Origins of Ignorance

  In the book From Mindfulness to Insight, Rob Nairn, Choden and Heather Regan-Addis notes how Ignorance "gives rise to the assumption that each of us is a solid, independent entity acting with free will in a world of things and people that are separate from us because they are solid and independent too" (p.110). This is so hard to analyze in a sense, because we are so used to thinking of ourselves as "solid" and somehow "separate" from what's around us. For example, we are in the habit of believing that there is an "I" with my own thoughts, feelings, impressions etc. and this distinguishes me from the world. It also gives rise to a sense of greed: thinking that things should be a certain way comes from the illusory notion of a grasping self that reaches out to the external environment and actively shapes it to one's desires. What happens when, instead of identifying with the sense of solidity, I were able to take a step back and see that the entire process of thought itself is just a constructed process that has no end point in the self? This is what the authors above invite us to explore.

   The problem of course is that once we start interacting with others, we have already fallen into the delusion of self-others, whether it's a good delusion (a good dream) or a bad delusion (a nightmare). There is already a solid sense of I that takes ownership or possession of its own thoughts and does not consider the things around it as also one's own mind. But the challenge is to take responsibility for all that happens, in the sense that all is a reflection of one's own mind. How this is done takes a lot of practice. It requires being able to see that all of this is your mind--and nothing is excluded or in the foreground that we can call a self.

Simple Joys of Being

  I contemplate how, even though meditation is done in exactly the same way and at the same time or location, I seem to experience something different each and every time. I have never been bored of meditation, particularly because it involves the deepest form of mind-based inquiry, in which I have tried to explore what emptiness means, how all is experienced as empty, and what is mind or self. Why, then, can we not extend the wonders and joy associated with meditation to daily life? I would like to explore a few reasons here.

   First and foremost is the habitual way we conceptualize our day to day life and efforts. As soon as I engage in an activity that appears even remotely familiar to me, but which has been performed several times before, these habitual concepts start to kick in. Either I go into autopilot, or I subconsciously internalize the idea that "this has been done before", and so I start classifying the experience as something with little or no novelty value left inside of its core. Rather than choosing to let go of those filters and engage the present moment with a sense of adventure, I am using the conceptual mind to imagine that this moment has passed or has been created before.

   Secondly (and this may sound left of center), there's the fear of death. When I am afraid of my life being either incomplete or a "total waste of time", I am comparing my present experience with something I deem as more valuable or "worth my time". This has the effect of dividing and dulling the mind, as opposed to a mind that views this moment as perfectly formed and deserving of the utmost welcome. At the heart of this constant desire to compare one experience to another to rank its overall value or worth is a deep fear of identity annihilation. I truly feel that when we are calculating what we should be doing, we are identifying ourselves with a body which is destined in the end to be extinguished. In this way, we experience great suffering, the antidote of which is to rediscover the simple freshness of being in the present.

  Thirdly, and related to the second, is a kind of self-consciousness. When I am always reflecting on who I should be (some idealized picture in my mind), I fail to accept who I truly am in this very moment, and this creates difficulties for me and those around me. When I am not carrying this standard of how I should be before me at all times, I become more open to seeing both myself and the things around me for what they are and how they feel to me. When I am not fighting these ordinary feelings and experiences, I become a kind of phenomenologist of life: curious about what is happening in the embodied present, as opposed to chasing after abstractions or moral shoulds.

From Conflict to Connection

  There is something about the ability--the experience, should I say--of allowing something unpleasant to appear in the mind that leads from a sense of discontinuity to one of connection. This "allowing the unpleasant" seems to come from a courage of recognizing that present moment "goes on being" even when we have encountered a personal setback or even a feeling of failure. When I morally "condemn" myself, saying that "I should not be this way", I subtly split myself up into two parts--accuser and accused-- and these two parts become at war with each other. But this is also a subtle defense: by making myself both the condemner and the condemned, I am creating a kind of false division. In fact I am both condemner and the condemned, yet neither, because neither exists as a distinct entity.

   The alternative is to simply experience both the shame and the desire to do better as a single whole: they both exist inside of me. Even the resistance to pain exists within me, and is inseparable from me. Knowing that present moment does not fall victim to the onslaught of moral condemnation, I have the courage to face pain, accept it, and transform it into future actions. And I no longer side with either the condemned or the condemner. They are just like the waves in a vast ocean of being. But to really and truly live this way seems to take an incredible amount of courage.

Compassion : A Way of Seeing?

    On my way home from the Buddhist class today, I was thinking about what "compassion" feels or looks like to me. I sometimes find it difficult to relate to compassion, so I have been reflecting on what it means to be compassionate, exactly. The dictionary definition of compassion is the desire to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. But, in order to truly cultivate compassion, we need to be clear within our hearts that we are suffering, as well as just what we are suffering from. So I think that compassion and wisdom go hand in hand. Without wisdom, there is no real grounds for compassion, since one could argue that we could theoretically end suffering just by having more things, more money and the like. On the other hand, a wisdom lacking in compassion might turn out to be very dry and abstract. It does not have the softness or lightness of being that could accommodate the needs of sentient beings.

