Happily Derailed

                At work today, I was completely thrown off my usual routine, as I had to take care of old issues dating back to my former position. It seems that my past experience in this area is needed for the current issues in that department. A job never really finishes. It only lays dormant until new issues arise. In the beginning, it was so hard for me to be thrown back to those old problems. But I had to adjust my attitude a bit, to let go of what I thought I needed to do today.

                Every one of us has this inner voice that tells us where we probably should go and do. Probably. But at best, the voice is really only an estimate of tomorrow’s cares. I think the biggest trap I get into is having a preconceived expectation of what I could and should achieve from day to day, even before I  arrive in the office. It’s good to set targets to motivate myself, but measuring myself by those targets may not be such a good idea. So I have tried to practice the notion of being happily derailed from what I thought I was expected to do.

                I think a good example of what this might mean comes from the natural world. When I see a tree, I rarely ever see it growing perfectly straight in one direction. I remember seeing these beautiful bonsai in a florist’s store, and noticing the way the branches curve and twist in complex ways that preserve the proportionality of the whole. Can those branches be predicted with mathematical accuracy? If so, there would be no beauty in its organization. And there is far too much predictability in terms of how it preserves its proportions. I think in a similar way, it is good to note the ways that life deviates from the plans I have made of it, to contain it or tame it.

                Yet another example comes from the mathematical world itself. I remember going to calculus class and learning about the nature of slopes, particularly as they apply to asymptotic equations. I remember how asymptotes continue to slope upward and upward until infinity, without ever fully reaching the destination of the solid line that marks ‘zero’. The interesting thing is that everything about an asymptote is perfectly predictable, and it obeys all the laws of slope and proportion down to the smallest fraction. But it still fails to obey the human need for an absolute ending. It isn’t good or bad. It obeys the laws of nature, but somehow it disobeys the laws of human comprehension.

                The metaphor I am describing also extends to this idea that somehow I should know who I am and exactly who I should become. While this might be somewhat true, it overlooks the invisible factors that go into this present moment as it is now. At least I can plant the seed in my mind of what I would like to do and make plans accordingly. But I also need to acknowledge the fact that it is one seed in an ocean of seeds. What comes to fruition and what does not is based on innumerable causes, some in my control and others not. This doesn’t mean that I abandon every project before it starts. Rather, it is about humbly accepting the fact that I can have a good overview of where I want to go, but it isn’t a guarantee that I will ever get there. To embrace the whole of that dream, I need to respect the tiny steps and the detours and missteps as well. And I need to see that having a dream is tricky. It is something that needs to be gently entertained, without trying to push too hard to get rid of the other realities that face us, including our physical and time limitations.

                Another way of looking at this is that we get railed and derailed, and this is continually happening again and again. To try to aim at perfect rectitude is to defy this kind of natural process that is happening at every moment: in breath and out breath, long and short, up and down, day and night. So being ‘off the path’ isn’t the end of the path itself; it is a phase in a path. And we can relax into the detours, if we make a vow to learn from them.

Repentance and "Loving the Absent"

When I first started to learn about Buddhism, I was quite daunted by the notion of ‘repentance’, and still am to some extent. I think that I have these experiences every so often, where I realize that I am trying to defend something that cannot be defended, because it has no substance. For example, I may encounter situations where something happened years ago, and karma just started to ripen now. I might recognize a mistake that was made at work, or some difference in perspective on what seemed ‘right’ at one time in the past. But perspectives change all the time. At work, something that seemed to make sense in one context might mean something else later. Can something that seems correct now always be correct? This is probably a very shallow form of humility.  But I am trying to practice this art of not knowing, particularly at work, so that I am less inclined to spend time defending old decisions.

But this attitude is quite nuanced. For example, if someone does not appear to care about what has happened in the past, that indifference could also create a negative karma. I don’t think that the not-knowing approach means not caring. I think that once I surrender a defensive view of what I have done and decisions from the past, I am free to care for the present moment. But this care does not mean attachment to an outcome. It means that the moment is taken for what it is, and I am not comparing it to anything I have carried over from the past. Caring might actually mean recognizing that how I have acted may not be seen in the same way by everyone else. So if I give up my perspective a bit and accept others as different, a new form of caring might arise.

