It’s About Time

I’m cranky.

And distracted, exhausted, short-tempered, selfish, critical, cynical, illogical, flustered, convinced I’m always right (and annoyed as hell when I find out I’m not), indignant, impatient and impudent.

And I don’t think that’s like me at all.

Cranky Brad is Cranky

 

Four years ago I started this blog to kickstart a meditation practice over the course of 30 straight days, and I’ve decided it’s time to re-up in 2016.  I seem to find more success with sticking to things like this when I set myself a challenge that I can track (and then making it public so that I feel slightly ashamed if I fail…), and so I’m optimistic that a revived 30-day meditation commitment will accomplish what good intentions and an inconsistent schedule could not. But building a good habit isn’t the only reason I’ve decided to sit in mindfulness; I actually feel kind of desperate for it.  All that uncharacteristic crankiness and impatience is frankly kind of bumming me out, and as I meticulously sort through all the possible causes and reactions (as I have a habit of doing…), I keep arriving at one course of action: meditation

Sitting (as I’ll refer to mindfulness meditation going forward) has always been a struggle of mine; my own little Buddhist bugaboo.  For one, I suck at it.  I have short, inflexible legs that make a full lotus position seem like Mount Everest (but with a higher body count), and I’m too damn stubborn to believe that meditating in a chair–or even the seiza position–is “the real thing.”  I’ve also found that, in the last few years, my mind has been raising a small herd of brahma bulls that starting kicking like mad the second I try to sit still and let my mind rest on my breathing.  Of course, this latter fact is one big reason why I need to practice sitting, but I’m not ready to admit to that yet, because have to complain for a few more paragraphs.

Showoff.

 

Moreover, I’ve always been lousy at sticking to a routine.  Like… any routine.  Maybe it’s just a short attention span, but my days begin and end in wildly different ways as the week progresses.  Some mornings I’ll jump out of bed as soon as my alarm hits, run downstairs, do dishes, go for a walk, and leave for work early.  Others, I’ll hit snooze 6 times, screw around on the internet, and get to work 30 minutes late.  Nighttime is no different.  Contacts, teeth, book, sleep.  Or couch, South Park, and f*ck all.  For whatever reason, I’m bad at developing and sticking to routines.

“I do what I want!”

 

I am amazing, however, at making excuses.  I mean, just read the last two paragraphs.  I don’t lie (I hate lying); I’m just really creative when it comes to justifying a desired course of action.  Maybe it has something to do with my passion for logic and philosophy, but I will find a way to convince myself of anything that conveniently aligns with how I’m seeing things at the moment.  This skill has actually served me well professionally, because I can concoct a way to explain almost anything to almost anyone (even if I don’t myself believe it…), but it can be a real pain when trying to do something good for myself when my mind is made up to the contrary.

One of my best self-delusions is the belief that I’ll do something important TOMORROW.  Ah, no worries, I can do it TOMORROW–what’s one more day, right?  I’ll mow the lawn TOMORROW.  I’ll fold my laundry TOMORROW.  I’ll sit TOMORROW.  “TOMORROW, TOMORROW, I’ll love ya TOMORROW.”  I’ll bet that Little Orphan Annie sucked at meditating, too.

Pictured: Not a Buddhist

 

So if meditation is an organ my system keeps rejecting, why bother?  I actually have three good answers to that question, which are hopefully more potent than my three good excuses above:

1) It’s part of the Buddhist practice.  Intellectually, I consider myself to be very Buddhist.  I’m intimately familiar with the dharma, and I continue to immerse myself in the teachings of the Mahayana tradition through books, articles, podcasts and ongoing personal contemplation.  Intellectually, I’m one hell of a Buddhist.  Practically?  Well… OK, not so much.  The problem is, intellect only gets you so far.  Right Understanding may be the first step on the Eightfold Path (and it’s definitely important), but so much of what I feel Buddhism offers to the practitioner can only be experienced by regularly sitting in meditation.  Meditation isn’t “just a thing Buddhists do,” it’s something that gives you an opportunity to grow in the dharma in a very deep and tangible way, and I’ve always secretly lamented that the practice of sitting isn’t a larger part of my Buddhist experience.  Besides, it’s something that Buddhists have been doing for over 26 centuries, so there must at least be something to it, right?  (I admit that’s an amazingly weak recommendation for meditation, but I needed some way to close my first point, and segue to point #2…)

2) It cultivates compassion and lovingkindness.  Ah, yes–these are wonderful traits.  And not just wonderful in a “crunchy, peace-and-love” sort of way, but in a “pretty damn useful, actually” kind of way. Sitting with your own suffering is a compassionate act in and of itself, and it also allows you to extend that compassion towards others, both on the cushion and in the heat of the moment.  Developing these types of attributes are where the rubber meets the road for me.  I’ve tried to think my way into lovingkindness, and guess what: it doesn’t really work.  Sitting in meditation gives you a chance to be in touch with the present moment and get out of your own way.  The cool thing is that I’ve had moments of clear presence in my life, and they’re AMAZING!  The pure opening up to What’s Happening Now is a profound experience, but it’s only ever happened rarely for me, and never by just intellectualizing my way into.  The mind is great at zipping here and there and coming up with ideas and questions (and excuses for not meditating… ahem), but the body is always present.  Bringing your mind to rest on a physical sensation like the breath is a great way to keep from getting carried away, and to allow your true nature–which is compassionate, loving and equanimous–to manifest more freely and often.

