Thursday, February 25, 2010

I don't know

You have probably noticed that my last few posts have vacillated between Christian and Buddhist interpretations of events in my life. In part this is because I have come to a point in my life where I can honestly say that I don’t know what I believe. Get that? I don’t know what I believe. Is there a God? I don’t know. Is there an afterlife? I don’t know. Are we born again and again and all life is a cosmic wheel? I don’t know. I don’t know, and not knowing is both terrifying and wonderfully freeing.

One objection to embracing the “I don’t know” philosophy is probably “If you don’t know what you believe, what do you stand for? How do you behave?” For me I think the answer to this is simple, and while some may cry foul, I say I try to act as best I can and that really I make a lot of mistakes and I try to learn from these. The objection may follow “How can one learn from their mistakes if you embrace no system, no dogma, no rule by which to judge your actions?” To this I would simply say that while some of my actions might seem questionable, even objectionable to some, for the most part, I try to be a good person, honest, loyal, friendly and that I look for these traits in others. Actions that separate me from these qualities I distrust and even abhor. Moreover, while I do not necessarily embrace particular religions or philosophies, I certainly look to them for guidance. I hold no one tradition higher than another, but judge them by the same standard that I judge myself. How do they treat people? Are they tolerant, fair, kind, respectful? If the answer is Yes, I push further, read more, contemplate, even adopt, but still I hold “I don’t know” as my mantra.

Is this agnostic? Socratic? The middle way? Sure. And No. Really this is what works for me. It is the realm where I am most comfortable. I was never a great follower. I don’t easily subscribe to great movements. I am a terrible liberal, a worse conservative. I distrust people like I distrust myself. I am full of faults. I make mistakes constantly. I am brash, judgmental, and egotistic. I don’t pretend that “I don’t know” has made me a better person. I am not enlightened. The Oracle of Delphi would never say that my brand of “I don’t know” makes me particularly smart or wise. On the contrary it has given me an inordinate amount of pain. The other day I stole a woman’s painting and ruined it (see The Great Art Caper) A Buddhist would have sought to avoid spreading suffering. A Christian might have been more charitable “there but for the grace of God go I,” but not me. I ruined her painting and spent the better part of the week A) worrying about it and B) trying to figure out how to make amends and do better next time (without getting caught.)

In the end, the great art caper ended like so much in my life. I was caught, and asked to make reparations. I had to face the music. I was reprimanded and I had to do a little community service. Mostly I got to think about my actions and how I would have done it if I could have done it over. From one point of view “I don’t know” wasn’t really working for me that day. That is to say It wasn't working if you think I am saying that "I don't know" is enlightenment. It isn't. I got chewed out. But like Brad Pitt says in the recent movie “Inglorious Bastards” “I’ve been chewed out before”.

I think what Brad Pitt’s character is saying here is “I can live with my actions. I can accept that what I sometimes do is unacceptable, and I can face the consequences of my actions” And I would add, “and in the mean time I will try to do better given the chance again.” And really isn’t that what making amends is about? Not just that we are sorry, but that “I am sorry” means "I would do that differently give the chance." The nice thing about "I don't know" is that it will give me many opportunities to make amends.

The really interesting thing about "I don’t know" is that, I suspect, if there is a maker, if there is a god, I will have had the opportunity in this life to have thought about that Idea a whole lot. And when I die I can look at s/he and say, “I am sorry. I will do better next time” and probably, the Buddhist in me will know that I will get that chance again.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Character defects

As everyone knows the economy looms large in the media these days. News reports are filled with statistics about jobless claims and talk shows host an endless stream of experts who, like the groundhog, forecast six more weeks of winter. “Things are getting better but we have a long way to go.”

I caught a fragment of one of these shows driving home from my daughters preschool this afternoon. The focus of the conversation was “education and the workplace” jobs in a nutshell and how to get better ones. The discussion began to contrast people of different socio-economic backgrounds and said people from household that have been below the poverty line for more than two generations have a harder time advancing in the workplace. “It’s easy to imagine the poor as lazy.” Said the guest “But the truth is the system is bent against them. They don’t have the same chances for education and training and end up falling far behind members of more affluent families.”