It is interesting that in Christianity, repentance means something like a three hundred sixty degree turn.  I wonder if there is any equivalent in my own experience to this repentance. I think full repentance cannot happen until I start to really experience the suffering behind desires. Even if a desire creates a good effect, that desire can later lead to disappointment when I can no longer hold the same perspective. An idea that came to mind today was something like embracing the absence of a desired object. This embrace would be equivalent to somehow extending the love one has for something to the absence of it. It reminds me of Simone Weill’s idea that God’s presence is known through absence.  

Every now and then I have experienced that kind of feeling…of being so frustrated with an outcome that I turn to loving the absence of the outcome. It is almost as though that excess energy needs to go somewhere, so it ends up embracing that which is not. I am not sure how this works, or if it always necessarily does. Quite often, it ends up creating an opposite desire that only leads to more vexation! But I believe a thoughtful approach would involve twisting the very desire that we have so that it embraces a kind of conscious rebellion of the desire, or a passionate resistance. It is like enlisting the energy of desire itself to subvert or turn against that very desire. But, again, I am not sure how, when and why it works or doesn’t work. It is just a hypothesis for now…

Invisible Gifts

          The night is humid and muggy as I walk along Spadina Street for my Mandarin class. Sweat starts to accumulate on my collar, even though the sun has already started to fall bit by bit. Tonight will be a review of colors in Ping Yin, along with hair styles and facial shapes. I struggle to remember what the words for ‘round’ and ‘square’ are. I am convinced that the colors should be easier to remember.

My Mandarin teacher waits for me in the Grad House when I text her to come downstairs. A few minutes ensue. I see students coming back to the dormitories, with faces of triumph and expectancy. The new summer term has started, and the campus is less deserted than it was back in May and June. I feel apprehension as seconds slip into minutes. I feel all the vocabulary slip away from me in tiny rivulets of perspiration.

My teacher asks if we could do the class outside, since the seats we normally have are facing the setting sun.  I hesitate to agree, but we head to the outside patio anyway. The sounds of sirens and horns fill the air. And I point to the flowers around me to show off my colour vocabulary. But then I forget what “round” is in Mandarin.

“Yuan”, my teacher says, calmly.

I nervously twitch my pen and laugh. I had been trying to memorize it for quite some time, but ‘round’ somehow doesn’t look like “Yuan”.

And we proceed down through the possible shapes of the face: ‘cheng’ for ‘long’, ‘jian’ for ‘diamond-shaped’, ‘tuo-yuan’ for oval.  And I picture stick figures with hair of different colors, some cheng (long),some  duan (short), some straight (zhi) and some curly (juan). Some have brown kafei hair, some black hei-ze hair, some grey hui-ze hair.

I figure it might take me many years to learn the language, or perhaps even decades in my case. And I hardly have the time let alone the concentration to learn. So the feeling then arises: why do I learn this if the result is so miniscule, compared to anything I might be able to contribute within myself? Could I spend this time helping someone else in some way, rather than trying to learn vocabulary that is so basic to Mandarin speakers? In this way, my motivation sags. I wonder what it means that I am learning the rudiments of this language. And suddenly, I feel as though there is a very large and barely scale-able mountain ahead of me, and I haven’t even touched the very beginning of it.

As I walk home, I wonder, what would Shifu Sheng Yen have said about this dilemma in my heart? Actually, my mind seems to recall his face, and what he said at one point about giving others the chance to give something of their own abilities and talents. I think sometimes receiving the teaching of someone else is also a way of giving to them. It is also a lesson in patience for both teacher and learner. Here is an opportunity for me, as a tutor in English, to understand what it must feel like for an adult to learn a new language completely from scratch: the frustration, the laughter and the loneliness of it all. If I can’t grasp what it means to be a beginner, how can I empathize with learners? If I have no patience for my own inability to remember certain basic vocabulary, how can I have patience for beginners to my own native language?

So I think that in some sense, there is a way to see this so that I don’t feel that I am receiving something without giving in return. But there is also something about ‘not being in a position to give’, to ‘being an absolute beginner’, that is so humbling that it subverts the false confidence in my own role as a giver. It subverts the traditional notion that ‘givers’ are ‘all knowing’ and omnipotent, when in fact, giving can also be giving one’s presence to something, or giving one’s commitment to a teacher/learner relationship, or giving one’s donation or support. There are perhaps infinite ways to give, and this kind of experience might encourage me to reframe how I might understand the role and purpose of giving as well as the form it takes.