3) I’m cranky, distracted, exhausted, short-tempered, etc., etc.  And here I am back where I started.  I sincerely believe that sitting in meditation is the most effective tool for countering these damaging states of mind that have been present in me for a while now.  Rather than just trying to juggle these emotions, think my way through them and try to rationalize them, meditation will give me an opportunity to sit with them, understand why they’ve arisen, acknowledge them, and let them slip away.  Moreover, I can’t help but think that these negative states of mind aren’t coming through in my behavior.  In fact, I know they are.  I’ve been complaining more, tensing up behind the wheel of my car, rolling my eyes more, swearing a LOT more, and laughing less.  That’s not how I want to behave, and that’s not how I want to be perceived.  But more importantly: that’s not what the world needs.  I work with a lot of people, I’m fortunate to have a lot of friends I see often, and I encounter more people than I can even know when I’m out grocery shopping, biking, driving and traveling.  That’s hundreds of interactions on a weekly basis, and if there’s any kind of energy I want to impart when I cross someone’s path, I want that energy to be one of patience, compassion and lovingkindness.  If anything, that’s more important now than ever, isn’t it?

So, tomorrow morning I’m going to sit.

And I’m aware of the fact that it’s going to be hard as hell, and I’m going to sit wrong, and it’ll hurt my short and inflexible legs, and the brahma bulls are going to buck my brains out, and I’m going to feel defeated, and I’m going to tell myself to just skip one day and do it again TOMORROW.  But I’m going to sit, and then I’ll do it the day after that, and the day after that, for 30 days straight.  And each day (or every few days, if I have nothing interesting to say), I’ll check in here and record how it’s going, and whether it’s having a positive impact.

My money is on it making a difference…

On we go.

A new chapter

It’s been a little while since I last wrote (though I have been sitting…) because I’m about to start a new chapter in my life, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how my story has changed over the last five years. I tend to look at my life through this “story / chapter” lens because I’ve found that the impermanent nature of things makes good sense to me when seen in that context. This view of things also comes out a lot in the songs I write, so I guess it’s only natural that I talk about it in my blog…!

Growing up I had a general sense of how my life would play out. I’d graduate high school, go to college and get a degree, get a job, get married and settle down, have kids, raise them, work, find a few hobbies, and then die one day surrounded by grandchildren. And my life did start to follow that general track, up to the point of getting married and settling down. However, everything changed in June 2007 when my wife was killed in a car accident. Besides being significant because it marked the most painful experience of my life to date, that incident has been a major point of demarcation in my life. Before June 2007 I had a plan for my life and a person with whom I was going to live that plan. After June 2007, I had no plan except to live one day at a time until I got to a place where I felt like I had my feet planted back on the ground.

Despite my sense of direction being thrown off, I did have a firm belief that everything would be alright. Whatever happens, the story goes on; just maybe not how you thought it would. However, because my primary identity as a husband was replaced with an identity as a widower, I didn’t really have any sense of what I wanted to happen next. Over time I came to understand that I’d one day want to meet someone, love and be loved, get married and try to start a family, but I knew that that was something that would happen years in the future, and I wasn’t interested in rushing or forcing it. Also, I started to realize that the end of one path left open the beginning of another one. In 2007 I was working for a company as their Director of Safety (despite graduating college with a BA and majors in Philosophy and World Religious Studies–long story), but I began to think, “Now that it’s just me, I could maybe take a risk and try something else.”

Also, I’d been playing and writing music for years, and, after Kate died, I threw myself back into songwriting. Kate had always said I should get out and perform, and so, in 2009, I finally did (and I was graciously received better than I thought I’d be). Eventually a friend of mine and Kate’s started accompanying me, and in 2011 The Pig Merchants were born, and we’re recording an album this Fall. Whether this musical endeavour would’ve come to be if my life had stayed on its former path is something I’ll never know, but this is where I am, and this is what’s come to be.

I also decided to more firmly plant my feet in the Dharma, took the Precepts with the Blue Mountain Lotus Society and started a (intermittent) meditation practice. For a while I chose to keep my Buddhist leanings on the down-low (meaning that I didn’t come out and whack people in the face with it unless they asked me what I believed…), but writing this blog and sharing the entries on my Facebook page have been the most overt expressions of my beliefs so far.

I’ve traveled–both for pleasure and for business–to places both inside and outside the US. I’ve tried to go mountain biking a few hundred miles every Summer. I’ve thrown myself into graphic design, marketing and brand management (things I’ve always been interested in) and worked my way from Director of Safety into a position as Director of Marketing and Communications. I also dated a little bit, and in the process learned more about myself and how it will feel to get back into a long term relationship. While I still didn’t feel like my life had a clear direction, I was exploring life on my own and enjoying what came my way.

However, at the end of 2011 the company I’d been working for for seven years downsized into oblivion and I was laid off along with the rest of the staff. Obviously this complicated things because it made my financial situation a little sticky, but at the same time I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief, not only because working for that company could sometimes be a stressful and thankless affair, but because I felt like one of the crutches I’d been leaning on since 2007 was being taken away, and I’d finally have to start on a new direction. And so, while I have taken the time to relax and enjoy some much-needed rest these past few months, I also set about trying to start writing the next chapter of my life.

I started creating more (and, I think, better) music for The Pig Merchants. I got in better biking shape. I finally compiled my graphic design portfolio. I read a lot of books I normally wouldn’t have had time to read. I started The Human Kindness Blog. I started to cook a lot more. I planted a garden. I started trying to be a lot more mindful and deliberate about keeping my house clean and slowing down the pace of my life. I started The Country Buddhist. I started doing some parttime graphic design, copywriting and brand management work for a start-up consulting firm. And I started to think about pursuing a career path that had been on my mind for years: Buddhist hospice chaplaincy.

