Twilight Zones

 I recall watching a TV program when I was growing up called "The Twilight Zone". The premise behind this program is that people who otherwise live "normal" existences are suddenly thrown for a loop--they find themselves caught in inexplicable dilemmas that cannot be explained, either by themselves or the authorities in their world. It's as though the "laws" of space and time (and society as a whole) were twisted or warped, and the person is caught in a wormhole where those familiar rules no longer apply.
   What pushes this show to a paranoia is that it puts the viewer in the position of one who knows and feels that something is wrong, yet somehow lacks the shared language with others to voice what is different. Like characters in Kafka novels, there is a sense of something being off, but no way to set it right, because there are no rules of engagement with others that bind people to shared solutions. In thriller movies like King Kong or even slasher films, there is at least a notion of a shared enemy that everyone agrees to escape from or fight. In Twilight Zone, no such common cause can be identified, and the main characters often feel isolated, thinking they are the only ones who share their previously familiar values.
  Sometimes, I feel like the view of samsara is very much more like "Twilight Zone" than anything else. We often find ourselves caught in situations that can only be understood if we go into past lives that we have long since forgotten. Even then, there is no beginning cause whatsoever, and whatever I do to frame the solution of a problem is itself influenced by my conditioning. In this situation, I might find that the prevailing explanations don't fit my ideas or understanding, and the choice is either to acquiesce with socially accepted discourses on what's true or not true, or I might say that the current explanations don't suit or address the conditioned arising. Many people are told to choose the former, because it's easier to accept whatever ideologies are given to us and try our hardest to stay within their confines. It's only when a person's suffering is excrutiating or especially bothersome that they will think to push the boundaries into the latter. This is where all explanations start to lose their meaning, and one starts to see their problems as entry points to deeper existential riddles.

Cool Empathy

 Empathy is often portrayed in popular psychology as a warm and fuzzy sort of feeling. We want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else so we try to project onto them traits that we find desirable, such as love or sympathy. But I have found that real empathy can be cool and detached as well. It doesn't need to set up or presume a specific atmosphere, and it can even be used to teach reading and literature. Empathy does not need to be immersive or total, in the sense of trying to completely immerse ourselves in another experience like a method actor. Instead, empathy might be considered trying out different ideas or situations that another person might be experiencing, based on what they communicate to us.
  I sometimes feel that the task of empathy can be too daunting: how can we ever tell whether we have fully captured another person's experiences? In fact, this is neither possible nor especially desirable, in my opinion. Furthermore, such an experience doesn't necessarily entail a connecting experience with another person. I think that empathy needs to be approached with caution and humility, in the sense that what we think about someone else can only be a mental construction based on a mixture of one's personal experiences,education and the observations of another person. We don't have special access to another person's mind, and nor is this necessary for people to get along or live harmoniously.
    Though we cannot know another person, we can have fun exploring the lived experiences of others. I think it's important not to try to take another person's experiences as one's own or claim knowledge that is only partial or fragmentary. This kind of empathy is grounded in a sense that understanding is impermanent and partial. And this is okay, because all of experience is a constant unfolding.

I Thou Spirit

In his book, The Religion of Tomorrow, Ken Wilber writes about different pronouns denoting spirit, which he refers to as "1 2 3 spirit". First person spirit relates to the identification of one's mind or interior as ultimate spirit. Second person spirit relates to spirit as a "you", or an enduring conversation with an other, whether it's God or the Buddha, or another practitioner. Third person spirit sees spirit as something out there, that has no direct connection with us, such as Aristotle and Plontius's ideas about the Prime Mover of things, or Spinoza's idea of conatus.
    I find that the "Second Person" spirituality is perhaps the least definable--and, for this reason, sometimes the most problematic. This is because trying to picture spirit as an ongoing dialogue between two or more persons is sometimes conveying the idea that spirit is never completed, and cannot ever be defined or contained. Wilber suggests that conversation with the other is the way that qualities such as "compassion, love, gratitude, forgiveness, and so on" (p.173) can be expressed.
   Thinking about spirit as an ongoing, incomplete conversation that never ends, can sometimes help a person let go of a certain pride that might come from believing that they have found spirit or have achieved it in some way. Speaking personally, I have found that it's only when I admit my lack of control, or exhaust the feeling of being "in control", that spirit is allowed to seep into my insides and lift me up. Part of it is because spirit always falls behind or out of range of words, so we only realize spirit when we run out of consoling words. But part of it also is that spirit can't happen if we feel already complete and full. When we are "full", we have ossified ourselves, and are not able to let anything in, which is why failure is often the prelude to many spiritual moments. When spirit is allowed to get into the broken cracks of a tarnished surface, one can then realize that the brokenness is part of a process, and there is no harm in ever having to break for lack of any other way to proceed forward.

