlessly angry and protective of some part of our self.

Is our unthinking identification with the child so far removed from that of pedophiles, who love children a little too much? Who seek to reclaim what they’ve lost by sexual contact: abused children go up to abuse in turn. There’s some relief, some quest for explanation and psychological resolution that, unexamined, draws them back into the darkness. Failing to understand the traumatized child leads the pedophile to do his thing, and the person who abuses the pedophile to do his thing. Insanity.

Which brings me all the way back to Christmas.

I would like to know: Why do parents, who presumably take their job seriously and want to guard their offspring and instill values—why do parents lie to their children about Santa Claus? Why do they go out of their way to deceive their little ones, and find joy and relief in solidifying the deception for another year?

There must be some reward to it, to go to the effort of taking the kid to the mall, or hiring a Santa to call your home. But it doesn’t make sense. Nobody wants to teach their kid that lying is OK. That going out of your way to perpetuate a lie is OK.

So the reward for being “good”, for following the rules and slowly learning how to be a member of polite society, is to be lied to. Beyond that, there's the lesson that material pleasures are the true reward for upright behavior.

I don’t see what’s wrong with having Christmas be about the birth of a miraculous baby to transient parents who had to rely on the charity of others. I don’t see what’s wrong with families gathering to bless the children in their lives. While we’re at it, perhaps some positive values could be instilled; there’s no merit in a holiday based on deception. No need to deceive children. And no need to deceive ourselves that this is a world where everything is OK. Not when the homeless and luckless are right in front of our faces, and we’re in the midst of holiday focused on a tiny baby who grew to teach the world about charity and goodwill.

Lost in the Rain

The rain today alternated between solid respectable downfall and deluge. In front of the house, Charlie Clark and a young rangy fellow named Jeremy who smoked hand rolled cigarettes were uprooting a tree with undesirable growth- and upheaval-potential. This went on for hours, and brought out a side of Charlie I hadn’t seen. He’s an anesthesiologist, and I hadn’t pegged him as one to get covered with mud in the cold and rain, and slog away with a lanky masculine hippy kid for company. But there they were, grunting contentedly for hours. By the time I went out for a drive, their green rain suits were covered in muck, their faces were spattered, and they seemed totally happy.

I didn’t know where to go, so I pointed the car towards the coastal mountains. Out beyond Philomath I turned into the little town of Wren, Oregon. “Town” is a generous term in this case: Wren is a tiny settlement, perched with fragile anticipation in the middle of nowhere, on a rail line that must have once carried lumber somewhere. The most notable thing about the place are the signs directing the visitor to a nearby covered bridge.

If you weren’t extremely lost, or in the wood products business, or didn’t live there already, the covered bridge is the only reason you’d show up in Wren. There's something mysterious and compelling about these bridges: they’re an odd gift left behind by the pioneers.

This bridge was actually not in Wren at all, but 2.5 miles outside it. Wren was merely the nearest settlement to the spot in the middle of nowhere where, once upon a time, something was important. I drove, and the pavement ended, and the fog bathed the layers of clear-cut hills, blowing silhouetted trees into existence, and then into oblivion. And there was the bridge. Nearby, an old wooden farmhouse, with not even a tin shed or a car parked outside to cue the year as anything other than 1920. Across the road, a freestanding dive-- a roadhouse-- that looked threateningly ready to erupt with pickup trucks, fistfights and methamphetamine should the weekend roll around.

The bridge is still in service, and traffic still goes over and through it. But there were no cars, and hadn’t been for miles. So I parked in front of the roadhouse and walked up and into it.

The floor-roadway was made of stout wooden planks, and the dark eaves resonated with the sound of the rain. It felt safe and dry and very unlike the middle of a road. I took some fantastic pictures, looking out at the hills, before the camera batteries failed.
Lurching back towards Wren, I passed an old log barn squatting like a colossal Lincoln Log structure near the road. No batteries! But I’ll go back there, and show it to Rob. The timbers are rough-hewn, thirty feet long. It’s something worth remembering, even if you don’t know why you need to remember such a thing. Because that’s once all there was? Because right now it’s just what is?

The rain and the ennui of life in the dark season had led me out of the house with no real goal; I only knew I was looking for something. So I headed north, up the Kings Valley Highway, to the terrain of my childhood.

It was twenty miles or more of unrelenting rain; hills and curves; fear of hydroplaning; and old, old farms. Farms so old that outhouses might be in use. Farms where nothing has changed, or will ever change. Trees crowded the road, and lichen hung from the naked branches in wisps, and then in ropes. The creeks and rivers were swollen, roiling high, creeping up their banks. Alone with the rain and no thoughts, I met no other vehicles until a big truck started riding my tail about five miles south of Dallas.

Dallas. Land of good old fellas and uptight Christian women. I found a little coffee place across from the courthouse. Two boys were playing chess and two older people were having an inane conversation. Some people were going to see Narnia, playing at the Fox movie theatre next door. I had clearly found the heart of the action!

I was famished, and not sure if ordering 1) a veggie burger in 2) a coffee shop was really such a keen idea. But the girl behind the counter piled on fresh lettuce and tomato and sliced an avocado on top! And there was a sizeable pile of potato salad on the side. I inhaled it with great appreciation.

On the way out of town, I tried to count bars, but gave up. Does the pizza parlor qualify? Dallas is notable for its large number of churches and drinking/fistfighting establishments, and a public life that embodies the clash between the two. Hence the well-fortified courthouse with the skybridge to the jail across the street. Does your tiny town have such a thing? I thought not.

From the highway heading east out of town, I turned off onto Ballard Road, and the crunching gravel I know so well. I’ve come back a handful times to drive by the farm where I grew up. But today for the first time, all memories seemed completely unsubstantial. It was beyond obvious: The fields and trees were not the same old ones. Not a single thing was as it had been before; I was in a truly unique and transient landscape, wondering about something that has gone, gone, gone. Nothing in here and nothing out there are what they were before.

Passing the house where I grew up, the structure glimpsed me—I was spotted by a familiar face, by windows like eyes under a cramped roofline. When you recognize someone before you actually see them, you sense them and do not perceive them in a normal way. Without thinking, I said "Hello!" to that alert spirit, to that recognition by inanimate intelligence.

Ray Adams’ kitchen light was on, as it’s been for 25 years and more. The trees are towering, and our old pasture is now vineyards. Along the road, the water was creeping out of the ditches and flooding in several places. Two pheasants stood in the way and looked at the car like it was something new.

Finally, on the big highway, 99W, I joined a long line of traffic on flawless asphalt, and we all sped home at a steady 60 mph, no curves or hazards in sight. Outside the house, there was a shallow mess of mud out front where the tree used to be. Inside, I was a bit startled to find the dishes in the sink, just as I left them.

(Pictures to come, once I buy a new camera cable.)

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.