However, then something both exciting and unexpected happened: I was recruited to take a position as an HR Communications & Graphic Design Constultant for a large company. And I start tomorrow! I see this new start as the beginning of a new chapter in my life because I’m starting a position after being without fulltime work for seven months, which itself followed a seven-year fulltime stint. Tomorrow I’ll be adopting a new routine, and working at a new place with new people. Most importantly (in my mind, anyway), I’ll be starting a position that I was hired for not because of a degree or certificate, but because of my own grit and determination. Up to this point I’ve taken work that I needed to take or had to settle for, but tomorrow I start a job that I worked toward and earned.

Which is a cool way to start a new chapter.

Now, this entry isn’t really about any kind of Buddhist principle. In fact, it brings to light some of my struggles with striving and attachment, and I apologize to any of my readers who’ve enjoyed reading my more philosophical ruminations up to this point. But, like I said, I’ve been a little pensive about the last five years, and so I figured I’d put some of those thoughts into writing. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about tomorrow, but I’m also anxious to see what might happen next; what new people will come into my life, what new opportunities will come along, and what might change. Either way, the story goes on, and everything will be alright.

Transcending commentary

I beg your pardon, faithful readers; I took yesterday off because after 13 days of writing… I just, well, felt like taking a day off. Also, I wanted to give myself a one-day break from writing to see if I could hinder the nagging question of “What are you going to write about today?” that usually pops up several times each time I sit.* However, now that I took a day off, I considered the possibility of not writing every day of this 30-day meditation journey and instead just writing when I really had something to say. We’ll see how it goes, but I expect that it will be for the best in the long run to only write a few times a week (as opposed to every day) because then, hopefully, my entries will be more interesting and I won’t have to fish for things to write. Because, like I said, I’m no teacher. The stuff I write just comes to me off the top of my head, and that will likely become apparent in time (if it hasn’t already).

As for today, there were a few thoughts that I wanted to express regarding my contemplation of anattta the other day, so I’ll try to do that briefly here.

I read through my “The stories I tell myself” entry from last Thursday, and I realized that I left out a very important part: the practical aspect of not-self. I tried to convey my intellectual understanding of the notion of anatta and I touched on how that tenuous intellectual undersanding may sometimes manifest itself in my thoughts and actions, but I didn’t really give much time to discussing what I see as one of the real “aims” of waking up and thereby achieving a genuine understanding not-self. To do that, I’m going to go back to meditation.

When I practice meditation, I try to keep a general focus on my breath. Not an intense, “now-look-here-you-f*cking-breath” kind of focus, but an “ahhh-my-breathing-is-happening-right-now” kind of focus. And while I’m doing this, thoughts come. When these thoughts come, sometimes I get caught in them, but I try to just recognize that I’ve been caught and return my attention to the breath. I call this “practice” because it prepares me to do the same thing in my daily life; i.e. if I get caught up in a thought, I can use my practice to bring my attention back to what’s going on.

Anyway, the main reason I get “caught up” in those thoughts is because there’s this sense of “I” that has a talent for taking things very, VERY personally. A gentle breeze hitting my skin elicits an immediate “Ah, that feels good,” instead of a simple, “There’s a breeze.” And thoughts about a project I need to work on in the evening can lead to “Oh man, I really don’t want to work on this–it’s going to take me hours, blah blah blah,” rather than an innocuous, “OK, I’ll take care of that then.” It’s perfectly normal to have these thoughts because they’re a reaction to my conditioning, and so long as I don’t get too carried away with them and can bring myself back to the moment, it ain’t no thang. For purposes of exploring anatta, however, they raise an interesting point.

When I take pleasure in a nice breeze, what’s taking pleasure? And when I get angry or anxious about an upcoming project, what’s getting angry? What’s getting anxious? It’s this conditioned consciousness. When things like breezes and difficult projects come into my life that either contradict or meet the expectations of the stories I tell myself (e.g. “I’m warm and could use a breeze,” or “I would rather sit on my ass than work this evening”, etc.), then my consciousness–this imaginary “self”–feels compelled to offer commentary. I imagine that these reactions to physical and mental stimuli and the subsequent commentary are what direct the vast majority of my day-to-day life. It can feel like a continuous dance of desire, avoidance and distraction. No wonder dukkha (unsatisfactoriness / struggle) is the first Noble Truth!

Someone who is awakened, on the other hand, sees through the delusion of “self”, and so the barbs that can get a lot of us stuck on a typical day are not going to be as bothersome.** That’s not to say that someone who has woken up will never experience difficulty or struggle, but I imagine that they experience in a different way. It reminds me of a passage from the Tao Te Ching (from Chapter 50) about the ideal man, or Taoist sage:

He who knows how to live can walk abroad
Without fear of rhinoceros or tiger.
He will not be wounded in battle.
For in him rhinoceroses can find no place to thrust their horn,
Tigers no place to use their claws,
And weapons no place to pierce.
Why is this so?
Because he has no place for death to enter.

Now, when I first read these words 12 years ago, I believe my reaction was something along the lines of, “Yeah, cool, sages kick ass.” But now I think I understand what they mean, and I think you could paraphrase them like this:

The person who has woken up doesn’t need to be perturbed by the things that cause most of us to struggle. Indignity doesn’t touch him, and discomfort doesn’t drive him crazy. Why is this so? Because he has no “self” into which these things can get stuck.

I’ll wrap this up because it’s getting long, but I think that this, once again, reinforces the notion that this type of awakening can’t be reasoned through but needs to be experienced. And I think that meditation practice is the best way that I can quiet and / or listen through the oft-obnoxious commentary of my consciousness. Even the voice telling me to transcend the self is a commentary on my own sense of unsatisfactoriness. The search for enlightenment makes us feel like we have to go looking for something, but attaining enlightenment is realizing that we’re already IT.

Or at least, that’s what I figure. After all, I’m no sage.

*I couldn’t.