Wilber, K. (2017). The Religion of Tomorrow Boulder: Shambhala.

Conditions for A Grateful Reading

 I have several books (library and otherwise) currently stacked on various shelves (bookshelves or otherwise), and waiting for me to read them. Sometimes, I am sidetracked by a whole lot of things, so I might not get to them as quickly as I would wish. On the other hand, this reading is essential to my research and theoretical formulations. And I am thinking: what kinds of reading allow me to be curious about the topics that the authors are conveying in the book? What aspects of reading fill me with joy, if not gratitude?  Conversely, what aspects of reading, particularly in academia, cause me to lose curiosity, if not outright shut down from being curious or grateful?
   All of this ties in with the topic of assessment, because I believe that learners and students assess as much as teachers do. While teachers ultimately assess the value of a students' writing, students also need to assess the sources they are researching to determine relevance to their research topics. However, too narrow a focus on "relevance" can lead to a kind of repetition of the same material and ideas as in existing scholarship in a certain area. To be original and creative, scholars need to be willing to dip into subject areas that are sometimes tangential to their current topic. This is because the cross-fertilization of different theories across different fields is a fruitful way to invigorate scholarship and prevent the student from thinking too narrowly about their given topic and field.
   So, I think this comes to my main point, and that is the reader needs to be willing to suspend disbelief in a topic's relevance to their topic. That is, a student needs to go beyond what they think they will find in a given subject to embrace what could be found; to even step outside the familiar to see something new. This requires a certain ability to enjoy and appreciate something as though it were specifically designed for that person's life in that moment. When a person is open to reading in this way, serendipity tends to happen. This, for instance, happens to me when I read the I Ching: I often connect the hexagrams I am reading to my life experience, or something that seems similar to it in some way.
  What I think this requires goes beyond a traditional idea of reading as an act of opening a book that was written years ago by another person. To read a book is to open to one's present situation, using the words of the book as a way of assessing that present, felt and lived experience. A book speaks to me and reaches out to me where I am now, but it is up to me to trust that it will do so, just as every book has always done so since the very beginning. When thought of this way, no reading is accidental, and reading can plant seeds for future thought or inspiration. Given this, there is no reading that is ever a true waste of time.
   Could some of this thinking about revising the function of reader key into what my thesis is about? Well, writing this should give me reasons to feel grateful later (perhaps).

The Pains of Being a Receiver

  I mentioned in an earlier post about assessment, that simply reading a student's writing with the expectation of receiving a gift is actually challenging a view that teachers should administer assessment rather than enjoy student writing. It is I,the teacher, who gives you, the student, a grade or an assessment, thus turning your work into something that can be coherently compared to something else. This, after all, is what the term "grade" comes from; it refers to a quality that can be scaled, compared, or categorized into specific functions or levels. Because the teacher gives a grade, the role of the teacher assumes a crucial agency, which students often lack. It's rare to find students completely in charge of their own grading. Even in those special cases, it's usually a teacher who becomes the final arbiter of whether the student's judgment or grading scheme is justified or not.
   What are the pains, then, of being a receiver of gifts? I think this goes back to a cultural notion of receiving a gift as a form of having a debt to someone else, which often seems unwanted. But it also seems to incapacitate the person who considers him or herself to be the "giver" in a teacher-student relationship. If I allow myself to admit that I am privileged to read my students' work (that is, even gifted to do so), then I am reversing the attitude that a student should thank me for giving them a grade and properly judging their work as "good" or not. Instead, I look to the student as providing me with an experience that is fundamentally not reduced to a grade, or a teacher-student transaction. In doing so, I surrender some of my "authority".
    Of course, we do (often inevitably) judge the gifts we receive---for example, we decide that our gift-giver was a bit too "cheap" or hasty in the way they prepared the gift. In that sense, receiving gifts and being thankful for them does not preclude my abilities to assess the quality of the gift itself. But seeing myself as a recipient of a gift from another takes away (to a certain extent) my capacity to judge the gift/giver in the way that I would judge my own purchases. In effect, I am told: this person did something 'gratis', and certainly didn't need to go to this length to do so. Seeing that this gift is not based on a previous debt, it must surely be seen as a gift, or at least as something coming from another person's sincere heart and intention.
   By shifting away from an idea of exchange, something must surely happen to the identity of the teacher as an assessor. This is my ongoing "huatou"--a contemplation for future postings.
   