View From a Supermarket

                The supermarket at Sheppard and Don Mills is teeming with life. I see kale, lettuce, tomatoes, and winter melon in the produce section. In the meat section, I see grey shrimp draped over hills of crushed ice. I see shimmering silver fish darting to and fro in a dark aquarium. Many of the fish appear to be swimming for dear life, particularly the larger fish in the lowest parts of the aquarium. One of the fish gets snapped up by a red-coated clerk and is cleanly but into two, after which the remains are returned to a customer in exchange for money.  People wind around me with dutiful faces and carts full of food. The afternoon winds down into evening.

               

              Life changes in an instant. A decision is made, money is exchanged, and a life is lost. Then the same repeats the next day and the day after. I look into the faces of the fish and wonder whether they have any inkling of what their fate could be, or why they remain confined in a watery prison. Their faces only look sad and eager to gulp in a few breaths of air and find a space among swarms of other fish. There is sadness there. The carcasses line up beside each other, like fellow comrades in battle. One of them frowns philosophically while a man has his fish weighed and wonders whether he will part with his $20 bill. Patrons scramble to shovel piles of shrimp into clear plastic bags. The world continues on its way.

                

                People suffer at times in vain. An example is a situation where I pretend not to hope for something, only to recognize how much I hoped after all when the object of hope disappears. This is a sad occasion, but it happens only so long as I don’t get the message the first time. As long as I am not comparing this thought with the previous thought, there is nothing to regret. So why do I keep accumulating thoughts as ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ and weighing in on which direction I should take? This kind of comparative picking and choosing does not work. No ‘path’ of life can be evaluated this way when nothing is immune to impermanence. So I need to think of another way.

              

              Early in the afternoon, I had this thought: the root of ingratitude is the mind’s habitual tendency to compare one thing to another. If I stopped comparing two thoughts or two situations, there would be no observable conflict between the two, and I could enjoy and appreciate both as they are.  The problem is that people seek ‘the best’ situation, as though there were such a thing as ‘best’ in the first place. In fact, the word ‘best’ is perhaps the most problematic term of all. It entails measurement (see my previous entry) and a progressive synthesis of pitting one thing with or against another. This then creates the illusory third thought, which is actually not a synthesis at all, but is a completely new thought altogether. And here I am thinking: wow, the new and improved thought! Is there such a thing? If I let go of always looking for the new and improved thought, what I am left with is taking the current thought on its own terms, letting it arise and disappear. And this gives me the space to take the situation for what it is without adding new qualifications to it.

                

             Taking things in this way, I cannot help but see each moment in a new way, even if it is not what I want it to be or what I expect it to be. The ultimate gratitude is relaxing in the moment. It is also the insight that this too will pass. In fact, it is precisely this insight into both gratitude and impermanence that I wish the fish could one day learn, in their respective journeys through successive lives and deaths.

              

               May all beings be free of suffering!

Measuring Up

               How do I measure up? This is the kind of question that both students and adult learners often reflect upon from time to time. I was reading a book in the library by Helmut Schock, called Envy. This very lengthy study describes how the need to ‘measure up’ against others is a very human, almost universal feeling, and yet nobody wants to admit to being envious. Envy and jealousy seem to indicate a kind of weakness, and I have found that the feeling almost throws me back onto myself. It is never easy to feel envy, yet society tends to pepper the matter over by trying to prohibit envy as an acceptable feeling. It seems right to suppress envy because that means that people won’t think too much about social injustices that might keep some people from achieving status that others have.

               

              I agree with Schock in the sense that I don’t think we can quite get away from feelings of envy. Envy is persistent because we are all social beings, and there are obligations we need to fulfill to others. Envy is the general sense that I am forced to contribute in society to others, in spite of the fact that I may feel less disposed to help than others. Envy is the process of comparison that arises from trying to take stock of one’s social and emotional assets in the world. But this is most especially the case when I have identified quite closely with someone else, to the extent of wishing I had what I believe they have.  Although certain politicians, for example, might have expensive things and more status than I do, I simply don’t feel any reason to envy them. Part of that reason must be that I simply don’t see myself as a politician, so there is no reason to envy what they have. I suspect that envy requires some level of identification with the envied person. For example, the person who admires another person’s fancy car might symbolize the car in terms of their own potential wealth. But if we are not identified with any symbolic meaning of the car, it just becomes a piece of metal with paint and wheels, nothing more. Uprooting symbolic aspects of envied objects can go a long way to demystify the source of envy, in many cases.