My mind hung on this thought. “It is easy to imagine the poor as lazy.” Mostly because my wife had had a similar conversation with a friend recently in which this very topic came up. My reaction was why would intelligent people think that? When I put this question to my wife, my beautiful bride pointed out that we, she and I, are often guilty of the same kind of thinking, not about the poor, per se, but that I frequently criticize the Republican spokespeople, conservative religious dogma and extremists of both the political left and the right as being “insane” or “crazy” and that this type of labeling is no different than that which assumes that the poor are lazy or stupid.

In my recent post “On Buttons” I shared that this kind of thinking is born of fear and misunderstanding and that ultimately the more powerless I feel towards these groups the greater my animosity towards them will be. But let’s call it what it is, folks. My condemnation of these groups is a character defect.

Who can say where character defects come from? I like to think that character defects are born of an honest desire to protect myself from some perceived fear or threat, but that, unchecked they became all consuming. Anger is a good example of one of my chief character defects. In my youth, certain individuals modeled anger as a way to deal with frustration. I spent many years shying away from angry people. But somehow in the end I became the very angry person that I had tried to avoid. It is easy. I will glare at my child and say “what do you mean by that” the way others had done for me, and as a child I would have backed away. But my children don’t back away. They don’t have the same low self-esteem I had. So they challenge me. So I try the same tactic again, this time more forcefully. You get the idea. This is how things escalate, and I keep doing it because, as much as I don’t want to. This is how I am wired.

At least, that is the way it feels. Because This is the story I tell myself, namely, "This is how to discipline." I see myself in that role and I act it out dutifully. The more I do this, the more I have become convinced that the stories we tell ourselves have a lot to do with who we are. We use these stories to define our selves. But they are not who we are.

In Buddhism The identity of the self, either objective or subjective, is the cause of delusion. The root of personality is to be sought in the “true self” which is manifest in the union of subject and object. We are all the same. You. Me. Everything. The hopes and dreams of the of an individual are centered on the affirmation of the individual, and thus separate us.

The other day my wife turned to me and said “I really like what the Pastor said in the sermon.” She went on explaining that what the pastor had said what that Jesus was an individual of absolute Love, and that really nothing else mattered. The Virgin Birth, the myths and stories that tell us about his life mean little if nothing and that what really matters is that Jesus was a person of, well, in Buddhist terms, a person of pure Spirit , into which all of his experience of love was poured. Just as I pour anger and shame into my “experience” in life, Jesus poured compassion.

I think this is what the Zen philosophers are talking about when they say that Zen is grasped in the simplest of realities and not in the esoteric or fantastic interpretation of human existence.

Another way of saying this is to recount a conversation I had with a friend last night who told me he had started teaching art to third graders at a charter school. “They are creative geniuses!” He exclaimed. “If anyone in this graduate program could create like them, it would be amazing.” Unfortunately, by the time we reach graduate school we have lost that spontaneous wonder that unselfconscious creative bliss, and thinking and rationalizing and doubting have edged their way in.

So that is it. It is the stories I tell myself about the conservative right that make me hate them, just as it is the story I have learned about discipline that I try to reenact that is one of the triggers of my character defect of anger.

And that is not it. Because knowing these things about myself doesn’t make me stop telling myself the same tales over and over again, if anything I just make me say them louder, doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

No, if I want to change my character defects, and I do, then I need to hold them up. I need to shine a light on them. I need to share them with others and become accountable for these stories. Otherwise they just lie there and fester in the dark.