Time Blurred

The sense of time is quite strange. I sometimes have difficulties figuring out how or why time seems to go "more quickly" on some days than others, when one is doing the exact same thing at work, from one day to the next. I believe that today felt like the shortest day of my life. Now why and how does it happen that time slips away so quickly?
    I have found that whenever I really let myself be drawn into the present experience, I am not even thinking about time. But there is no trick to this: I don't try be in the present, but rather I just let things fall in whatever arrangement they want to be, seeing myself more as a participant or a fellow "time traveller" than as the clock-master. When I think in this way, there is no time, because there is no longer the illusion that there is an I moving from point A to point B in time. Without that sense of linearity, time doesn't seem to exist at all, and I find myself oddly enough not even being aware that hours passed while I was doing something.
  It has only been recently when working at home that I have experienced these kinds of moments. And I have come to the sense that these moments are training in the awareness that time itself is not so real, because it is not a something reaching forward to an end result. This is a kind of felt sense of things going on and not having a real finish.

Enjoyment and Assessment: Opposites?

When teachers assess student writing, they might think of it as putting on a reflective, critical hat: one must assign a grade, which requires a logical mindset. What happens when one instructs teachers not simply to evaluate in a logical way, but to enjoy the students' writing through their emotions? So far, I have the stumbling block of seeing "reason" and "emotion" as somehow separate components in the assessment process.
  It's very much similar to the distinction between "passive" and "active" reading.  Books can be both a source of reflection and a kind of passive escape from thinking altogether. I have sometimes heard the expression "being carried away by a book" to describe the latter. It is as though succumbing to the pleasures of reading something without any critical acumen or interpretive framework were a kind of primitive, inadequate source of reading that needs to be supplanted in favor of a mature way of reading. I am also reminded of Plato's warning that art "corrupts" character, especially art that does not have a specific message that supports moral life.
   Bringing enjoyment or pleasure into assessing student work is not easy, because assessment itself is built around critical frameworks that support certain ways of reasoning about writing and art. Without those logical structures in place (and legitimated), there is a danger that the process of grading itself can lose its coherence. I remember a high school English teacher once remarking on how impossible he felt to grade creative writing, although he never hesitated to assign tough grading standards on essays. This teacher felt reluctant to evaluate creativity in the same way that intellectual thinking could be evaluated.
   What is it about creativity or "creative" writing that makes it immune to the deeper criticism of an essay or academic paper? Again, I would have to say that teachers have different impressions about the functions of these writing types. Whereas it's considered legitimate to enforce strict standards on discursive writing, narrative writing might get a looser evaluative mode. It's as though a kind of caution steps in that wants to preserve the sacredness of creativity and our responses to it, by holding a space away from a critical lens.

Non-Opposition as "Masochism"?

Sometimes, I wonder, does an attitude of non-opposition entail masochism? Does it mean being a "doormat"? I think it's tricky, because in a sense, masochism means defiling one's personality in favor of serving others. It is equally a form of self-attachment as, say, ego-aggrandizement, because the belief is that there are selves more privileged or deserving than "this self" that exits in "this body". What results, quite often, is a covert power struggle which is really founded on a resentment. Sometimes, one appears to be a willing martyr for a cause, but secretly might be reveling in the idea of martyrdom itself.
   I think true non-opposition takes its cue from a realization that there is simply nothing to oppose to begin with. Here is an analogy I once learned from a Dharma teacher: when playing chess by yourself, you take the white pieces in hopes to defeat the black pieces; then switch to the black pieces, hoping that the black pieces will defeat the white; and so on. Depending on how I choose to position myself in the game, I might root for either one. But in reality, I am playing all sides. The only difference is in the way I perceive things, which privileges one side over the other or confuses one thing as being mine.
  If I am on the losing side of this battle, I might reason by making a virtue out of losing (seeing it as a heroic surrender to an existing disadvantage that wasn't of my choosing), or even making a vice out of winning! (Pride, ego, arrogance, etc.) But one misses the fact that these "sides" are all created by mind. They change according to the circumstances, and no one can ever truly say they are one or the other.
   I think what makes masochism appealing is that it inverts a perceived power imbalance by playing on an ability to take on seemingly infinite, boundless burdens. This itself becomes a form of power. But non-opposition, on the other hand, does not separate masochist from non-masochist, nor privilege one view over the other.

