Pure Motivation

   As I was conferring with a colleague at work today, I had noticed a tiny sticky note stuck to her monitor, which read "If your motivation is pure, you will get the best results." When I see this kind of thing, I reflect on the miracle of being surrounded by Dharma teachings. Indeed, the idea that pure motivation brings about good results seems a very 'on the spot' Dharma teaching, if I have ever experienced one.
    Of course, like most spiritual teachings, this one takes time to understand and embody. And the concept can be a bit mysterious to unpack. For example, what exactly does 'pure motivation' entail, anyway, and how can it be achieved in a fast-paced workplace where profit and measurable achievements seem to be the bottom line? I reflected on a couple of things on the bus ride home. The first is that having this kind of message can be empowering and uplifting, because it reminds me to focus on why the organization for which I work exists in the first place and who it aspires to serve. In the end, most business organizations are designed to serve something or someone, so there is always an altruistic and interconnected aspect to every business. Even when a business has the mandate to ruthlessly pursue profits, it still relies on inter-being for its survival. There isn't a single business out there I know of that pursues productivity and products only for their own sake. All products need to have a purpose which connects the business to others. This being said, the 'pure' motivation could be thought of as none other than the authentic goal of the organization: what it is trying to do for a community or an ecosystem. By going deeply into this kind of motivation, I am bound to be much more motivated to be productive. After all, work no longer becomes about me feeling good. Rather, it is about the beings I am serving. When I take this approach, it is much easier and more motivating to be mindful, because I am no longer just serving my feelings of the moment.
    I notice that most books about the psychology of work rarely delve deeply into the why of work, especially related to the organization. It's as though a person working for Nike has the same purpose as someone working for Sony. Yet, if these organizations are serving completely different purposes, how can it be said that all workers have the same purpose in different companies? Yet, in a sense, every organization has its own soul, and this is the engine that rives the organization toward a specific path. That soul expresses itself in deeply different ways, from the company's vision to the aesthetic look of the office or general work environments.
     If I were to take this to heart, I would say that unless an individual sees and is convinced of the greater purpose of the company or organization for whom she works, it will be hard to have a pure motivation. Instead of taking pride in the company and striving to deliver the  highest quality, such a person only ends up working for her or himself if she cannot find the meaning of the organization as a totality. 
    But, as I am reading these words, I am also sensing the dangers of attaching purity to form, such as the form in which one works or an organization's character. After all, from a certain perspective, no phenomena are either pure or impure. It's only mind's attachment that makes phenomena pure and impure. So what would 'pure motivation' mean then? I think at that point, the pure motivation has nothing to do with individual vs. company, company vs. community, self vs. other...as these are all distinctions created in the mind. Rather, the pure motivation would simply be viewing the phenomena as having no self attached to it: no self-importance, no self-edification, no self-clinging. Okay, but what does this mean? I think it means that no matter what happens at work, I am not clinging  to a self. If there is a criticism or a mistake,  I don't need to congeal it around myself, or foist it onto someone else as an object of blame. Rather, the work just becomes the totality of my moment, and there is just no separating an 'I' from it when I deeply involve myself with work. I take the work to be mind, rather than separating work from individual self. I don't even need to judge me as being pure/impure at that point, since that remains is the doing of work. Once things cease to become markers of success/failure of the self, there is just the ability to act in the moment according to the emerging causes and conditions. At that point, the pure mind is not attached to any notion of purity or impurity, at which point it realizes the natural state of things.

Mystery of Connection

 Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Unexplained Powers of Human Minds  is a very interesting glimpse into how humans and animals are able to pick up the stare of another being that is out of visual range. The book abounds with examples of anecdotal accounts, explaining why and how this is possible, including theories that relate to evolution. According to evolutionary theory, all animals would have been naturally selected to be able to 'sense' a predator's gaze. Without that ability to pick up on another's gaze or look, many animals and humans would have arguably died out. But as I am reading Sheldrake's explanation, I am led to wonder if this is the only explanation for such phenomena. Is the sense of being stared at something that evolved over time, or is it a more basic condition of mind? I believe that from the perspective of Buddhism and Surangama Sutra in particular, it is the mind that sees and not the eyes. Therefore there would not necessarily be a visual organ required to see.
   The two explanations (evolutionary and Buddhist) offer different ways of understanding the same phenomena. The difference, to me, is that evolutionary theory assumes that creatures are born with separate minds. Sheldrake, at one point, remarks:

Over 5 million years a short period in geological time, there was an unprecedented burst of evolutionary activity known as the Cambrian Explosion. The number of basic kinds of animals, or phyla, increased from three to thirty-eight, as revealed most clearly by the fossil deposits in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies. What happened? The biologist Andrew Parker suggests that the key to all this was the evolution of eyes, leading to the birth of active predation. Suddenly there was enormous evolutionary pressure on prey animals to evolve defenses, and on predators to develop new means of capturing prey. Perhaps the sense of being stared at evolved along with eyes themselves. (p.65)

This view is common in scientific circles, and it makes sense if we look on the surface: animals kill other animals, so they must have evolved separate appendages to ward off predators or, conversely, consume prey. But this theory leads me to wonder: if animals behave separately, how are they able to communicate or even to sense other animals? Is there not something shared between all beings that allows them to connect with each other? The other related question is, if animals consume each other (as they do), where does one animal's consciousness begin and end? Can we say that there is one source of individuality in the animals' body, if it is constantly communicating with its environment to ward off dangers. I believe it was the biologist Gregory Bateson who had introduced me to the idea that organisms never live isolated but are in continuous feedback with systems of life. In a similar sense, there needs to be some background holding all this system into a cohesive form.
   Is it possible, on the other hand, that all this sensing and knowing is perhaps an inherent aspect of having sentience, and that it is over-reliance on sense organs which has gotten people away from the sense of connection? I am thinking of the example Master Sheng Yen uses in discussing the illusory nature of seeing, in his book Until We Reach Buddhahood: Lectures on the Surangama Sutra:

You may believe what you see is real, but when you are tired, or if you stare at a certain point for a long period of time, your eyes tire and you may begin to see things. Your eyes see what really isn't there. Ordinary people will admit that what they see under these circumstances is probably unreal. But if they are awake, they take what is seen to be real. The sutra shows that what is seen brings forth innumerable feelings and emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, joy,. Your mind is directly affected by what you see. You may thing what you see is real, but your sight is  really no different from that of a person with tired eyes (p.161-162)

The difference between evolutionary and Buddhist perspectives on seeing are quite striking. While evolution takes seeing as a survival tool that has developed over time, Buddhist perspective takes seeing itself to be an illusory by-product of over-reliance on sense organs and emotions. As long as there is attachment to a sense organ like the eyes, there is no true seeing, because the objects we see are treated as separate, fixed forms, rather than as impermanent impressions of mind.

These two explanations might offer different theories about the sense of being stared at. While evolutionary theory might see it as an 'add on' based on natural selection, I think the Buddhist view would see this sense as something original and inherent to mind that is not depending on senses at all.

Sheldrake, Rupert  (2013) The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Unexplained Powers of Human Minds. Toronto: Park Street Press.

Sheng Yen (2015), Until We Reach Buddhahood: Lectures on the Surangama Sutra Volume 1. Elmhurst New York: Dharma Drum Publications

the sense of urgency

  After the meditation this morning, someone in the group had raised a question: what happens when a thought comes up that seems to require attention? This person observed that at times, when her body and mind were most relaxed, the thoughts of what needed doing would come out stronger than in a non-meditative state. I think her question was coming from the perspective: is it more compassionate and wise to take care of the thought by reflecting on it, or is it important not to engage the thought at all and let go of it?
    I have been thinking since then that most thought carry with them a sense of urgency. It's very rare that my thoughts will say something to the effect of "I'm not that important, you can take me or leave me." In fact, thoughts, like advertisements, seem designed to entice people to attend to them. Perhaps it's the evolutionary function of thoughts that they need to be fancy and enticing for people to pay attention to them and perpetuate their existence. I have even heard of the phrase "meme", coined by Richard Dawkins, to describe the way in which thoughts survive over time by having a kind of mental attraction over us.
    I believe that one of the functions of meditation practice is to give people practice in not always having to engage every thought that comes to mind even if it seems attractive or enticing in some way. Without the practice of non-discursive awareness, how is it possible to discern a thought that needs tending and one which does not? Without practice in non-discursive, meditative practice, we may be continually following endless trains of thoughts, and becoming exhausted in the process. And there is no ability to simply rest the mind from thinking altogether.
   I have also found meditative practice helpful in my research and reading practice. Without meditation as a tool for daily life, I often find myself getting either over-enthused by an idea I read about, or put off altogether: almost a kind of all-or-nothing mentality toward ideas. Rather than seeing an idea as 'just an idea', I might get so emotionally attached to promoting or disputing that idea that I am not able to clearly see its benefits and disadvantages. Through meditation, I have come to see a couple of tendencies. One is that ideas are never permanent: they come and go, like the weather, even when they appear to be good ideas. The other is that clinging to thoughts can create all kinds of vexations, especially when we are engaged in judging them as good or bad. So when I abide in awareness, I can start to see that ideas are neither absolutely good nor bad, but can be used according to the needs of the moment.