    Firstly, I think compassion needs to be gentle. It cannot have hard boundaries around it that are governed by absolute rules, likes or dislikes. This is because a compassionate mentality does not reject a situation as unworkable. It tries to see each difficulty as an opportunity for people to let go of their attachments and connect to a deeper reality. Saying that something is "awful" (to use Albert Ellis's REBT term) or to "castastrophize" about the future, is clearly not compassionate, because it adds misery to difficulties. Making grand statements about how terrible and dark a situation is would be like dropping a large brick on one's foot! It really doesn't help to think in absolutistic ways.

   Secondly, I think compassion needs to be global. It can't just be about the people I happen to "like" or who are similar to me. There has to be some way that all beings fall into the compassionate purview, simply by virtue of how deeply sentient beings' lives are pervaded by suffering. If we visualize even the most abrasive person who causes the most evil and suffering imaginable, we also need to realize the pain that person is in to wreak such havoc, as well as the suffering they continue to create for themselves. There needs to be a broad universality around compassion; it needs to unconditionally envelop all being.

    Thirdly, compassion is unconditional. It does not evaluate one life as somehow more worthy of living than another. Here, I think there needs to be a deep appreciation for life, similar to what Albert Schweiter (another Albert!) refers to as "reverence for life". Do we extend unconditional acceptance to ourselves? I would have to say I don't. This is because I will secretly condemn myself for not doing certain things with a certain kind of intensity, and will even berate myself for not being perfect at something--both of which are attitudes lacking in compassion.

    That all being said, I don't think it is easy for me to cultivate compassion. An anxious person in particular is continually worried about a future that often doesn't happen to come to fruition, yet the anxiety clouds the positive that is in each experience.  Being unconditionally accepting of ourselves and others takes a lot of courage, particularly the courage to break out of patterns of self-criticism---thinking we constantly need to struggle to prove ourselves to the world rather than allow everything to be the way it is, including the painful moments of life, but with an attitude of softness, knowing it's illusion and it's not who we truly are inside. Thus, compassion is a very long and difficult journey which requires a small light of warmth to spark from within and to gradually grow over time.

The "Good" vs "Emptiness"

 One of my favorite essay collections has to be Iris Murdoch's Existentialists and Mystics. I have been taking some notes on this fascinating anthology of some of Murdoch's best essays and lectures. Murdoch is both a critic of 20th Century philosophy as well as a promoter of a somewhat Platonic sense of the Good. She critiques certain strands of modern philosophy as being too focused on the will and "free choice", as opposed to cultivating the proper attention needed to make meaningful choices that are based on clear evaluations of what truly exists. Although Murdoch does not precisely define the Good (any more than, say, Plato does), I find myself making parallels between her notion of the Good and the Buddhist notion of Sunyata, or emptiness. Here are the parallels that I draw between both concepts.

1) Both concepts involve a reality that is independent of "self" or self grasping. Both emptiness and "The Good" are independent of our wants, desires, self-centered tendencies. 

2) Both concepts require contemplation or a disciplined activity of the mind to be fully known or revealed. Murdoch suggests that contemplation of nature, art, or any other discipline such as academic subjects or crafts, can take us effectively out of ourselves and into a realm where values matter. A tradesperson definitely can tell the difference between a quality furniture and furniture that is sloppily made. By analogy, most people have an instinctive sense of values that are conducive to the good. Murdoch also introduces Simone Weil's concept of "attention" to denote a patient and diligent attitude where we humble ourselves before a subject matter--waiting for it to disclose itself rather than trying to impose our prejudices or quick judgments on the thing to be studied. Of course, emptiness is similarly something that requires contemplative awareness to be deeply known or fathomed.

3) Both concepts entail a sense of contingency. Contrary to the human impulse to try to systematize or contain the truth in a single philosophy or work of art. both "the Good" and "emptiness" defy all expectation. This is simply because things operate from endless changing factors, and are constituted by factors that are not contained within neat or predictable concepts. Emptiness is an idea that takes us beyond conceptualization, because it suggests a "thusness" that cannot be controlled, predicted or fully shaped or known by the intellect.

There a lot of other things to say about the parallels between Murdoch and the Buddhist concept of emptiness as I understand it. However, I do want to add that from what I understand of Chan and Zen Buddhism, what we think of as Good and Bad are not absolutes but necessarily co-exist. This is one thing that I don't think Murdoch's philosophy goes into very much, but I am very fond of Thich Nhat Hanh's frequently cited notion of the "lotus" and the "mud", which suggests that all things inter-are. We can't have a beautiful lotus without the ugly and smelly mud, and nor can we have flowers without filth or garbage to fertilize them. 