Assessment Time

I have a lot of apprehensions about assessing my students' writing, and I have to admit that I don't know why. Perhaps one of the reasons why I am pushing to do my thesis on gratitude in assessment, is that I have these weird feelings about assessing student work. Part of me thinks of it like having a tiny shark's mouth that tries to bite into a giant peach (a reference, no doubt to James and the Giant Peach). It is a feeling like "where to start?" I am overwhelmed at times by the sense of never being able to get at a student or a learner's thoughts. The writing is only ever a pale reflection and often a final draft, which conceal earlier thoughts and drafts. Could it be that my desire to see evidence of learning in the students gets in the way of simply enjoying the writing the way it's presented to me?

   I think that what I am really wanting to learn is about the way that assessment operates through presence and non-presence: through being in the moment and attempting to stand "outside" the moment to assess "from above", or from the vantage point of an objective observer. To assess means to assume a subject position and (perhaps, though maybe not) to refuse to be taken in by the peripheral qualities that don't land in the rubric of the evaluative process. On the other hand, there is this other function of writing which resists critical evaluation. It's the way that we long to connect to others through their writing, seeing writing as the window to the soul, both the writer's and one's own. Reading and writing as reflection of the soul is also something that Emerson has described in his writings, and it's something I want to continue to explore with my own practice of assessment.

  

 

online disconnects

I believe that the kind of isolation I experience at this time might be a training in what it might feel like to let go when one dies. I have had many experiences of online disconnections-either due to faulty technology, or not knowing how to troubleshoot Zoom to get the microphone to work. Such kinds of situations have tried me a great deal, and make me realize how fragile human connection and living is. When I am stuck with a problem and my livelihood depends on it getting solved, how do I deal with it on my own? When social life is fairly integrated, it's hard to find that many situations where one is left entirely on their own, but I think that the situation now requires more patience with times of not knowing, especially when the technologies I have are very slow.
  Disconnection may be an experience of either greater resilience,or perhaps a letting go of the illusion of ultimate resilience. I have a hard time straddling the middle path between these two binaries. For sure, being strong is something that crises encourage people to do, but there are times when the idea that I could do everything on my own or become self-sufficient starts to wear around the edges. This is really to say that there never was any time when I could do anything without the support of other beings, and even being left alone by myself to tinker with a slow network connection is a testament to this

Seeing What Has Been Built Already

It's important to reflect on what's already been learned: to think, what paths have I already crossed? If one's past experiences are not attended to with care, key lessons from experience are often overlooked.
   Experience can be thought to be a barometer, in the sense that it can tell a person what has worked in the past. Sometimes, experiences are fraught with prejudice, and one needs to question how they understood or interpreted those experiences. This is why an over-reliance on "pure" experience can sometimes lead to a sense of not being able to get out of established ways of thinking. It's as if I am too bound by what I saw and thought in the past, and this can lead to feelings of being overly attached to those interpretations.
   Each time I read a sutra, for example, the meaning is going to change according to my practice and understanding. If I simply said, "Well, I have already seen this, and I don't need to read it again", I will naturally feel that I don't need to read it again. But the problem is that when I open a page I am reading it with a new set of conditions and previous experiences. I can no longer ascribe to the belief that I already crossed that river, when in fact it's a new experience completely. While I can use the learning from the past to assess the new experience, it simply won't be the same experience at all.
   That having been said, being able to see what I have built from past experiences, efforts or learning, can give me some confidence to push forward and be open to new experiences. I am not a blank slate, but rather my mind has the capacity to integrate new experiences into already existing (and valued) experiences. In this way, I can trust in my capacity to learn, based on reflecting on the ways I have learned in the past.