Philosophical Fantasies

      When I was a teenager, I came across a book by Clark Ashton Smith called Out of Space and Time Volume 1. It was a used book which was among a pile of others in a comic book store (of all places), even though it was all prose writing with very few graphics. The other 'volumes' of this series seem to have escaped me, but I certainly remember the garish cover: an animate skeleton with a green background and a kind of supine figure floating in the foreground. The book was an anthology of short stories in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, much of which had fascinated me at that time. I seem to have recalled one particular story in Smith's collection: a first person narrative about the experience of being buried alive, and the kinds of feelings that accompany it. Although it was a gruesome story, I afterward reflected: life itself sometimes 'buries' us when we are still alive. Has anyone ever not experienced the emotion of being trapped or engulfed in the everyday? I also started to wonder: when a person is overwhelmed, what do they have that keeps them intact? What prevents them from disappearing altogether in the avalanche of experiences?
    Now that I am much older, I probably don't relate to science fiction with the same fascination that I did as a teenager. For instance, I am not one to imagine other worlds or fantastic beings the way I used to at one time. But when I had the opportunity to re-read Smith's short stories in his collection Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, I have other views about Smith. In one of the stories, "The Last Incantation", Smith writes about a jaded sorcerer of dark magic who is simply bored with his powers and nearing the end of his life. He is such an adept magician that he has subdued most spirits and has power over a great many things, but his heart is dissatisfied. Reflecting on his past, he recalls a girl he had fallen in love with when he was younger, Nylissa. Smith's prose is quite magical here:
  
Then Malygris groped backward to the years of his youth, to the misty, remote, incredible year, where, like an alien star, one memory still burned with unfailing luster---the memory of the girl Nylissa whom he had loved in days ere the lust of unpermitted knowledge and necromantic dominion had ever entered his soul. (p.17)


Nylissa dies of illness at a young age, and Malygris decides to devise a spell that would revive her spirit. With the help of a talking viper, Malygris manages to conjure a spirit who resembles Nylissa in every respect, yet he seems to doubt that it is the 'real' Nylissa:


...somehow, as he gazed and listened, there grew a tiny doubt--a doubt no less absurd than intolerable, but nevertheless insistent: was this altogether the same Nylissa he had known? Was there not some elusive change, too subtle to be named or defined, had time and the grave not taken something away---an innominable something that his magic had not wholly restored?(p.20)


Concluding that the spirit in front of him couldn't possibly be the real Nylissa, Malygris orders this spirit to leave. It is later that the viper reveals to Malygris that the girl was the real Nylissa, and it is Malygris' own youth that has eluded him after all: "no necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless hear that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then." (p.20) The one thing that Malygris has no power to restore is his own emotions, as well as the newness of the experience he had as a youth.


      Some might think that this story is a kind of romance, but I think the story speaks of the effort to try to make something in the past into something new. What is the source of Malygris suffering after all? To me, the story is about impermanence. There is just no way to recover a thought that has already passed, and conditions are constantly changing. Malygris longs for something that symbolizes an eternal youth, when in fact every waking moment is eternal. Why does he get stuck in the past?
      Another interpretation of the story is that it is a meditation on the nature of power. Even when a person has achieved power over the natural world and even over themselves, this power somehow corrupts experience. The more powerful I feel I am, the more I think I can create my own happiness, or control how I feel just by manipulating the conditions around me. But as the story suggests, Malygris has no power over himself at all: even when he can restore the dead, he still cannot feel the same way that he did when he was younger. It seems that the sense of power leads to more discontentment.
     On a deeper level, the things that people think they have power over are actually already passed. Take a scientific discovery as an example. I might think I have mastered a result by setting up the right conditions, but this mastery is a kind of generalization which ignores the complexity of the present moment. Think of technological discoveries as an example. On the short term, technology offers a solution, but in the end, it creates new problems and challenges that were not foreseen in the past. I might think that I have more power, but this power is always about things that have passed, and they don't relate to the present conditions. Technology is only a temporary fix for a set of conditions we might already be familiar with, but it doesn't consider consequences or repercussions that are bound to arise. Much of the climate problems we now experience are the result of recent technologies.
    I wonder, then, does Clark's story suggest that people need to get rid of the past to see things with new eyes of wonder? Or does it mean the opposite--that there is simply no way to recover the sense of wonder once it has passed? I think that both possibilities are there. On the one hand, trying to chase after a memory is futile, because it's an attachment to something that is already gone, and was never permanent to begin with. Most 'phantoms' are just memories of things that weren't meant to be forever. On the other hand, if Malygris had let go of the past and wanting to control himself to be happier, who knows--he might have realized that the sense of wonder is in every moment. There is no simple answer, but Smith's story raises interesting meditations about the nature of memory and how people's sense of being changes over time.