**Or so I’ve heard.

Whether or not you agree, Part 2

I was very surprised (but pleased) with the reaction I got from my last blog entry.  Not only in terms of page views (which were the highest since I started this blog), but also because of the comments I’ve gotten from friends of mine, each from a slightly different school of thought.  I appreciate these comments because they made me think more about the topic of inter-faith dialogue*, and I’m going to try to capture a few of those thoughts in today’s entry.

*I’m using “inter-faith” here in a generic sense to include non-religious schools of thought, i.e. those not necessarily grounded in matters of faith.

First, let me reiterate that, despite my familiarity with Buddhist teachings, I’m no teacher.  Also, while I was raised in the church, I’m no expert on Christian theology or doctrine.  Finally, even though I majored in world religious studies and philosophy in college, it’s been years since I was engaged in active study, and I’m not qualified to instruct regarding any religious or philosophical tradition.  While I have my fair share of facts and recollections about these subjects, I don’t want to pretend to speak with authority on any of them.  This blog is simply a record of my thoughts, beliefs and experiences, and it’s 99% off the top of my head without doing any research (and the 1% of “research” that I do usually involves spell-checking…).

So, now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let me jump back in this here swimmin’ pool…

Inter-faith dialogue can be tricky, because it can become a forum in which two diametrically opposed philosophical systems can come face to face.  And, let’s be honest, anyone who believes in anything usually believes that what they believe is the best thing to believe (if they thought something ELSE was the best, they’d believe in THAT instead).  Therefore, it’s very easy to turn a “dialogue” into a “shouting match” where both parties are trying to convince the other that they themselves are right, and their opponent is wrong.  Additionally, given the importance that some people ascribe to their beliefs, these arguments can get very personal and include a lot of fist-shaking and condemnation.

Honestly, I feel that inter-faith dialogue needs to be tempered with restraint and, as the commenters** noted, 1) a desire to find common goals, 2) a sense (and acceptance) of not-knowing, and 3) a willingness to listen.  If a Christian approaches me and says, “I know there’s a heaven, I know there’s a hell, and I know where you’re going if you don’t believe in the redeeming act of Jesus Christ,” the conversation will stall, because at this point, we’re using two very different vocabularies to describe the world.  This would be the same as me going up to a Christian and saying, “The Holy Bible is not authoritative, there is no heaven, hell, or eternal soul, and Jesus was just a man who may or may not have really existed.”  I use these two extremes to show that, if inter-faith dialogue is simply used as an opportunity for two stubborn people to insist to one another that they KNOW what’s true, then they’re just going to piss each other the hell off.

**Yes, I know “commenters” isn’t a word, but I’m going to use it anyway.

I’m going to posit an idea here that some may not agree with: When it comes to matters of belief, we cannot know whether or not they’re true.  You may believe them to be true, or want them to be true, or assume that they’re true because you’ve never really thought about it, but if you KNEW that they were true, then you wouldn’t need to BELIEVE in them.  Right?  Accordingly, I think that people entering into a discussion with someone from a different school of thought should be comfortable with not insisting that they be right.  Because if you insist that you’re right, then you’re automatically assuming that the other person is wrong, and that puts a really lopsided slant on the whole thing from the get-go (and you probably won’t open up and listen).  Besides, if you’re confident in your beliefs (and why shouldn’t you be; they’re the best, right?), then you shouldn’t be afraid of what the other person has to say.

In my mind, however, constructive inter-faith dialogue shouldn’t only be about belief; rather, it should center on practice.  And here’s how I define those two terms:

• Belief is what we hold to be true without proof.  It’s all the stuff that’s written down in the books we believe to be true, and it’s all the stuff that goes on inside our head that directs our daily lives.
• Practice is what we do (specifically, how we act) in accordance with what we believe.

Practice is where the rubber meets the road, and is therefore, for me, what really matters.  Beliefs are in our heads.  Practice is in the world.  Regardless of what we believe, it only makes a difference if it has a bearing on how we act, and how we act is something that can be discussed with a sense of familiarity and reality between believers of any religious or philosophical tradition.  What’s more, most people will say that what they believe in inspires them to be kind and compassionate (and not act like bastards), which is a good thing.

One of the commenters from the last post said that the ways he engages people through his work in the arts is inter-faith dialogue in the sense that “everything we live out displays a sense of what we do or don’t trust in, and that ends up being shared to some degree through community and relationships.”  That’s exactly my point: the way we live reflects our beliefs, and that way of living is being shared and made true–whether we realize it or not–to those around us.  And we can find common ground by discussing actions MUCH more easily than by discussing thoughts.

Now, OK, all this may sound to some of you like a cop-out.  You may be thinking, “Focusing on practice over beliefs doesn’t provide an opportunity to really debate or explore meaningful differences in fundamental doctrines.”  And you’re kind of right, it doesn’t.  My personal opinion is that most of us aren’t even deeply familiar enough with our own belief systems to compare “fundamental doctrines” with another person; all we’d really be doing is comparing and contrasting our personal worldviews, which are as varied and incomplete as each one of us.  Furthermore, I’m generally opposed to the idea of proselytizing.  Conversion has historically been a very violent and messy affair, and I believe it’s couched in the selfish belief that we know better than someone else.

Like I said at the beginning: inter-faith dialogue can be tricky, and it’s something that needs to be approached mindfully and openly.  Most discussions between people of different schools of thought may not go anywhere or accomplish anything.  And that’s alright.  Occasionally, however, the dialoguing parties may find just a tiny bit of overlap.  From my point of view, I think that if we can find even a small bit of common ground, and that common ground involves compassionate action, then we’re doing pretty well for ourselves.