Many Factors, Not Just One

  I have found out that whenever there is news that is shocking to me, my immediate impulse is to try to find an answer to "why" that most reflects my bewildered state of mind. Perhaps it's no wonder that in the early days of the corona virus, people were posting a lot of interesting theories about how and why this virus came to be. Had the "answer" been a more or less simple or random explanation, such as a mutation in nature, people would have still floundered looking for explanations that match their states of mind. This is similar to how, when I was a young boy in the early morning, I would often try (or not try) to freak myself out by staring at the shadows under the furniture, and try to guess what those shadows happen to be, until enough daylight would show these things for what they are. The "reality" always felt more disappointing, because they lack the feelings of mystery, wonder or suspense that my initial fear had entailed.
    More recently, I have noticed that a lot of the so-called explanations --and seeking of explanations, for that matter--are starting to die down, in replacement of predictions as to "when this will end" or the more mundane and practical contingency plans, lest it never quite ends. What I notice is that the kinds of answers people seek are often reflections of the stages in which they are collectively grieving. The "answers", whatever they may happen to be, matter less than the power these explanations may grant in balancing a person's emotional and spiritual equilibrium.
    To say that things have many reasons and not just one, turns out to be a bit of a let-down, because a) it fails to match the shock and bewilderment; and b) it fails to admit of any single root cause that can be pinned down in any precise way. But if a person stops to reflect that things have multiple causes , similar to a weather map that shifts with each new current or wind pattern, the "reality" of things appears more understandable ---even a bit less outlandish. This is because one is not trying to deliberately create shadows by excluding certain bits of data, or by distorting some bits of data to look more remarkable than they really are. Things work together in nets of causes and conditions, which means that no single cause is to blame. Although this way of looking at things seems mundane and even bland, it can go far in de-escalating states of anxiety as well as preventing the anger that comes from thinking that one thing is operating on purpose to de-stabilize other things.
    Conspiracy theories are examples of cases where something is enlarged to the point of having an omnipotent power over things. We attempt to weave stories as a way of bringing to justice something that may never have a single root cause. But the satisfaction of defeating or subduing the imagined cause is perhaps the counter to one's fear and sense of things being "out of control". The problem with these theories is that they end up intensifying the anxiety that they are designed to quell, because the enemy is always lurking somewhere in one's psyche, ready to be projected outward onto some new cause or problem.

Letting Go in the Midst Of

  There is no time to let go because letting go happens right now, in the midst of everything that now is. Whatever difficulty or tension happens to be there, there is no "later time" to resolve it at which point we let go. Letting go is letting things be as they are, and to relax into that being, even if it means sitting between two or three things or not having fully resolved the issues of one's existence. Even this unresolved aspect is exactly where one needs to drop everything and stop trying to make the ends "make sense". It is at this point that one can exist in something that is not temporal. It remains eternal.
  This is good news because it means that the grief that one carries with them related to the unresolved mysteries of life (what am I here for? What is all this for anyway?) can be let go. This does not mean that those issues cease to be real, but that the quest for an object to quell the questions vanishes, and things are seen in their impermanence. There is simply no gain and no loss; nothing is permanent. The quest for a permanent answer starts to vanish and fade away.
    All of this is reminding me to go back to Kierkegaard's writings. Even though he is not Buddhist, I believe that he has a lot to say to this idea of faith in the eternal.

The Phenomenon of Strangeness

 Being on the subway these days, I feel fear. But, interestingly, it's not so much the fear of the virus (although that's certainly a fear) as it is a pervasive sense of a social structure caving in or at least under tremendous strain. Recently, I have been experiencing the fragility of care; the sense that caring is dependent on the intention and choices of many collectively, and simply cannot be enforced by itself. I believe that when social structures start to unravel through disasters or crises (like the one we are experiencing now), it becomes evident that kindness and care are not automatically mandated things, and they never were. Those things are decisions that come from individuals. When the social fabric crumbles or slows down, it might be more clear how these decisions are made. Kindness becomes very kind and lack of kindness is experienced as an extreme absence---almost a kind of violence.
   There is a quiet everywhere. In the subway stations, many people do act strangely, as though there were an apocalypse, and even sanity is starting to leave the walls of all the institutions. I think that when I am seeing this, it is a reflection not only of me as a perceiver but also the collective karma and its reaction to the pandemic. Sometimes it takes the form of paranoia--maybe putting a little bit too much protection on face and hands??--while other times it takes the form of a kind of giving up and acting out of fantasies that otherwise get suppressed or hidden away.
  I think it's important in these times to remind myself that people are expressing the deepest sorrow of all humanity at this time, and might even be acting out the traumas of the natural world, all of which had been silenced through heavy industrialization. None of this has to do with the people themselves as individuals, and perhaps the virus is only an expression of  a deeper malaise that was always silenced under the constant drone of machinery, productivity, and efficiency. Like wounds that have sat under flimsily held bandages for decades, these festering sores start to hang out under the decaying seams. I find it interesting to see how this unfolds and what it means, but I would suggest not to take any of this personally, but to see it as a collective karma.