Smith, Clark Ashton (2014), The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. New York: Penguin Books
    

one step at a time

When I walked into my apartment tonight, the first thing I thought was: there is so much to clean, and it's been a while since I have been home to attend to it.And it seems like a while since I had tidied things, so it started to look dismal. I decided to break things down into distinct steps: make the bed first (perhaps the hardest task), followed by the various books scattered here and there on the floor and desk; finally, organizing clothes for cleaning. At first, I felt somewhat heavy, thinking how long it would take to get it done. But over time, I chanted and it settled my mind a bit. And I noticed that when I stopped wanting the time to go by, things did get to be quite a bit easier.
    I begin to feel that the root of feeling overwhelmed is not about having time vs. not having enough time, or being busy vs. not being busy. I have come to feel that even when there is much to do, the mental attitude can be something like "one thing at a time." There is only one thing I need to pick up and put away in this moment, so it doesn't benefit me to contemplate each and every future moment. To do so is bound to make anyone feel overwhelmed or stressed. It's almost like imagining how much food I am going to eat over the next week or so, and losing my appetite just trying to contemplate all the quantities of food. Is there any sense in contemplating things in this way? Not really, unless I want to be turned off food or any activity altogether.
    The same thing can apply to reading. It has often been my habit as a student to have several books  being read in parallel, and I would pick and choose my reading based on necessity or perhaps general mood. But if I were to contemplate how many books I need to finish in a certain stretch of time, I completely lose my enjoyment of the books. Not only do I stop enjoying the books, but I also lose the sense of meaning from these books. It reminds me of how, when I was in elementary school, the librarian would try to motivate students to read by having them write down all the books they have read in a month. After a certain number, students get special prizes--a trip to Acapulco, or something like that. The librarian was smart in the sense that she was tapping into students' love of extrinsic rewards. But in another sense, trying to read for quantity rather than meaning is the fastest way to turn people off reading altogether! It becomes a chore of sorts, or even a contest, where we compete even with ourselves to see how many 'things' we can finish in a stretch of time. The problem here is that we lose the ability to simply be with anything, because we are biting off way more than we can chew.
    Of course, I don't think this is a simple solution that works in all cases. I just read something the other day that hit home to me: if we want to reduce how much we clean, we might want to reduce how much we buy in the first place. I found in my own experience that the fewer things I own, the easier it is to maintain my lifestyle and life in general. The same kind of thing applies to the mind..  If my mind is loaded with concepts, theories, philosophies and so on, it can get cluttered very quickly. And if I do a quick check of what I am thinking, I will find that many things are idle curiosities which come and go. They lack solidity, so why should I be entangled in these thoughts and theories?  I am trying to say, less is better, and it's a good reminder for me to try to be simpler in lifestyle when my mental habits become complicated. Quite simply, people need far less than they think they need to be satisfied and to function in the social world. 