Whether or not you agree

Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to continuing my thoughts on anatta today, BUT I did take time to sit earlier, and so my 30-day sitting-on-my-butt journey is alive and well.  I had a Pig Merchants show this evening, and show days tend to get pretty busy.  That’s my excuse anyway.  However, I still wanted to write–if only briefly–because I’ve been writing every day for the past 10 days or so, and I wanted to keep that streak alive.  So here it is:

I had a great talk with my bandmate, Adam, following our show this evening.  I love Adam and his wife and their three adorable children, and not only have they been incredibly supportive over the last five years (they were good friends with my wife before Kate and I met…), but they’ve opened their home to me on many occasions and have always been very gracious and kind.  Anyway, tonight Adam and I had a chat about our beliefs.  Adam embraces a Christian spirituality, and he recognizes my Buddhist beliefs.  We’ve spoken a few times about our different views of the world, explored similarities and discussed differences, but I’ve always been glad to have these conversations.  I think inter-faith dialogue is important, not to try to win over the other person or find “chinks in the armor”, but to appreciate the way that other people think, believe and practice.  Whether or not you agree.

Our place in the worldwide community of human beings is far more important than anything we can believe, and so our practice–regardless of faith–should be compassion and loving-kindness.  While talking to Adam I thought, “What if all the buildings in the world burned down, all the books burned up, and we lost our ability to speak.  Without temples, churches, synagogues, Bibles, sutras, Korans, Torahs or religious teachings, what would be most important?  It’d be how we relate to one another and how we treat one another, not who’s right or wrong.”  Or it least I think it should be.

If only it were that simple, right?  I know that there are a lot of American Christians who struggle with Buddhist practitioners.  And I know that there are a lot of American Buddhists who left the Church and struggle with traditional Christian doctrine.  And I’m not so naive to think that these two traditions will ever overlap or agree to the point of being indistinguishable.  But practitioners of both schools should acknowledge that being human is more important than being Christian or Buddhist, and humans should avoid being bastards to one another.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but, because of my chat with Adam, it was on my mind.  So I’ll end by repeating something I said in one of my previous entries: “With all the profound and amazing ways that we’re connected and inter-dependent upon one another, any ideology that seeks to keep us apart is missing the point, and I think that those ideologies should always be regarded with suspicion.”*

*Wise man say: “Only pompous asshole quotes himself.”

The stories I tell myself

While sitting today I came back to anatta–the notion of not-self (I’ll likely come back to this fairly often)–and I thought of it as a two-edged sword. On one hand, I can contemplate anatta and think, “When I die, there’s nothing that goes on. No soul, no self, no consciousness that is ME.” That line of thought came very naturally to me from the beginning (or at least I don’t recall struggling with it in the early days, despite my Christian upbringing). The thought of disintegrating at the moment of death and becoming nothing but memories and the enduring ripples of karma doesn’t bother me. To be honest, thinking about some kind of afterlife or heaven–no matter how transcendently blissful–just exhausts me. “Really? You mean, after I’m done with this life, there’s more shit? Oh for Pete’s sake….”

I’ve shared my calm comfort with one day being little more than a snuffed-out candle with people, and they tend to become nonplussed and ask me, “But don’t you want to…?” And I say, “No. No, I don’t.” I’m living my life right now, and when that’s over, it’s over. So long as my end isn’t too messy or stinky and I still have some of my wits about me, I intend to face death with a sense of “Ah, Here It Is.” In fact, I hope I can conjure the courage to face a stinky, messy, half-witted death with some degree of presence and relief, even if it is staggeringly stinky, messy and half-witted. While I do hope that I leave behind a positive legacy and am missed (hopefully by at least two subsequent generations of little Brad’s), I imagine that the anticipation of finally shrugging off the burden of consciousness will be ironically joyful.

I hope that doesn’t sound macabre. It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me. I just feel relatively comfortable with my own mortality. Perhaps that’s a consequence of having to bear the death of my wife at so young an age, but I also know that I had many of the same thoughts about the self and about impermanence even prior to 2007. And when people approached me in the weeks and months after Kate’s death and said, “Well, at least she’s in a better place,” or “Everything happens for a reason,” I struggled a great deal with keeping quiet about how I could integrate the loss of my wife into my life without having to believe in heaven or an omniscient string-puller. Ah well, no need to get into all that….

The second edge of the anatta sword is, for me, the trickier one: the one I struggle to comprehend while I’m still ALIVE. A few days ago I ruminated on why I find this to be so difficult, but I ruminated on it some more while I sat today, and so I’m coming back to it here.

Language is sticky. It almost seems to me that it’s very difficult to not “validate” the self every time we open our mouths. Sentences in the English language contain a subject and an object, and so if I want to tell someone that I’m taking a trip to the grocery store, I say, “I’m taking a trip to the grocery store.” Yeah. And I thought to myself, what happens if I try to make statements about my activities but exclude the subject in my sentences? So “I’m taking a trip to the grocery store” becomes “Taking a trip to the grocery store,” or just, “Trip to the grocery store.” Apart from grammaticians gasping and wagging their fingers, that sentence sounds incomplete to me because I’m so used to saying WHO is going to the grocery store. I’m sure a linguist like Noam Chomsky would have something intelligent to say about this phenomenon, but I know that, for my part, this dependence on languauge in order to SPEAK also works its way into my ability to THINK.

In other words, it feels weird to have thoughts that don’t include a subject–AKA “Me.”

Setting aside this quandary for a moment, I recalled a diagram I once saw in someone’s blog. You look at this picture and you see three Pacman’s and three caret’s, but you can’t help but think, “I see a big, white, upside-down triangle.” Everything that we see IMPLIES that the triangle is there. In fact, when you look at it quickly, you may even notice that your brain is subtly drawing in faint lines along the edges of the implied triangle. But it’s not really there.