Creative Blocks

Sometimes when I am designing a lesson plan, I find that things aren't quite clicking, and I need some kind of serendipity to bring pieces together. Working on one thing for a long time, I start to believe that the project is not coming together because I am not working "hard enough" and am not focusing on the task at hand. But what would it be like to think about this differently--to think that the lack of focus is not the problem in itself, but, rather, a signal that something else is needed that is not in the immediate vicinity of my focus or my objectives? Sometimes, no matter how hard a person tries, the puzzle isn't coming together, not because one isn't making an effort, but because the pieces just aren't all there.
  The act of creating seems to be a frustrating one because it's always about working with different wavelengths. On the one hand, discipline and focus are definitely needed to organize one's objectives and make sure one is doing things with a plan in mind rather than haphazardly. On the other hand, there needs to be space to be able to say, I am not there yet: there is some reason why this is not coming together as I think it should, and no amount of force is going to "make it so". So I need to put down the methods I am using to do this project and quite simply try something else.
   When the lesson plan isn't as good as I want it to be, I can think, "well, I guess I am going through a rut. Let's find something else that might put it in perspective." This isn't about abandoning the plan altogether so much as it is about temporarily back-burnering it and allowing other things to intertwine with it. It could be about finding an unexpected connection or just stepping out of the familiar to allow this something else to happen. But I guess the worst thing to do is to berate oneself or try to repeat the "stay focused" mantra, since a lack of focus can be something to listen to and honor as a sign that something else may be needed at the moment.

Giving and Receiving

 I have sometimes taken the role of someone who gives something that I have known or experienced, while other times, I receive the experience and gifts of others. Which one,  you might ask, is the more important one? Many are quick to say that it's more important to give than it is to receive, but I beg to differ. I think that both are equally valid parts of the equation, even to the point where skillful receiving has a place in the spiritual path. One of my colleagues who is working in areas of holistic education refers to this as the Confucian idea of "being a good guest", or being someone who receives things with a spirit of grace and respect for what is given.
  Without receivers, would givers know they are giving? Well--most people know what they are giving and how much, simply by the amount of effort that they exert in the gift itself. However, I don't believe that giving can happen in a vacuum. It's the person receiving the gift who acknowledges that the gift has a value, and is not something that is just given out of a whim. If, conversely, a gift has no value to the receiver, then it lacks relevance, and might even be harmful in elevating the status of giver without considering the value of the gift itself. So receivers properly grant and channel the acts of giving into things that matter to the receiver.
   Finally, I believe that by being good receivers, we allow people to practice generosity, particularly those who don't necessarily shine as "exemplary" or "front page news" givers. Giving doesn't need to be ostentatious, big or even generous. Giving can be small and even modest. I think that people need to be receiving the humble gifts of others to encourage giving, even when that gift is not big or earth-shattering. Everyone truly has something they can give, and that faith rests with the receiver.

Life Going Zoom

Many people are writing editorials or blogs on how to best utilize one's time when in self-quarantine. But I wonder if the way time is used is a crucial part of any life. Perhaps, as I have mentioned in previous entries, a change of pace gives people a chance to better examine how they are using their time, but also, conversely, how time is using them up. I am also witnessing what happens over time (to use an unintended pun) when a change of pace unexpectedly arises.
   The first stage is obviously "crisis": a time when all of one's previous routines are being disrupted, so much so that it feels like a kind of psychological death or falling out. We wonder, now that there is no contact with others, no outdoor travel, no "non-essential" shopping, etc, what do I do with all the freed up time? Of course, what often happens at this stage is that we start to fill our days with new things and new routines start to set in. Rather than using this death as an opportunity not to plan but to see life in an altogether new way, we might build a different life which features similar routines. That's when the accommodation sets in, and our lives are rebuilt after the terrible crisis.
  "Zoom" is a very good example. I have recently been getting many requests to use Zoom, as well as initiating requests for online sessions. Zoom is a software that allows for group interactions and is very user friendly. In the beginning, when I started using Zoom, it was there to fill an isolation that was left from being quarantined--and, in this sense, it becomes something that is refreshing and welcome. But later, I sense--particularly in this past week- that Zoom is another tool that re-introduces a set of routines and tasks. In itself, Zoom becomes the hub of a new online marketplace that brings all that was there before "back to normal". While this is a good thing in a way, it also shows that there is very little room for individuals to define their own routines or give themselves space to try on new identities and styles of being. But working from home is also interesting because it often entails that a person could do more, since everything is in one place and they needn't travel from one place to the next. This is where I think technologies can push people to extremes if they are not used wisely or in a considerate way.

