It is hard to know where to begin. Today was a hard day. But mostly, I think, because that is the story I have chosen to tell myself. Today was the day of my Graduate Comprehensive Exam. It is where I show my work and tell the faculty “I know how to make the work” and “I know how to talk about the work” so “I am ready to graduate.” Except that I was really nervous, and the day never really went as planned.
You could say that my day really began when I heard my name being called and I came to standing in front of a plate glass window. I was staring into the quad outside, but really I wasn’t staring at anything. I don’t know where I had been. For a moment I thought "perhaps I had blacked out." It was then that I realized that it was over. I had made the presentation and it was finished.
I heard my name being called. I turned and there were people standing around. Some were talking in small groups, others were walking towards the exit. My eyes locked with my committee chair. “Lets meet in the media room.” I nodded and walked forward. I watched as we approached the room. I saw him fumble for his keys. The door fell open and several faculty members and I walked in. Everyone was seated. “Where was I supposed to sit?” I wondered. I pulled a chair into the center of the room. Then thinking better of that choice I left the chair there and retreated to one corner of the room and waited. Everyone was silent. “Why was no one talking?” Someone asked a question.
“If you would like to talk about procedure I can wait in the hallway.” I offered. More silence.
“I think we have your statement. Why don’t you wait outside while the faculty talks?” Thankfully I left the room.
I walked outside. I saw another faculty member talking to a student. I wanted to scream. I walked to a construction site nearby and picked up a clump of dirt. It was heavy to the touch. I broke it into pieces. "Why did it crumble so easily?" I threw the debris to the ground and picked up another. This one felt heavier. Wetter. I threw it into a mound of earth. I turned. The couple had left. The sun was annoying. I walked to the shadow of the building but the shade was uncomfortably dark.
“I hate it here.”
I went inside. The hallway was deserted. I walked the length of it and climbed some stairs. I though better of my decision and walked back down again. “I am pacing.” I thought. Better to sit, but there were no chairs. I walked the length of the hallway again and came to a rest in front of the media room door. I could hear muffled voices within. “I am in shock.” I thought, then added “I can’t be found here.” I ran back to the stairs and climbed them halfway and sat in the shadows. At some point I called my wife. The conversation lasted hours and seconds. Later I remember feeling ashamed for not remembering it more clearly.
Voices.
Bodies.
Movement.
Two of the faculty members had left the building. Two more were in the hall. I heard them say something about line quality and technique, “I can hear you” I said, or possibly “I am aware” as if to say “of my shortcomings.” None of it made sense.
“You passed” said the chair.
I am staring out into the quad through a plate glass window, I hear my voice being called. Suddenly I come to. “Is it over?” I wonder?
Friday, March 5, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
How Buddha saved Christ
When I was an undergrad in college, I wrote this paper on Plato, which I titled “The Erotic Love of Wisdom.” It was supposed to be my undergraduate thesis paper but in reality it was probably just me jerking off on paper.
Someone proof read the paper for me, probably a professor, but I don’t remember who, and told me that the ideas I was championing in the paper reminded them of a video that had recently watched on Gnosticism. I had never heard of Gnosticism so I went and rented the video.
There really isn’t anything worth reporting about that movie. It was a shoddy piece of documentary video shot by a new age production company championing their own esoteric brand of Christianity, and using the discover of Gnostic texts in Egypt to support their outlandish claims. Needless to say I was under impressed, but I was interested to learn more about the discovery of never before seen texts written by Christians about Christianity from within a few hundred years of the death of Jesus.
I bought myself a copy of the Nag Hammadi Library; the collection of texts referred to in the movie and set about reading them. Fascinated, looked in the front of the book and learned that the book had been published in connection with the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont C.A. Called them. Got an application, and Voila I was in Graduate school studying the first four hundred years of Christianity.
You could say my interest in ancient Christian texts is a by-product of my brand of Christianity. That is, for me Christianity begins with the revelation. In the beginning was the word, and while it is over simplified, one could understand Christianity as a kind of explanation of the revelation, communicated to us in words and statements that depend on the believer’s acceptance of these statements.
After all, one thing that the Nag Hammadi discovery had shown us is that Christians have always been profoundly concerned with these statements: with the accuracy of their transmission from original sources, with the precise understanding of their exact meaning, and with the elimination and condemnation of false interpretations. At times this concern with the words of Christianity has been exaggerated to the point of obsession, accompanied with the arbitrary and fanatical insistence on hairsplitting distinctions and the purest niceties of theological detail.