I want to change my relationship with my family, my friends and my community, and the only way I know is to start getting real honest about the way I see the world, and then maybe I can stop filling my experiences with angry tea.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

The Cup

I was maybe fourteen the first time I purchased a book about Zen. I found it in a little used book store in Honolulu. I don’t remember the title of the book but I do remember this koan titled “A cup of Tea”:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

I was writing a email to a friend the other day trying to explain why I thought programs like al-anon were difficult. “I am too smart for al-anon.” I said. “I have familiarized myself with eastern and western religions, spirituality and philosophies, and when I hear them echoed back to me in meetings I think ‘right, humility’ or ‘right, meditation. I know about those things.’” I went on to explain that knowing about a thing and doing a thing are different, and that knowing about a thing might make the doing harder. Harder because I have my arsenal of explanations and justifications already built up. I can tell you why meditation is important, or exactly what I think humility means to me, and in my mind I might think, “I don’t need to do that.” Or worse, “I’ve covered that territory.” Thus the work doesn’t get done.

The best example I have is acceptance. Acceptance can be read by some as blind faith while others might interpreted it as spineless submission. It’s an old orators trick, anyone who questions the content can easily be sidetrack by retorting with a series of definitions. The audience feels the question is addressed and the orator goes away unchallenged. Getting hung up on definitions is a great example of how I can be “too smart,” accept that in this case I am both orator and audience. The one that I deceive is myself.

The wisdom of the empty cup is obvious. Matthew 5:3 says something similar, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” This poor corresponds to the notion of “emptiness.” The temptation is to imagine the heart or mind emptied of “self and all things” and ready to receive the Spirit. But this is a mistake. Read carefully the “poor in spirit” is not one becoming poor, but one who has lost everything. Not only are we to empty our cup, but we are to lose the cup itself! The individual poor in spirit has completely emptied themselves of both content and cup and is open to the inexhaustible possibilities of god, where god is not only the work (tea) but the works (cup).

I am a little afraid that some of you might raise the proverbial red flag here, as the last paragraph is pretty dense. I have to agree and add that this kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about when I say I am “too smart.” Still I think the koan of the empty cup is important Mainly because in a time of universal propagandism of the easy life where information and solutions are literally a click of a button away, the message of the empty cup is more important than ever.

As I was talking about the other day in my post “If you meet the Buddha, kill him” Zen cautions against acquisition of Knowledge. For knowledge in Zen terms is the equivalent of Ignorance, for knowledge fills us up and leads us astray. In Christian terms you might say mankind has eaten from the tree of knowledge and become ignorant. How then do I empty my cup if I can’t even think about the contents that I want to empty? Is this some kind of sophists trick? If I am not to think about these things am I not really substituting one kind of ignorance with another? Again the definitions plague me.

I think the thing that comes at the end of the day, when you’ve spent time meditating on how to empty your cup and how then to lose even the cup you hold is to realize that even if you lost all of these things you would still be the ordinary person that you are. In al-anon meetings I have heard this described as “turning my will over to the care of god as I understood him.” In Zen it is to cast away attachments to experience or as the Bhagavad Gita says “you have the right to your action, but not the fruit of your action.

Again, I don't think that the answer lies in denying the self or the world of experiences. I think that emptying my cup is really about making me ready for whatever comes next. It is a kind of universal readiness that comes from being truly empty or absolutely poor. The possibilities are endless. But If grab hold of them, then my cup becomes full and I lose that state of potentiality that I have attained. Instead, I release my concerns and my joys and embrace the world in the moment, always mindful of what the next moment might bring.

If I had to sum up what I think the koan is really trying to say, I think it would have to be this:

“Trust yourself and be happy.”

Friday, February 12, 2010

Of Buttons

Do you have any words that just push your buttons? I do. I ran into one the other day while casually browsing the internet. Imagine that, finding something on the internet that pushes someone else’s buttons. But the think about this word (I’ll tell it to you in a second) is that it shouldn’t push my buttons. That is to say, I wouldn’t expect it to. Because while yes, it is a hot button word, it is one that I had long ago considered, one that I have talked over with learned scholars, my wife and friends. It is something that I thought I put to be a long time ago. I guess that is the thing about pushing peoples buttons, they wouldn’t be so easy to push if people knew they were there, right. I mean, if you know you have a sore button, you sew it up, right? You steel yourself against it. You prepare by forming phrases like “I don’t want to talk about that right now” or “Can we change the subject?” The task of hiding away a button from the wiles of the internet is even easier, no? I mean, all you do is click the “Home” button, or the “Back” button, and the offensive material is gone, voila. Not that a button has to be offensive, but that it stirs up something within, some old thought or old feeling that you thought you had put to bed long ago. My word, yesterday, was feminism.