Being Generous with Moments

Being generous, I think, requires total trust and faith. It's not easy to do. The problem is about the self and what it believes to be its own "capacities" and "sufficiency". Any time my sense of self and boundaries are challenged, my sense of generosity contracts, and I go to a place of trying to protect what I believe feels safe and "self-sufficient". But all these boundaries are illusory. The only suffering is the suffering of putting up boundaries and walls.

  What it takes to be generous is to challenge the inner "should", like "this should be this way", or "I should not feel this way". I think it requires sacrifice: not the grudging sacrifice of resentment, but more like a genuine sacrifice that comes from "nothing to lose". Sounds a bit contradictory, I admit, because quite often the connotation around sacrifice is that it is a real giving of something that we feel loathe to part with. But I don't think this is the true meaning of sacrifice. More to the point, sacrifice has to come from a truly free offering that, again, comes from a genuine sense of "nothing to lose". The real heart of sacrifice is this nothing to lose part, because without it, sacrifice becomes little more than a token gesture.

   Another way I am thinking about it is to see generosity as a venturing or perhaps "an adventure" in letting go---trying to see what it would be like to give time and resources to others that I would otherwise wish to have for myself. This is the heart of serving and a real contemplative practice that doesn't take place on the cushion.

When Confusion Prevails

I have been reading about the Tibetan Buddhist view on the third stage of the bardo, prior to the time when beings reincarnate into new lives.  This is supposedly a time of extreme confusion, where the temptation is to try to settle one's blustering mind-state by referencing a specific body with a specific form. If anything, this bardo to me is similar to what happens when I am trying to settle on a topic to write about, or even a research project. The pressure to resolve confusion can take the form of trying frantically to settle on a particular design, rather than staying with the feeling of confusion until it somehow resolves itself.
  Listening is another form of potential confusion. Have you ever thought about how listening to another person can be such a risky operation? Unless we are so familiar with what a person is talking about that we can literally "complete the other's sentences", it's not likely that we can control the direction of  a conversation, much less know in advance the speaker's meaning. Listening becomes a huge interpretive undertaking, which often leaves the listener lacking in any mooring if the subject matter is beyond that person's familiarity or comfort zone. In those situations, it can be tempting at times to prematurely bring in an interpretation that has nothing to do with the present discussion, or even jump in with one's own opinion, which has little to do with the story being told. The potential for misunderstanding or lack of comprehension altogether can be very strong in these situations.
  What if it were that the interactions we have with others transcend understanding, such that trying to search for the meaning of the others' sentences is not as important as the mind to mind communication of inter-being? This is a weird idea, but I guess I am trying to drive at the interaction as transcending the meaning of peoples' sentences or words. This goes back to the idea that dying is not a terrible thing if we learn to stop grasping at things, and stay in the space of formlessness for a while. In this way, confusion yields to a wisdom of non-grasping.

A Longing to Create

The joke that has been circulating recently has been that the corona virus might inspire a future "Baby Boom", given that people stuck in their homes might find little to do except create children. This is humorous, but behind every good joke is a dead seriousness. I believe that a lot of what's going on globally relates to a collective movement to go home and literally "incubate" a fresh beginning or a social idea. But it might also reflect, at least for me anyway, the longing to create.
  Creating is not the same as "producing", and I think that a lot of human life emphasizes more production than creation. An example might be corporate life. As a worker in a corporation, I am expected to produce as much of a service as possible, to the members who are my customers. The customers, in this case, are musicians, and the service is about music royalties. Although there are certainly elements of creativity in the work that I do and how I do it, that creativity is driven by the greater needs of the organization. Some people might compare this kind of life to being a cog in a machine, although I would probably not put it in such as stark way as this. Nonetheless, being able to work from home, I can't help but think, where is the home base upon which I shape my values and purposes? Is it naive to think that coming home might also involve trying to find a space where I can be a creator based on who I am deep inside?
   I think the longing to create, at least in the context that I am describing, also might key into a notion that we can be recognized as people with creative powers in a community with others. Artists would probably most resonate with this idea, but I believe that creative effort also extends to doing crafts or displaying some aspect of one's abilities. I have even heard one of my friends teaching flower arrangements in her spare time, as well as organizing groups related to the art. While these activities don't promise lucrative "productivity", they offer these small spaces where humans express things that are dear to them and reflect their lived present.
    To step off the constant push to production is to enter a space where we might ask, "what next?" and be met with many possibilities, all of which are bewildering. Creating is a laborious process, however, and I wouldn't be under the illusion that an epidemic might spawn a host of new artists. But I am hopeful that new ideas might arise from being self-isolated and not so driven by the distractions and entertainments of modern life.