WE are the same way. So much in our lives IMPLIES that we’re this thing; this constant, unchanging self. Our language, our perception of ourselves, our perception of other people’s perceptions of us, etc. My favorite exercise for regarding myself in this way is to see myself as a human onion, where every layer of the onion is a story I tell myself. On the outside, very simple stories are apparent:

• I’m a male human being.
• I’m a son, a brother, an uncle, a friend.
• I’m a 30-yo Buddhist.
• I’m a volleyball player, a guitarist, a singer, a songwriter.
• I’m a breathing chunk of meat, bones and blood with white skin and brown hair.

And as I peel through the layers, more subtle stories are told:

• I’m someone who has a bad sense of direction.
• I’m someone who can be very impatient.
• I’m someone who is very loyal and loving.
• I’m someone who had a good day today.

But eventually, after I peeled away every layer, I’d get to the middle of the onion, and find, what? A solid, unchanging ball of light that is my true self and that will exist for ever and ever? No, I’ll find nothing. A silence beneath all the stories I tell myself. So if I return to language for a second and start telling these stories without “Me” as the subject, I see all the stories become statements like:

• Male human being.
• Guitarist, singer, songwriter.
• Bad sense of direction.
• Good day.

I’m a conglomeration of these statements, and the amazing truth about all those stories is that many of them are changing every day, and one day I’m going to stop telling them. And when the stories are no longer told, the ME who I thought was telling them will disappear, too. Poof, the sashaying chunk of loyal, directionally-challenged, volleyball-playing meat will one day dissolve into whatever little bits of matter conspired–if only for a short time–to form a Brad-shaped-thing. Maybe that’s why death doesn’t freak me out–it doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal when you get down to it.

However, like I said in a previous entry, THINKING about anatta in a certain way (in this way, for instance) is one thing, but truly REALIZING it is another. The problem is that storyteller is looking for himself in the story he’s telling, but he’ll never find it there. It’s not anywhere to be found. The storyteller will figure it out when he stops telling stories.

More on this tomorrow….

Right place, right time

This morning’s sit was very ordinary (not a bad thing) and so I’m not going to write a lot about it, but I did want to–at the risk of sounding both repetitive and corny–touch on two moments of awareness that I experienced today.

The first one took place while I was riding my bike on one of the trails at H.M. Levitz Memorial Park. I rode early this morning because I was tired of using the heat as an excuse to not ride, and so I figured I’d beat the forthcoming 97° day by riding before it got too bad. Anyway, as I rode along, I saw a woman and her (unleashed) big, white, shaggy dog walking toward me. Now, I’ve encountered my fair share of dogs that have found me interesting enough to bark at and–on three or more occasions–chase me, and so I approached them with a bit of caution. As I drew near, the dog looked at me as it loped along, but the woman let out a quick whistle, and the dog looked straight ahead and continued walking. When I passed by, the dog, seemingly, could’ve cared less.

This isn’t in any way unsual, but I’m bringing it up because it struck me that it was a good metaphor for dealing with stray thoughts while sitting. I still struggle (and may always struggle) with a plethora of thoughts raging through my ever-active mind while I sit. I’m sure everyone does. It’s easy to chase down these distractions and get lost in them, but a gentle *twoot* is all it really takes to bring yourself back. And it’s much more subtle than my (pyoo-pyoo) Mind Laser. As a Zen teacher once said, the moment you recognize that you’ve started to wander away from the moment is Awakening.

Or something like that.

My second moment of awareness today occured during the sunset. I live on 1.5 acres in central PA, surrounded by farmland and graciously-spaced houses, and I get some really nice sunsets in my backyard. Usually, I catch a glimpse of orange light that lets me know that some serious sunsetage is going down, and today I saw a flash of orange on a white box truck out my window as it drove by the front of my house. So I walked as fast as my short legs could carry me out to the edge of my property. At this point, I usually obliterate the sunset by taking pictures of it and then walking back inside. But this evening, I accepted the fact that the pictures wouldn’t do the sky justice, and (after taking a few pictures ANYWAY…) I just stood there and looked at it.

I don’t know if everyone is like me, but I can really lose myself in good scenery. And while I stared at that sunset, I almost forgot I existed. I didn’t pay attention to the fact that the eyes doing the looking were embedded in a head, a few inches above a bushy beard, seated upon a neck and two shoulders perched atop a meaty torso and two bike-hardened sets of leg muscles.* For all I knew, my eyes were floating 20 feet up, and the sky seemed to envelope me–everything else slipped out of focus. My brain didn’t even function linearly, and instead felt like it was a skipping record: “Wow.” “Wow. “Wow. “Wow.” And I stood there until the light faded, disappointed that it only lasted a few minutes, but glad that cool shit like that has a certain “right-place-right-time” quality to it.

*That just might be the worst verbal self-portrait ever.

To bring you along with me and give you an idea of what I was looking at, here’s an unsatisfactory video of tonight’s sunset over Ono:

Reactions to the reactions

Occasionally, I come back to one of my favorite quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh (from his book “Being Peace”):

“We are so busy we hardly have time look at the people we love, even in our own household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in a way that even when we have some leisure time, we don’t know how to use it to get back in touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time–we turn on the TV, or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go somewhere. We are not used to being with ourselves, and we act as if we don’t like ourselves and are trying to ESCAPE from ourselves.” (Capitalization is mine)

The crazy thing is, this book was written in 1987, before iPhones, before texting or online chatting, before Facebook or YouTube or Pinterest or any of the other popular “plugged-in” time-sucks that modern technology has given us. Nowadays we can consider picking up the telephone or going for a drive to be great ways to spend our time “un-plugged”, but Thay seemed to be implying that even these activities can take us outside ourselves. To be fair, he would probably also say that going for a drive or talking on the phone would be fine ways to practice mindfulness, so long as when we’re driving, we’re ONLY driving, and when we’re on the phone, we’re ONLY on the phone, and not updating our Facebook status or preparing dinner at the same time.