My study of Gnosticism in Graduate school was cut short when I decided to drop out and follow the love of my life. But my time in graduate school opened for me an awareness that the obsession with doctrinal formulas and ritual exactitude has made people forget that Christianity is a living experience which transcends all conceptual formulations. I know that I am guilty of this behavior, stopping short at a mere correct and external belief expressed in good and moral behavior, instead of entering into a relationship with God as the word made flesh.
Actually it took learning more about Buddhism for me to even begin to understand what that relationship would look like. Let me first say that the Buddhist metaphysic is not a doctrinal explanation in either the philosophical or theological sense. You don’t have to believe in the enlightenment of the Buddha as a solution to the problem of the human condition, and the experience of Enlightenment is not a revelation of how the universe came into existence, what will eventually happen to it, what the purpose of life is what are the moral norms, what will be the reward of the virtuous, and so on. To try to pigeonhole either Christianity or Buddhism in these terms is to reduce it to a mere world-view. Yet this is how Christian theologians frequently view Buddhism and sadly it is how I once viewed Christianity, not as a living theological experience but as a sense of security in my own correctness, a feeling of confidence that I am saved. A confidence, I may add, that is based on my correct view of creation and a merit system peppered with the anxious hope that the right answers will present themselves and that life is really a struggle to attain this sense of righteousness even as my desperate recourse to sacrament or understanding of the word cause me to continually fail, fall and struggle to rise again.
What Buddhism taught me about Christianity and ultimately about my own spirituality is that Zen does not need to explain the universe as much as Zen wants me to pay attention and to become aware, to be mindful and to develop a certain consciousness which is above emotional deception. Deception of what? Of life as it truly presents itself, and not life as my consciousness wants it to be. Because Zen, less a philosophical system about nothingness, rejects systematic elaborations in order to get back to a moment of pure unarticulated direct experience of Life itself. What is this "I" that exists and lives and what is the difference between an authentic experience of life, and the illusory awareness of the self that exists? Zen is not an idealistic rejection of sense and matter in order to ascend to a supposedly invisible reality, which is alone real. The Zen experience is a direct grasp of the unity of the invisible and the visible, a radical awareness of experience that does not require of explanation, but awareness.
In researching these thought I encountered a website that rejected the comparison of Buddhism and Christianity because, “Buddhism believes neither in the existence of a loving and living God nor in a substantial self, so the compassion of a Bodhisattva cannot be accorded with any ontological reality while Christianity treats love both as a means and as a goal of life. Moreover, love is seen as the very nature of God. As love has its source in God, so we are asked to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and this love found its ultimate expression when offered himself as a victim upon the cross for the remission of sins of mankind.”
To which I would say that this is a terrible misreading of Buddhism and that the Buddhist does not rejoice in the escape of the phenomenological world of suffering or try to negate it. Instead the Bodhisattva elects to remain in the world and find Nirvana, or pure awareness, not by reason but by the same compassionate love that identifies all sufferers in the world of birth and death with the Buddha, whose enlightenment each person potentially shares. Christian charity is exactly like Buddhist compassion as both seek not only to be free from suffering, but to eliminate that suffering wherever and whenever it is found.
The thing is, it took me a long time to get out from under the idea that I had to understand Christianity to get it. Stories of the virgin birth, walking on water, and the crucifixion became puzzles for me to solve, and having thought I solved them or at least having come to reconcile them with my faith or the lack thereof made me feel no closer to god. Instead, it took my discovery of Buddhism to understand that I didn't need all of these stories, or or that matter to understand them, in order to have a profound experience and relationship with the higher power of my choosing. I don't understand the whole pascal lamb, and the eucharistic host, and finally I don't have to. For me, Buddha saved Jesus
Someone proof read the paper for me, probably a professor, but I don’t remember who, and told me that the ideas I was championing in the paper reminded them of a video that had recently watched on Gnosticism. I had never heard of Gnosticism so I went and rented the video.
There really isn’t anything worth reporting about that movie. It was a shoddy piece of documentary video shot by a new age production company championing their own esoteric brand of Christianity, and using the discover of Gnostic texts in Egypt to support their outlandish claims. Needless to say I was under impressed, but I was interested to learn more about the discovery of never before seen texts written by Christians about Christianity from within a few hundred years of the death of Jesus.
I bought myself a copy of the Nag Hammadi Library; the collection of texts referred to in the movie and set about reading them. Fascinated, looked in the front of the book and learned that the book had been published in connection with the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont C.A. Called them. Got an application, and Voila I was in Graduate school studying the first four hundred years of Christianity.