              

              It seems important to know that envy is not ‘natural’, even though it is persistent and pervasive. I think that envy is quite unnatural because it is based on conceptual ways in which we measure ourselves in the world. I can never be certain, but I doubt that dogs and cats are envious in a classic sense of the word. While a dog or cat might want the food that is in its brother or sister’s bowl, this does not mean that the dog or cat will think: “hey, really wish I was that dog/cat”.

              Knowing that envy is based on social conventions for how we measure up, I might be able to let go of identifying myself with those conventions. This does not mean that I cut off from society or ‘personal measurements’. In fact, those measurements are still going to appear in work or school situations in spite of all one’s protests. But I think the mentality might be something like: the world is built up from measurements. It seems that in spite of their arbitrariness, we need measurements to ensure that forms are respected and there is a system of promotion in place at work that could be verified independently. Having said that, however, it is up to me to reflect that these measures are not truly reflective of my potentials. It is impossible to measure human potential because we do so many things from day to day, and there simply isn’t a number that can capture the miraculous thoughts and actions we are capable of from day to day. At best, organization ‘experts’ might be able to break a task down into discernible units and measure the action based on the speed and number of units produced. But does this reflect all the living potential of a human being? Measures and forms don’t measure the full complexity of thought and the time it takes to form sound judgments and thoughts. In that respect, there is always a limit to conventions and measures, even though it seems that we do need them to some degree to maintain a structured work and academic life.

                

              I think overall it is useful to consider that measures are conventions that lack the permanence that we often consign to the so-called objective and neutral. Doing so might help me identify less with the measure, while still contributing to the social structures to which I belong, as an act of harmonizing and compassion. 

Encompassing Life's Pains

I remember reading a book many years ago, Ian Suttie’s Origins of Love and Hate. The book  talks about how development for children typically involves making them feel independent and toughening them so that they don’t rely on maternal love to survive and get along in the world. What comes out of this is a total reaction against tender feelings, in favor of an aesthetic of machismo, or toughness. As children, many of us are taught to think that it is wrong to feel tenderness, because doing so elicits the same dynamics of ‘co-dependence’ that keep us behind in our development into adults. We have a million derogatory words for this presumably co-dependent tenderness. And somehow, particularly for men, there is a sense that we don’t quite connect maturity with the ability to have softer feelings, whether for ourselves or for other beings. In order to “mature”, we have to repress the original maternal bond and become a little bit desensitized.

                

           From the perspective I have read in Chan Buddhism, I think that the attempt to cut off tenderness is similar to seeking a certain state of being and rejecting others. When Gautama Buddha first practiced asceticism, he also seemed to opt for a tough approach on himself, by fasting and denying himself the basic pleasures or sustenance of life. It was only later that he arrived at a middle path between indulgence and total asceticism. In many ways, all human beings are raised to be a little bit ascetic. When I suffer the hurt or pain of a frustrated wish, my first impulse is to simply cut off the wish and the source of the wish as well. Another example:  a friend of mine was explaining to me how she wanted to delete her Facebook account because she found it so addictive to keep going back to it. I asked her why she found it addictive, but she could not find a reason. Rather than going into an understanding of what draws her to Facebook, my friend prefers to have nothing to do with it. But without understanding the original craving, it is easy for it to come back in a different form, such as an attachment to texting or some other mobile application. I explained to my friend: I may have a craving for ice cream, but would that make me want to cut off my mouth? I think the extreme of asceticism would be trying to dissociate from the emotion altogether, rather than embracing its source.

               

           Meditation practice is often the choice between asceticism and embracing an experience. Asceticism corresponds to trying to deny that pain or other emotions exist, by ‘focusing’ exclusively on the method of practice. This gets me a little bit of the way, but not very far. It is because when I meditate, I start to see the limits of trying to suppress emotions, whereas in daily life, I might not recognize such limits. When not distracted, pain can seem much greater, so meditative practice seems to require a very different turning toward the pain. Krishnamurti has described a kind of meditation where the emotion is seen as inseparable from ‘me’. But how is this accomplished? I am not always successful at this. At times, I think that one has to imagine some being that is large enough to contain all the suffering in the universe. But that ‘contain’ is not just about absorbing the suffering, the way the ocean absorbs poison. I think that there needs to be a genuine attitude of interest, rather than trying to deny the sensation altogether. Christ is an example of a being who seemed to have embodied all human suffering into his own physical body, and this often helps people to manage pain. Why is the image and center of Christ powerful? I think it is powerful because there is no pretending that pain doesn’t exist. Pain becomes manifested in the body image of Christ rather than being completely non-existent or simply unseen. Another reason is that the pain is turned to and embraced rather than cast out prematurely. It is only in facing the pain that one can let go of  it or see its impermanence.