But the reason this quote originally jumped out at me was because, when I was looking for a book to read, I kept saying to myself (and to people who wanted to help by recommending something…) that I was looking for a book into which I could ESCAPE. When I read TNH’s paragraph that I quoted above, it was like a punch to the brain, and I thought to myself, “So THAT’S why I sometimes feel so agitated.” For whatever reason(s), I sometimes find who and where I am to be unsatisfactory, and I want to escape into something to forget about it. Music, a book, friends, etc. Please don’t think that I’m implying that those things are bad! And I know that Thay wouldn’t say they’re bad either. But when those things are used to simply pass the time or intentionally take us out of who or where we are, they’re supporting a harmful tendency: to escape from what’s going on.

I’ll admit, I sometimes dream about unplugging; turning off my iPhone, not going online, not streaming Netflix… for a day, for a week… fo’ evah. No TV, no text messages, no Words With Friends. When I got a Blackberry for work a few years ago, I thought, “Bah, I don’t to be plugged in all the time,” but then, after a few evenings of being able to get email around the clock without even having to check for it, I began to think, “How did I survive without this?” And when I thought about getting an iPhone, I thought, “Bah, I don’t need something with all that fancy hoobajoop and hizzafuzz,”* but now my brain seems to feel like it can’t survive without carrying my phone around and looking at it countless times during the day. And now I’m plugged in, with information at my fingertips, and I feel both drawn to and appalled by the idea of unplugging.

*OK, I probably didn’t say “hizzafuzz”, but I’m pretty sure I used the word “hoobajoop.”

I bring all this up because today, while sitting, I pondered the subject I discussed in yesterday’s entry: my struggle with feeling like things were better in the past. In the past, say, before I became an acolyte of the Internet? Perhaps, before I uploaded my brain into Apple’s flagship portable device? Now, that’s an oversimplification, but I can’t help but feel that being so plugged in contributes to my sense of there being “good ol’ days” at an earlier time in my life. There are other things that I’m sure contribute to this feeling; the death of my wife, Kate, in 2007, my company closing in late 2011, the economic downturn in 2008, the fact that I got fat in college and can’t run around and kick ass in hockey like I used to, et cetera. I seem to recall life being simpler before these things….

And so there are times in my life that, when I think about them, I get what I call “warm fuzzies.” Some of these moments are recurring, like the first warm days after Winter (that I start grasping for shortly after it gets cold), or Halloween (that I jones for ’round about August), or spending time with my fam around Christmas (for which I develop a hankerin’ in November). But most of the “warm fuzzy moments” are drawn from memories: running around in my parent’s yard as a kid back in the 80’s, working with my dad digging potatoes in the garden, playing street hockey back in the mid-90’s, dating Kate back in ’00, taking my spiritual quest into my own hands and discovering Taoism and Zen in ’01, waking up to my wife for the first time in ’04 (…to name a few). These “fuzzies” are fine memories, but there are times I wish that things could feel that way again, and that desire has a tendency to trap me and take me away from myself, and I wind up looking for ways to escape.

While sitting and looking into this tendency, I remembered two things, and did one thing. First, I remembered that meditation practice doesn’t stop us from reacting to things, but it can help us to stop reacting to our reactions. Feeling a twinge of nostalgia is a reaction. Getting snared by thoughts of the past is a reaction to a reaction. The second thing I remembered was that a big part of awareness is being present with what your body experiences when you spend time with certain thoughts, and this led me to the one thing I did: I decided to “breathe in and breathe out” these different moments and pay attention to what my body did when those thoughts were present.

I breathed in running in my parent’s yard, and I breathed it out.

I breathed in working in the garden with my dad, and I breathed it out.

I breathed in my early days of spiritual exploration, and I breathed them out.

I breathed in that first morning with Kate, and I breathed it out.

What surprised me was this: None of those moments resonated. And I’m using the word “resonate” here to mean: caused a stir or a significant reaction. They felt hollow. Yes, when I thought about those different things, I felt my brain perk up, like a dog hearing its master’s car in the driveway, but the presence of my in- and out-breaths were more “real” than the memories, and so the memories felt comparatively insubstantial.

Having experienced this, I breathed in “the moment where I am right now”, and it resonated. And I thought, “Oh.”

My reactions (and my reactions to the reactions) to my “warm fuzzy” thoughts are coming from where I am NOW, not from where I was THEN, and that’s very important to remember. Those things, as fond as they are, are gone. It’s OK to remember them from time to time and be glad that I got to experience them, but it’s not helpful to start to panic about those memories and feel like I need to get out of where I am now, or try to recapture those positive feelings.

I still feel like I have a long way to go before I calm down some of my reactions to the reactions to my “warm fuzzies”, but it was good to feel the unreality of the past in contrast to the pregnant SUCHness of the present. But for the rest of this morning’s session, I breathed in present moment, and I breathed out the present moment, and it was just fine.

Perfectly ordinary

Seven day sitting streak–that’s like a whole thing!  But I’m realizing that not every day is going to be worth mentioning in this blog.  For instance, today’s session was perfectly ordinary.  I breathed, I strayed from my breath, I realized that I strayed from my breath, and then I brought my attention back to my breath.

Repeat.