You could say my interest in ancient Christian texts is a by-product of my brand of Christianity. That is, for me Christianity begins with the revelation. In the beginning was the word, and while it is over simplified, one could understand Christianity as a kind of explanation of the revelation, communicated to us in words and statements that depend on the believer’s acceptance of these statements.
After all, one thing that the Nag Hammadi discovery had shown us is that Christians have always been profoundly concerned with these statements: with the accuracy of their transmission from original sources, with the precise understanding of their exact meaning, and with the elimination and condemnation of false interpretations. At times this concern with the words of Christianity has been exaggerated to the point of obsession, accompanied with the arbitrary and fanatical insistence on hairsplitting distinctions and the purest niceties of theological detail.
My study of Gnosticism in Graduate school was cut short when I decided to drop out and follow the love of my life. But my time in graduate school opened for me an awareness that the obsession with doctrinal formulas and ritual exactitude has made people forget that Christianity is a living experience which transcends all conceptual formulations. I know that I am guilty of this behavior, stopping short at a mere correct and external belief expressed in good and moral behavior, instead of entering into a relationship with God as the word made flesh.
Actually it took learning more about Buddhism for me to even begin to understand what that relationship would look like. Let me first say that the Buddhist metaphysic is not a doctrinal explanation in either the philosophical or theological sense. You don’t have to believe in the enlightenment of the Buddha as a solution to the problem of the human condition, and the experience of Enlightenment is not a revelation of how the universe came into existence, what will eventually happen to it, what the purpose of life is what are the moral norms, what will be the reward of the virtuous, and so on. To try to pigeonhole either Christianity or Buddhism in these terms is to reduce it to a mere world-view. Yet this is how Christian theologians frequently view Buddhism and sadly it is how I once viewed Christianity, not as a living theological experience but as a sense of security in my own correctness, a feeling of confidence that I am saved. A confidence, I may add, that is based on my correct view of creation and a merit system peppered with the anxious hope that the right answers will present themselves and that life is really a struggle to attain this sense of righteousness even as my desperate recourse to sacrament or understanding of the word cause me to continually fail, fall and struggle to rise again.
What Buddhism taught me about Christianity and ultimately about my own spirituality is that Zen does not need to explain the universe as much as Zen wants me to pay attention and to become aware, to be mindful and to develop a certain consciousness which is above emotional deception. Deception of what? Of life as it truly presents itself, and not life as my consciousness wants it to be. Because Zen, less a philosophical system about nothingness, rejects systematic elaborations in order to get back to a moment of pure unarticulated direct experience of Life itself. What is this "I" that exists and lives and what is the difference between an authentic experience of life, and the illusory awareness of the self that exists? Zen is not an idealistic rejection of sense and matter in order to ascend to a supposedly invisible reality, which is alone real. The Zen experience is a direct grasp of the unity of the invisible and the visible, a radical awareness of experience that does not require of explanation, but awareness.
In researching these thought I encountered a website that rejected the comparison of Buddhism and Christianity because, “Buddhism believes neither in the existence of a loving and living God nor in a substantial self, so the compassion of a Bodhisattva cannot be accorded with any ontological reality while Christianity treats love both as a means and as a goal of life. Moreover, love is seen as the very nature of God. As love has its source in God, so we are asked to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and this love found its ultimate expression when offered himself as a victim upon the cross for the remission of sins of mankind.”
To which I would say that this is a terrible misreading of Buddhism and that the Buddhist does not rejoice in the escape of the phenomenological world of suffering or try to negate it. Instead the Bodhisattva elects to remain in the world and find Nirvana, or pure awareness, not by reason but by the same compassionate love that identifies all sufferers in the world of birth and death with the Buddha, whose enlightenment each person potentially shares. Christian charity is exactly like Buddhist compassion as both seek not only to be free from suffering, but to eliminate that suffering wherever and whenever it is found.
The thing is, it took me a long time to get out from under the idea that I had to understand Christianity to get it. Stories of the virgin birth, walking on water, and the crucifixion became puzzles for me to solve, and having thought I solved them or at least having come to reconcile them with my faith or the lack thereof made me feel no closer to god. Instead, it took my discovery of Buddhism to understand that I didn't need all of these stories, or or that matter to understand them, in order to have a profound experience and relationship with the higher power of my choosing. I don't understand the whole pascal lamb, and the eucharistic host, and finally I don't have to. For me, Buddha saved Jesus
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.
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.
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.”
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?
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"
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"
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