Mind flexibility

Flexibility of mind is like getting rid of all the things you need to keep your ship afloat. All the ideas that bog a person down--including the cherishing of materials and possessions--only keep the mind trying to grasp, rather than learning to relax into the moment. No matter how many views we might happen to cherish, even those views are bestowed upon us by the cultures in which we grow up. What we often cherish as "mine" is really cultural habits passed down. So even this cannot technically be considered your own.
   As soon as there is attachment, there is pain and a fear that come from identifying with the object of the attachment. Recognize it and then release, and practice the idea that there is nothing to even let go. Subject and object are just games of the mind.
 When the mind is flexible, there is an ability to ask the question: what is this moment needing? Instead of imposing a plan or a framework, there is a freedom to just let things be and to make oneself available for whatever happens to arise. In this way, the way of being is softer and more loose.
  Perhaps this looseness of mind is a kind of preparation for all the deaths we experience throughout our lives. It can be an invitation to adventure and exploration, not a place of fear.

Sources of Greed

What's the real source of greed? I am thinking about this recently. While it might seem obvious that greed comes from having too many desires and wanting too many things. But I think an alternate explanation might be that greed arises from a mentality of scarcity, due to a contracted sense of the self. In order to desire "a lot" for myself, there has to be a sense that things are perpetually moving away from me. This is the curse of Tantalus, who is condemned in the Greek classical underworld to not being able to reach food due to an overweening flood of water.
    I suspect that greed comes from an insecurity that is fed through a spirituality of scarcity. If people believe that there is no abundance that is already theirs, they will steel themselves to try to scrimp for whatever they can. A sense of security comes from the belief that I can have something "all my own", but this grasping mentality is actually the source of suffering itself. It comes from the idea that the world is perpetually spinning out of "my" grasp, which also entails a separate "I" as opposed to the world. It is like I am trying to grab crumbs falling from a table because I don't see the source of those crumbs. I treasure and value them as though they were the only food bits I could ever have, not knowing that the source is always renewing itself in some way or another. In essence, greed always stems from a partial view-not realizing that what we see is a piece in a greater whole.
    People might think that the answer to "greed" is to be happy with "less", but even this "less" is illusory because it, again, entails that the self is separate and isolated. It doesn't account for all the ways in which people are given many things and continue to be gifted with abundance. So I think that the answer to the question of how to curb greed is not "accept your lot in life", but rather, "open up to the abundance that already is life". I can only be as generous as I am able to see the universe as generous.

Closer to Non-Duallity

I am continuing to read Andrew Holecek's Preparing to Die. Holecek describes how the stages of dissolution mirror a kind of edging toward a non-dual relationship with mind. The first senses to weaken and dissolve during the death stages are the eyes, followed by ears, nose, tongue and sense of touch. These senses, according to Holecek, are less and less dualistic, because they convey more proximity than distance, and more of a sense of now-ness and totality as opposed to the dualistic "near vs far", "us vs them". Perhaps one way of putting this might be to say that eyes are designed (by evolution perhaps) to see the hard edges of things and detect movement and deviation. Eyes woould be more sensitive to difference and would define differences through mental categories.Skin, on the other hand, is more related to the sense of closeness and proximity between my body and another's, which in turn evokes the notion of interconnection.
   What I find intriguing about this hypothesis is the idea that perhaps the entire civilization and education is built around the eyes. Bentham (as you might recall from the writings of Foucault) talked about the idea of the eye as a kind of symbol of 360 degree surveillance: both looking at others and looking at ourselves. When the eyes dominate a civilization, there is no need for external force, since we become our own watch-people. As people age and their bodies start to weaken, they can no longer sustain the energy that's required of hyper-vigilance or trying to "measure up" to society's requirements, such as the need to compete for scarce resources and titles. As a result, they may start to turn more inward and develop a more non-dualistic approach toward life, where letting go becomes a natural aspect of the body going into a slow decline. But who is to say that this is bad or a sign of "decay"? Perhaps this approach is closer to a more authentic wisdom.