I can tell you where I found it. That way if you go and look you will see that it wasn’t from some ultra-radical feminist website that wants to castrate men and do away with pantyhose. It was a blog site called “blue milk.” A fairly sweet, intelligent site that offers insights in life and parenting and relationships. I clicked on the “About” button and my eye read “My feminism is richer for understanding your feminism.” And it was like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water on me. I was done. I wasn’t going to read any more. I navigated away and didn’t look back, but the damage was done. The proverbial button was pushed.

Buttons have different powers over us. Some make us afraid, some make us angry, this one left me feeling confused. “Wait” I said to myself “What is feminism again?” I quickly typed the word into the search engine and went to the wikipedia page. I read the usual jargon about it being “a political, cultural or economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women.” And then went to the outline in search of greater meat. I eyed the “pro-porn/anti-porn” headings, but then spied a subject line the spoke right to my dis-ease: “male reaction.”

“The relationship between men and feminism has been complex.”

“No s**t.” I thought. I read the paragraphs over and then switched of the browser and walked away. “There is no way I am touching this” I told myself. I felt too inadequate to jump into the middle of a decades, even centuries long debate on the rights and differences between the sexes. Even if I could, my people pleasing center wouldn’t allow it. “Who would I offend, and why?”

I wouldn’t characterize my behavior as defensive, as much as self preservation. I wanted to look away from the topic, because the reality of the situation was, that while I have thought about various topics under the heading “feminism” I have never really thought about feminism in terms of “my feminism.”

Blue Milk said, “My feminism is richer for understanding your feminism.” But that begs the question doesn’t it? “What is my feminism? “ I thought. “Hell, what is my masculinism? Is there a masculinism? Is her Masculinism stronger from understanding my Masculinism?” That last one sounded defensive. I threw it out. It turns out there isn’t a “masculinism” but there is a “masculism.” But masculism sounds so un-masculine that I immediately didn’t want any part of it.

My wife wrote her undergraduate thesis on feminism, specifically women and the porn trade, not the sex workers, but women who ran their own pornography related sites, women who were “empowered” by this line of… work. So I did what any self-respecting man who is doubting his trust in the feminist mystique would do. I didn’t say a word to her. At least I didn’t until I sat down to write my experience of it and she happened to be passing by and I casually said “I had the weirdest experience the other day…” and she knew instinctively what I was talking about.

“It’s threatening.”

She went on to talk about a conversation she had recently had with another friend about the statistic that whites are becoming a minority. “What would that mean to me if I suddenly became the minority and they were the majority?”

It isn’t about racism. It isn’t about sexism or any -ism at all for that matter, though anyone can easily make it into an argument if they want. It is about unfounded fears rising to the surface and threatening our sense of security.

I have a friend who likes to say that fear is False Events Appearing Real. That’s my experience. Listen to what I said earlier: “a ultra-radical feminist website that wants to castrate men and do away with pantyhose.” Stereotypes. They bubble to the surface and push buttons. Not that they are real, or even that I believe them, but that at one point in my youth I might not have known the difference and so being uneducated, or unschooled or sheltered, I had fears. Fears about women. Fears about Homosexuals. Fears about people of other races. Fears that I grew up and got smart and threw out because, well, because the stereotypes were a lie. A lie created by people just like me who probably felt threatened just like me and that were about people who, while not just like me, are more like me than I know, which is why I fight racism and sexism and –isms of every character when I see them, and why when a button is pushed, as they sometimes are, I can use that fear as an opportunity to remind myself that, for me, the –isms aren’t about men and women, black and white, straight and gay. For me the –ism is about difference, and I don’t believe in difference. I reject them. Not that I don’t support the -ism and the desire to treat people equally and with dignity and respect, but that I believe people to be equal and so I don’t adhere to the –ism.