              

           During meditation tonight, I tried to adopt an attitude of genuine concern for the pain. And I found that this genuine concern was not attached to anything in particular. It was a sort of loving interest in how the body was doing and an attitude of solicitude. I found that when I can do this in a genuine way that is not straining or trying to embody an impossible ideal, it is not so distracting. I am not struggling with my emotions, and it is much easier to calm the mind. And I am not trying to use a blanket concept to ‘get rid of’ any experience I have.

A Circular Path

Canada’s birthday starts with getting off at Union Station, then taking the trip to the Distillery District by foot. The day is muggy and with a bit of rain. Judy and I walk through Mill Street, then north toward Queen Street. We stop for a treat of juice and frozen yogurt, followed by the trek down Leslie Street. We finally head south to Woodbine Park, where we see a concert by a band that does reggae covers, mostly of songs by Bob Marley. We head down to Ashbridges Bay Park, and walk along Cherry Street.  Needless to say, exhaustion sets in for both of us. By the time a bus arrives, we don’t even bother to ask where the bus takes us. We are only happy to be able to sit down for a while and enjoy the circular path of the bus, as it winds through Lakeshore followed by Cherry Beach, and then finally toward Union Station again. But we really had no clue where the bus was going after all.

There is something beautiful and loving about a path that goes around in a circle...and yet, how frightening it can be as well. The feeling of being in a circular pattern sometimes jolts and sometimes leads me to keep trying to crack the code of the pattern so that I am off and running again. It seems that psychology is obsessed with this idea of ‘breaking the circle’, and making sure that a particular counter-productive pattern is not engaged in again. Can circles sometimes be meaningful in themselves? I think about how being on a bus just offered a good respite from the pains of a long walk. And being able to go in a circle seemed to soothe me for a while and give me the energy to keep going after the long hike.

Irving Singer wrote a beautiful series of books, The Nature of Love. In the second volume, he talks about the courtly love that occurs in the medieval periods of Europe, particularly arising in Italy and France in the 1100s. In one of the courtly dialogues, he describes a lover who tries to convince a lady to love him using philosophical arguments, of all things. The dialogue becomes a circle which dances around notions such as why we love, who is worthy of love, and what earns the respect of another person. I think that a lot of what counts as courtly love perhaps doesn’t hold true today. For example, the idea that a woman should somehow ‘reward’ a man for his virtue through loving him seems quite absurd and oppressive. I don’t think that raising a person to the status of a god or goddess has also done very much good in the area of relationships. But I think the value of studying these dialogues is in knowing what does break down in the way people think.

Incoherence has a lot of valuable insight in itself. It might even be useful to study it so that it doesn’t happen so often in relationships. But there is something else that is valuable about studying these kinds of circular movements of discourse and dialogue. I think the polarities that dialogues introduce (albeit philosophical) soften the sense that there ever is a completely right or wrong direction to take. Dialogue allows people to step back and even laugh a bit at their sense of certainty. And the philosophic dialogue is often the one that people are reluctant to engage with others, so reading one offers a vicarious way of experiencing the nuances of the beliefs that people cherish. While dialogues often don’t arrive at conclusions, their circularity can have a rich source of value for the person who is willing to take that journey.

I don’t think that I can necessarily apply the knowledge of an historical philosophy of medieval love to modern context. In fact, I do believe that the way people understand love has changed with the times.  However, I think that it is sometimes useful to trace the circular paths of history even if it doesn’t seem to pertain to today’s world. At the very least, learning about a different way of thinking can help me to be less attached to my ‘certainty’ that the current thinking is the ‘best’. And it also gives me clues as to how my present views evolved and to what extent they are based on the cause and conditions of the moment. As I explore other notions of what love is, I become more understanding and tolerant of the different perspectives that arise from this complex subject.  I can be gentler and forgiving if I learn to explore the kinds of inroads that others have taken, including the strengths and limitations of certain ways of thinking.  But the key is not to treat this exploration as though I were trying to replace old certainties with new ones. It is rather to soften the heart by making me less certain of what I think I know. This is already a good step toward compassion, in my opinion.