On Trying To Be Buddhist

On Retreat - Oh Yeah

It's been four months since my last entry - a sign of something or other.  Age, lethargy, other interests, I don't know. In any case, right now I'm on retreat - so of course it's the time to start writing again.

This retreat began last Sunday, and I knew it would not be easy.  However, I expected the difficulties to be more in the area of discipline and inner-child-revolt.  Instead, they've been physical - even though I'm using a chair, and have been taking time to rest in the afternoons.  Today I just gave up for the first two sessions. 

I find meditation has a rather stimulating effect on my creative urges, including blog entries, and other forms of writing.  The quiet of meditation (even the rather busy Vajrayana type) seems to work like taking the cap off a bottle of soda.  There is an up-rush of all the things that ordinary mental activity, ordinary perception, have been keeping down.  And not giving this material any attention seems just to intensify the process.  Then when the session is over, the cap goes back on the bottle, the effervescence ends, and finally, being in a position to write, or reflect on fresh insights, I find they're fading very quickly.  Several topics, however, have left a strong enough impression for me to note them, and plan to say more -

Being old - I've accumulated enough years for it to be official - and I'm beginning to feel it.

How very long it has taken me to begin to understand Buddhism.

The real choice - which reality do I want to be in?  How does this relate to renunciation? 

More on these very soon - tomorrow?

Speculation

The contents of the mind are a torrent of fragments - images, thoughts, concepts, etc.  Through learning and discipline, we make something coherent out of all this - we impose order.  So the world we perceive is the reduction of perceptions to something coherent and manageable.  Is it possible that dreaming is just one of the mental states that occurs when we relax this normal discipline?  Is dreaming necessary, not for its content, but for its base state - rest?  That doesn't mean the content is without meaning - but it is a different perspective.

Being Angry - Part 2

The metaphor that ended my last entry has continued to resonate - the idea of old anger being like an oil field that provides fuel to what otherwise might be just a brief spark or a small flare-up.  I do know I have unreleased anger - and not without reason.  However, it's a danger - it can create an intense conflagration out of every small flame.  Ruminating on this I really see what a simple and clean thing anger in itself might be - and how much of what I often feel is not actually related to the present process but has old roots, and, more important, is almost entirely mine.  

I suspect there's a sort of dull and nearly imperceptible pain arising from such a reservoir of feeling, and that's why when someone or something gets me angry, there is a secret pleasure in releasing it.  In turn, this hooks me into holding on to the anger; it gives me an incentive to avoid resolution of any sort.  I want to stay angry.  I want to continue finding grounds for it.  It makes me want to blame others, and not let anyone off the hook.   

What do I do to get rid of this? 

Being Angry

I was up late last night and was watching TV in a rather disinterested way.  Then I came upon a Discovery Channel documentary on climbing Everest.  It was part of a second series, the first having covered a group of climbers the previous year.  There were several men who had climbed both years, and one of them was pretty spectacularly unintelligent.  In the previous series he'd gotten a lot of 'screen time' both because he'd been slightly injured, and so there was the drama of whether or not he could make the next stage, the summit, etc, and also because he tended to ignore the climb leader's instructions, putting both himself and others at severe risk.  So here he was again - and here was the same pig-headed behavior.  It was easy to be angry at his disregard for everyone's safety.  And I kept watching - held, I began to see, by the pleasure of my anger.  I really wanted to see him get what he deserved.  What reservoir of ill-feeling do I have stored up that pushes in this way for release?  A sort of emotional fossil-fuel that is available to power all sorts of self-righteousness. 

Ignorance

Ignorance is one of the major obstacles that we encounter, according to Buddhist teaching.  The 'three poisons' as they are called, that form the very center of the endless round of life and death, are lust, hatred, and ignorance.  And usually ignorance is seen as lack of knowledge, perception, or even intelligence. It appears to be a rather passive fault - at worst, wrong views, misunderstanding, quite unlike the active qualities of desire and hatred. 

A long time ago one of my dearest friends pointed out to me that one can also see ignorance - in some instances at least - as rooted in actively ignoring things.  There is an element of choice in such ignorance, not the simple dice-toss of one's genes, or bad luck in birthplace, parents, personal qualities.  Choosing not to be aware is the worst form of this poison.  The subtlety of it makes it even more powerful.  It's hard not to notice burning desire, or firece hatred - but that soft turning away that is the first step into not-knowing happens so easily, seems so innocent that it is doubly dangerous. 

What View?

Awhile back I reconfigured my TV to reflect recent channel changes.  In the process I discovered that I had access to a few channels that I'd forgotten about, including EWTN (the Catholic channel).  So, late that same night I found myself watching an interview with a nun who had been, in her youth, very interested in eastern religion.  She was telling her life-story which, at least for this interview, was one of coming home to her true faith.  It was a beautiful story, in its own way, but I was left feeling somehow unhappy, and I couldn't quite figure why.  Since then I've watched EWTN a few more times and I think I have a handle on what's causing my discomfort (which persists.)  It's the simple business of their having only one right view. 