As much as Murdoch wants to delineate a clear and fixed notion of Good, there is something in what I have read from Buddhism and Taoism in particular that tells me that both good and bad are in the same boat. If something is sinking the boat, good also suffers, and so we had might as well view both good and bad with equal parts care and consideration, knowing that they are not fixed, unchanging entities. They co-exist. A sloppy craftsman sometimes needs to be sloppy before they can become good, since the sloppiness is the grounds through which we practice perfecting our craft. This doesn't necessarily negate the ideal of perfection that the craftsman might aim for, but it suggests that we can't condemn the bad as imperfect or flawed if, in the end, it contributes to the craft. 

Being able to see the good intention in something or someone (and value it) is one expedient way of reminding a person that their actions are a form of light struggling to find itself, even when the behavior seems ostensibly to be destructive. Destructive relative to what? Even the worst forms of destruction can be the grounds for some deep learning or reconstruction. On the other hand, if we try to cut up the world into good and bad, we are not respecting that an organic process is happening and unfolding, often through some dialectic struggle of sorts. Knowing this and acting upon it does not guarantee goodness, but I believe that thinking this way makes goodness more likely, because it does not try to divide the world into unsolvable opposites. And also, thinking this way can keep one's spirits hopeful even in times of darkness and struggle.

Murdoch, Iris (1997). Existentialists and Mystics. Penguin Books

The Ultimate Generosity

  In Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go, Thich Nhat Hanh remarks, "[P]ractice is not hard labor. When we work too hard at anything, whether it is business or enlightenment, then we can't stop in order to see all the wonders of life inside and around us" (p.101). Does this mean that we should not work hard at all, and not have any thoughts? I think, to the contrary, that when there is truly nothing to attain, then we may behave like people with infinite wealth: because we have nothing to hold onto and nothing to lose, there is no reason not to give to others. However, Thay cautions: don't work too hard at anything. I certainly like this approach, since I am naturally a lazy bum!

  On a serious note, I really think that from this perspective, generosity needs to come from a feeling that we have enough to give, not that we are somehow obligated to do so. This is a tricky point, since feeling obligated can lead to resentment, as we feel we are being forced to give by a deity or a commandment. When we change the notion of commandment to preferences (as Albert Ellis brilliantly did in his books), then it's easier to negotiate preferences without fostering unnecessary guilt or resentment.

 To go back to Thay's point, when there is nothing to attain and no attainment, people might conclude that this takes away the motivation to give. To the contrary, however, I think that full presence in itself is the ultimate generosity. It does not make any demands, leads to no feelings of resentment, etc. precisely because it is totally in the moment with nothing held back. A person who feels gifted by the present is no longer making demands on the world, and feels confident that who they are is precisely what they are giving in the moment. From this perspective, there is no fear or resentment. There is simply this continuum of being that is committed to weathering life's ups and down's without any craving for more or rejection of what is actually emerging. This "presence" is precisely what is needed, and it's thus the perfect gift.

Kaleidoscope Visions

 In the book, Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go, Thich Nhat Hanh's commentary of Master Linji, we read the following words:

...if the wave knows how to take refuge in water, if it knows to believe in the water, then the wave loses all of its fears, sadness, and jealousy. If we take refuge in our true nature then we aren't afraid anymore of gaining, of losing, of having, of not having, of living, of dying, of being, and nonbeing (p.99)

Now what does this mean? If I understand correctly, it means that we have to be very mindful of when our practices are nothing but a wave running around trying to find something that it already inevitably is. When we are feeling miserable and unhappy or not at peace with ourselves, chances are that we are chasing after and identifying with the phenomena, rather than going back to our true nature which is the mind itself. And it can be wonderful to realize that our misery is not a sign of ourselves being in the wrong in some way, but rather that we have simply missed the mark and overdid something that does not require doing at all.

The other day, I was browsing in a toy store (actually looking for headphones, to be precise), when I came across a toy I used to have as a child called the kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope is a deceptively simply toy consisting of small pieces of rock or paper, inside a glass tube with a series of mirrors that gives the image of symmetrical transformations each time the tube is turned by the viewer. The kaleidoscope, for me, represents the illusory world of appearances. For one, it embodies the mental distortions that come from reflecting surfaces--which suggests how we misrepresent our world through concepts, habits, and conditioning. The second illusory aspect is the sense of time: colored pieces of paper have a habit of shifting over time, especially when they are continually being turned in a kaleidoscope. This, for me, represents the delusion of "permanence"--believing that something will remain when in fact we are always in a state of flux.

If we are able to behold appearances using the analogy of the kaleidoscope, we will see that all our representations fail to grasp or embody the full reality of change and emptiness. Then we can fully relax and let go of all representations of self and other, time and space, wave and ocean. If our practices don't take us to this continued realization, then they become more entrenched habits and delusions. That is why we must examine whether our practice feels like a burden, or whether it is a lightening and softening process.

Thich Nhat Hanh, (2007). Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go. Parallax Press.