Through a Glass Darkly

 This morning while on the bus to work, I was reading a passage from Wen Haiming's fine introduction, Chinese Philosophy, where he was talking about Guo Xiang's discussion on being and non-being (p.81). Guo Xiang notes a delicate balance between the notions of 'being' and 'non-being'. While things and people do have these peculiar characteristics which give them a certain 'isolation' form each other, they also interact in novel ways all the time. Essentially, however, Guo Xiang sees all things as having a certain amount of solitude from each other, and spontaneously arise from their own nature. Hence, Haiming remarks:

Existentially, the beings of living reality are left in seclusion, and people  are forced to confront a transforming world of nothingness. Guo Xiang portrays the myriad things as changing both naturally and independently, but he does not extrapolate in regard to the feeling one would hold toward the world. (p.82)

What does it mean that beings are in relative seclusion? What I think it means is that beings come into this world with destinies that are not immediate or apparent in our surroundings. One particular view in education, for instance, that is popular these days is that children are blank slates who are waiting to be filled with new information. Any simple observation of children would show that they are very different and possess unique talents, characteristics and challenges. This isn't to say that children cannot change or don't change (they do, in fact), but I think GuoXiang's philosophy suggests or hints toward the mysterious process of coming to unfold our true selves. To be 'left in seclusion' is somewhat like saying: each person has this unique destiny that nobody else can fill.
    Guo Xiang''s notion of destiny somewhat falls in line with the Buddhist notion of cause and condition. This notion does not state that sentient beings are bound to one way of being, but, rather, destiny is constantly in a state of flux or change. This is why Guo Xiang characterizes destiny as 'contingent' and subject to constant change through new encounters. In a sense, this also accounts for why he is suggesting that beings develop in 'solitude'. If I am always encountering completely new or unfamiliar situations that are not subject to reasoning or explanation, I am in essence alone to understand the situation. There is never a point in time where I fully understand the true 'reasons' for things, because encounters are contingent (accidental somewhat) and subject to spontaneous and new creation.
        I think this in essence is similar to Buddhist teachings, where we accept the previous conditions but are also capable of seeing that new conditions are continually being created. Buddhists do not need to feel that their karma from the past binds them to being the same way over and over again into the future. Rather, because things are subject to constant interaction and change, there is never a full point of resolution for any being. Guo Xiang's philosophy also reminds me of Sartre, who was also experimenting with the ideas of freedom (spontaneity) and contingency. For both philosophers, the experience of being cannot be reproduced or replicated in any way--hence, its solitude. Even choices cannot be replicated or systematized, since consciousness is always the result of spontaneous encounter that is not hardwired into the brain or genes.

Haiming, Wen, (2010)  Chinese Philosophy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Sense of Priorities

    Are priorities carved in stone? I found that recently, in my work, I am noticing how priorities aren't so easily kept in place. There are times when I have a list of things I need to do, only to later find that many of these priorities shift as a new project comes along, or a new enthusiasm. And I found that it does take some wisdom to know when to keep awareness on a priority and when to accommodate other situations that emerge. Pema Chodron describes, in a similar manner, the attitude one takes toward meditation when she describes the level of attention needed to watch the breath: "it's only twenty-five percent awareness on the out-breath. The other awareness is less specific; it's simply that you are alive in this room with all the different things that are occurring here." (p.21)
     I start to realize that meditation practice is similar to keeping priorities, and vice versa. Priorities are not carved in stone 'musts' but are more like reminders which bring the mind into the present situation. For instance, when I rank the things I need to do at work according to level of urgency, timing, practicality, etc,. this action prompts me to be attentive to what I am doing and to arrange my day. But if I am suddenly pulled away from these priorities to do something else, I needn't feel 'bound' to my priorities  or overly attached to them. After all, priorities are 'maps' and not the territory, and if I am too attached to them, I will end up not learning from new opportunities or experiences.
    I think a similar principle might apply with meditation practice. If I am overly determined to stay with  the method itself and not see the unfolding experience or process as well, I am not aware of what the mind is doing in those in between moments when not engaged in the meditation. It is as though I am only interested in the particular method itself, and I lack a sense of tenderness for my whole being in the process. But the problem here is that I become blind to my whole experiences, whereas the methods of practice are only designed to reveal all these experiences, without discriminating them. So, for instance, if I take the approach that 'only thoughts of the method are acceptable', I am subtly rejecting the true workings of the mind. This too becomes attachment. A middle approach is to see the method as a tool to be present and cultivate equanimity toward all states of mind and body, rather than being fixated on method.
   There are also times when no matter how determined I am in my practice, I am simply unable to stay with the method of practice, most likely due to pain. In those moments, I recommend treating the pain itself as a kind of question...a body question that is similar to the question generated by the mind. By being curious about the question of body pain, I suspend my judgment about it and am able to better tolerate or create spaces for it, rather than trying to avoid it altogether.

Chodron, Pema ( 2010) The Wisdom of No Escape.. Boston: Shambhala