I don’t have a feminism, and having someone say "your feminism makes my feminism stronger" bugs me. Why? Because I am threatened? Maybe, but I think it is because I think I don't want there to be an -ism, and I want the worlds hates and fears to already be resolved. But that is not realistic. Why? Let me ask it another way: Can there be a world without -isms? I don't know. To me -isms are about difference. There may never be a world without -isms, but there can be a me without -isms, and part of my fighting the intolerance I see is to reject them, to reject difference and just be O.K.

I guess the question is, does talking about it perpetuate it? I mean, feminism isn't about difference, it is about making things more equal, or at least ideally. But then is it really about making things equal, or does talking about the -ism mean there will always be that difference. Like does saying "there has never been a black president" make it less likely that there ever will be because it hold out the difference at arms length and says "look at this." But then, there IS a black president... so what do I know?

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

From the Unreliable Narrator

Zbigniew Herbert
from the poem "In the Studio":

When God built the world
he wrinkled his forehead
calculated and calculated
hence the world is perfect
and impossible to live in

on the other hand
a painter's world
is good
and full of errors

And then this, from Robert Rauschenberg:

"My paintings are an invitation to look some place else"

The Kingdom of Nirvana

I think one of the things I really enjoy about my blog is that I never really started blogging to say any one thing and in the process made my blog a catch all for everything. It is good for me, because I am not a writer and I don’t routinely jot down my thoughts in journal, instead I get to talk about what interests me and I don’t have to worry about anyone judging me because my blog isn’t enough about art or parenting or anything else, and at the same time the blog is about these things, because, ultimately they are part of who I am.

I suppose in an odd way if you wanted to know me, or at least what interests me, all you have to do is read the blog. Except that the really personal stuff doesn’t make it in here. Usually because it is too painful or to humiliating or something, and really how much do you want to know about a person?

And then I read this piece by my friend the unreliable narrator, or this blog about the life and writings of my friend Oleoptene, or this blog by my friend Stuart and I see them routinely holding out their flaws and inspecting them, sometimes for insight, and sometimes for humor, and I think “well, I have done that” the thing is, they routinely are able to pick up the little nuances of their life and hold them to the light for the precious jewels that they are, and I don’t think I can.

I am both supremely confident, and horribly insecure simultaneously. I want my blog to be ABOUT something, and I don’t. I want to share a PART of myself, and I don’t. I mean, how much of yourself do you share on a routine basis? and with whom?

I have maybe a handful of close friends that I could call up on a moments notice and say, “I’m scared” or “I’m pissed” or “I’m drunk.” And they would totally understand. But mostly I think this is really so much masturbation and I can’t, or really I don’t share myself. Again me being both confident and simultaneously insecure.

The irony is I am a gregarious, often outspoken individual who sees himself as shy and insecure. So, is the problem that I don’t have enough friends or that I don’t “share” myself with others, or is the problem really just a problem in my head?

The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that it is all in my imagination. But then really this in not a problem of my not being open, it is a problem of me getting caught up in my head, and it is a fairly typical problem for me. The more I think about a thing, the more I think I am convincing myself of the truth and, ironically, the less “real” that thing is.

I can sit here and convince myself that I am this or that but the truth is I do not have a realistic picture of myself in my mind, and the more I think about myself in the abstract, the less real that image of me becomes. Perhaps this is why the Buddha would discourage his disciples from engaging in abstract philosophical talk, as reason tends to focus on and extract singularities from a great multitude and hold it up as a truth, when in fact, nothing exists in a vacuum, not even Nirvana.

Nirvana is probably a really good example of what I am talking about here, because most westerners don’t really understand Nirvana and tend to think of it as a kind of vacuum attained by the extinction of all desire and as the penultimate experience of a world denying religion, when in fact Nirvana is probably more aptly defined as “pure presence.” In Nirvana the meaning of life is discovered in openness to being and “being present” in full awareness.