But I find this to be a good thing.  After all, this isn’t a 30-day journey to full-frontal awakening (that’s just unrealistic); it’s a 30-day meditation practice jumpstart, and in that regard I feel like the first week of my expedition has been a success.  Again, it’s a little sad to admit that I’ve been studying Buddhism for over 10 years but have failed in that time to establish a consistent practice, but I’ll never regret the “intellectual” time that I spent pondering the teachings and letting them saturate my worldview.  But, as yesterday’s contemplation of the 10 ox-herding pictures revealed, there are some things (indeed, the most important things) that can only be experienced and can’t be intellectualized.  I’ve felt the compulsion to look for my true (not-)self, have seen its tracks in the dirt, and have even possibly glimpsed its horns.  And that’s my practice.

But, like I said, I feel like my first week has been a success.  Sitting now feels like a part of my day, and when I rest my toosh on my zabuton I settle in, form my mudra, sit and breathe.  I’m still planning on trying different meditation techniques, but zazen still feels like my cup of tea, and that’s OK.  Also, I’d still like to continue to occasionally sit with ideas when I meditate–like emptiness, impermanence, interdependence, anatta, etc.–but I don’t want to get into the habit of feeling like I need to look into something have a breakthrough everytime my ass hits the cushion.  Sometimes, hopefully, but if I sit with that expectation, then I’m likely going to feel discouraged pretty often.

I’ve mentioned Ken McLeod’s podcast, Unfettered Mind, a few times already, because I really enjoy his style of teaching, and I usually listen to his “sutra sessions”, which are Q&A hours with the folks attending his meditation center.  The reason I like these podcasts is because he’s not just lecturing on a topic; his topic changes with the questions he’s asked.  One thing I notice is that the question-askers usually bring up concerns or problem areas in their lives, and I feel fortunate that, despite my share of tragedy and difficulty, my life has been pretty OK.  However, it has made me examine myself a bit in order to uncover an area of life where I struggle, and I think I’ve found that area.  As I mentioned in my first post, I struggle with idealizing the past and feeling like the grass was greener back then.  There are a lot of reasons for that, and while I recognize those reasons and can even touch the fruitlessness of looking back over my shoulder, I still compare Then to Now, and I still squirm.  Even though I know that it may very well be a difficult process, I want to bring that to my practice.  This tendency to look backwards has been another thing that I’ve intellectualized and failed to see into, and so I’m interested to see what secrets it may hold my considered while sitting.  And so you may see this come up in the weeks ahead.

I guess we’ll see….

Looking for my ox

Ever since I first encountered Taoist writing, I’ve been drawn to its authors’ tendency to use analogies to make their point. I think the same way–something makes sense to me when it’s explained in terms of something I already understand or have experienced. The Tao, in general, is a great way (no pun intended) to understand the world because there isn’t anything that doesn’t “fit” within the course of its movement, and Taoist literature regards human beings as just another part of the world and the movement of the Tao. So if the world goes through four seasons, so do we as humans. Spring –> birth and childhood. Summer –> adolescence and young adulthood. Fall –> late adulthood. Winter –> old age and death. A tree damaged in a storm will heal but carry scars. So, too, do we heal but carry scars. Anyway, this paragraph is just a long way of saying that I think in terms of analogies and appreciate how the Eastern traditions can be very analogical.

And, all that being said, I can use two analogies to describe my meditation today:

1. Trying to listen to a radio station that kept picking up static and pieces of other transmissions
2. Standing in between two mirrors that infinitely reflect one another.

Suffice to say, this was a difficult sit. In keeping with the focus of my last two sessions, I decided to meditate upon an idea. And it was one that I’ve struggled to be able to “figure out”: the third mark of existence, anatta, or not-self. To give a little background, there are three marks of existence in Buddhist philosophy:

1. Anicca – Impermanence and change. Nothing lasts forever and nothing stays the same from moment to moment.
2. Dukkha – Struggle or unsatisfactoriness. We all struggle with life, usually because we’re attached to impermanent things and resist change.
3. Anatta – Not-self or insubstantiality. There is no eternal, unchanging self or “soul” that exists, and the sense of an “I” is a misperception. This one’s kind of tricky to summarize.

I won’t say that I have the first two “figured out” either, but I can relate to them intellectually and can recognize them when I look at myself and at the world around me. Even anatta makes sense to me theoretically, but when I try to look deeply into it, I can almost feel my synapses mis-firing. Not-self has always been a struggle for me, and it’s no wonder why when I re-read the first sentence in this paragraph: “…I look at MYSELF and at the world around ME.” I’m using the misguided faculties of my consciousness to seek out and arrest something that doesn’t exist.

What a pain in the ass.

And so my meditation session / Buddha-mind discovery expedition felt like a crackly radio never-ending mirror mind-f*ck. When I was done sitting however, I came downstairs to my little library and grabbed from the shelves one of my favorite books, “Entering the Stream.” It contains essays from a wide range of authors from different traditions and across several centuries on all sorts of Buddhist teachings, and I KNEW it had to have something on anatta that would be helpful. To start, I read Chögyam Trungpa’s essay on the development of ego and treatment of the five skandhas, but I ran into the same kind of wall. It made sense, but I couldn’t SEE it.

But then I came upon the old Zen teaching (and wonderful analogy) of the 10 ox-herding pictures by 12th century Chinese master Kakuan, and I realized, “Oh right, this shit’s hard and it takes a long time. What a relief!” If you’re not familiar with the ox-herding pictures, there’s a pretty good explanation of them HERE. Essentially, they portray the practitioner’s journey to find his or her true self, or Buddha-nature. There are 10 pictures, starting with the search for one’s “ox” (true self), with the eighth picture representing enlightenment (i.e. realization of not-self), and the last two pictures portraying the enlightened practitioner’s return to the world. As I looked at the pictures, I realized that I’m probably around number two. Maaaaaybe number three. But yes, this isn’t something I can just “figure out”–this is true awakening.

It felt good to have it put in perspective. And now on I go looking for my ox.