Thus the old t-shirt adage applies: “To be is to do. To do is to be. DoBeDoBeDo”

Both Buddhism and Christianity agree that man’s present condition is not in right relation to the world around him or the things in it. If I can’t even think about myself and form a “real” picture of who I am, how much less real is the world to me? Mankind bears a propensity to falsify his relation to things and spending inordinate amounts of energy justifying those claims. The Buddhists call it Avidya and the Christians call it Original Sin.

The noble truths of Buddhism begin, life is suffering and suffering is caused by desire. My experience tell me that this is true, especially when I think about myself reasoning myself out of a problem. It is the equivalent of desire desiring itself out of desire. It is unattainable.

In yesterdays post I talked about “change happening all at once over time.” If I am uncomfortable with some part of myself, then I have only to look at myself as the source of discomfort. If I am uncomfortable with some aspect of the world (traffic, school, people) again, I, not them, is the source of discomfort. I choose to be uncomfortable. I am responsible for my own feelings.

In my last post I said, the answer to the problem of change is time. That is all there is. The more I try to grasp and contain the feeling, the less I am able to experience the feeling for itself, as I am busy "thinking" about the feeling and not actually going through the motion of feeling frustrated or insecure. The more I try to form a picture of myself as that person, the less like that person I think I am and thus the more I perpetuate my own problems. The folk adage is "time heals all wounds" and I would add "and reveals all shortcomings and defects of character."

Life is not about the trifling of my problems and my joys, Nirvana, say the Buddhists, exists in the world around me. The New Testament says as much about the Kingdom of Heaven(Lk 17:21). It is here. It is now. I just have to shut up and enjoy it.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

So I am flipping through channels the other night and I landed on a scene in the Matrix where the Oracle is telling neo “we cannot see beyond choices that we do not understand.” And I think about for a few days and I have decided that for me “choices” is really “control” and that I cannot think beyond situations that fall outside of my control, and that really situations that fall outside of my control paralyze me because suddenly all of my energy and all actions are somehow spinning around the solution “how do I get past this?”

You might think that, having had this realization, I would feel better or feel comforted in the gentle glow of self-realization, but I wasn’t. Seldom do self-revelatory thoughts provide manuals instructing me how to change my behavior. Instead they leave me feeling more hopeless than ever that the possibility of change will free me of my “character defects.”

That being said, I have had moments of clarity in which I realized that some character defect, which had previously been plaguing me, was no longer present. But that it was not the moment of clarity that freed me from this action, rather it was time. Someone once said to me, jokingly, “change happens all at once over time.” That pretty much sums up my experience.

Self-revelatory moments can be profound. I remember one time I was walking through a park in Santa Fe when it occurred to me that creation, imbued with the spirit of the creator, was looking at me. You might say I stopped looking at the world and began to perceive myself through the eyes of the universe. It was an ecstatic moment, and one in which I wandered around that park for several hours sitting on benches, starring at the stars, and hugging trees. SO powerful was the experience that for the next several weeks all I had to do to summon the experience was to revisit the park at the same place at roughly the same time each night. Sadly, eventually the experience faded and new ones came and went until all that is left is of that moment resides in the faint glow of a memory.

“If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Is a Zen saying used to caution the practitioner to become detached from our everyday conception of ourselves as potential subjects for special and unique experiences, or as candidates for realization, attainment and fulfillment. If you have an idea of what it is like to be enlightened, you probably aren’t, you might find yourself, like me, clinging to a moment or worse falling in to complacency as the ego assumes its place in spiritual glory.

In fact many spiritual traditions equate spiritual transcendence with negation of the self, i.e. Self as Void in the Zen Buddhist tradition and its parallel in the Christian tradition as “I live now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) Where the Christian faithful empty themselves of the contents of ego consciousness and become void in the light of god where the infinite reality of his Being and Love are realized.

The realization of a transcendent reality could perhaps be more easily described as what it is not, but for me it is an existential transformation, one that is realized not in trying to attain the Void or the Spirit, but in the recognition and especially the acceptance of humans as imperfect beings.