I should immediately note that not all Christians, or Catholics, express this view.  Moreover, this nun was sharing within her own family so to speak, and not addressing people of different faiths.  So - I have no idea what she would say to me were we to meet and talk.

The fact is that I too feel that I have arrived, after searching, at the very best possible spiritual place.  I deeply appreciate the beliefs of others - and rejoice in them.  But still - to my mind, what I believe is, as it were, the most true.  So is there any difference between my position and that of the nun I saw on EWTN?  Would I make others as uncomfortable as she made me?  Would there be anything wrong with that?  Anything right with it?  I don't know - but it doesn't feel ok.  How does this relate to pure view?

Merton's Way of Life

I just stumbled across an entry I wrote in another section of this blog back in 2004.  It was written in response to a friend's comment that she found Merton's writing (as summarized in The Intimate Merton) quite self-absorbed. 

In order to respond, I went back through some of his writing.  It seems that in both his public writings and in his journals, Merton is actually quite reticent about his innermost life.  My own reaction to the later volumes of the journal when I first read them years ago, was to wonder where all his youthful fervor had gone, and where his "spirituality" was.  The fact is, he keeps that substantially to himself - even while appearing to speak of his deepest experiences and feelings.  He was, after all, writing to be read by others, even though he speaks of wanting a place to write where he can say everything.  There is only one place I know of where the screen falls for a moment - and it is not in his journals but in his correspondence. 

Michael Mott in The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton quotes from a letter Merton wrote in 1966 to a Sufi mystic with whom he had corresponded for a number of years, and who had evidently asked what his daily life and meditation were like.  It is worth quoting in full:

I go to bed about 7:30 at night and rise about 2:30 in the morning.  On rising I say part of the canonical office, consisting of the psalms, lessons, etc.  Then I take an hour or an hour and a quarter for meditation.  I follow this with Bible reading, and then make some tea or coffee…with perhaps a piece of fruit or some honey.  With breakfast I begin reading and continue reading and studying until about sunrise.  Now the sun rises very late, in summer it rises earlier, so this period of study varies but it is on the average about two hours.

At sunrise I say another office of psalms, etc., then begin my manual work, which includes sweeping, cleaning, cutting wood, and other necessary jobs.  This finishes about nine o'clock, at which time I say another office of psalms.  If I have time I may write a few letters, usually short (today is Sunday and I have more time).  After this I go down to the monastery to say Mass, as I am not yet permitted to offer Mass in the hermitage.  Saying Mass requires an altar, an acolyte who serves the Mass, special vestments, candles, and so on.  It is in a way better to have all this at the monastery.  It would be hard to care for so many things and keep them clean at the hermitage.  After Mass I take one cooked meal in the monastery.  Then I return immediately to the hermitage, usually without seeing or speaking to anyone except the ones I happen to meet as I go from place to place (these I do not ordinarily speak to as we have a rule of strict silence.)  (When I speak it is to the Abbot, whom I see once a week, or to someone in a position of authority, about necessary business.)

On returning to the hermitage I do some light reading, and then say another office, about one o'clock.  This is followed by another hour or more of meditation.  On feast days I can take an hour and a half or two hours for this afternoon meditation.  Then I work at my writing.  Usually I do not have more than an hour and a half or two hours at most for this each day.  Following that, it being now late afternoon (about four) I say another office of psalms, and prepare for myself a light supper.  I keep down to a minimum of cooking, usually only tea or soup, and make a sandwich of some sort. Thus I have only a minimum of dishes to wash.  After supper I have another hour or more of meditation, after which I go to bed.

This in itself is evidence of a deep interior life - but the next part makes it explicit. 

Mott notes at this point that Merton "had always felt it was wrong to discuss his own religious practices in any detail … He had been reserved on this subject even in his private writing."  However, in writing to this friend he made an exception.  Merton went on:

Now you ask about my method of meditation.  Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer.  It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love.  That is to say that it is centered on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God.  One might say this gives my meditation the character described by the Prophet as 'being before God as if you saw Him.'  Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind this would be a kind of idolatry.  On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and realizing Him as all.  My prayer tends very much to what you call fana.  There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God.  My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence.  If I am still present 'myself' this I recognize as an obstacle.  If He wills He can then make the Nothingness into a total clarity.  If He does not will, then the Nothingness actually seems to itself be an object and remains an obstacle.  Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation.  It is not 'thinking about' anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible.  Which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is Invisible. 

I do not ordinarily write about such things and ask you therefore to be discreet about it.  But I write this as a testimony of confidence and friendship. [Seven Mountains, pp. 432-433]

Mind and Reality

Several weeks ago, shortly after writing My Mind on Tape Delay, I came across a statement by Jeffrey Grupp, a lecturer in English and Philosophy at Purdue University.  He states that nirvana is "the direct experience of quantum reality."  That's a mouthful.  Or mind-full, if you'd rather.  It recalls something the great Longchenpa said about people who have attained the highest levels of realization - that, among other powers, such a person  "can perceive the very atoms of [his] body."  That electrified me when I first read it because it was clear that Longchenpa was speaking literally.  Of course "atoms" in his Tibetan does not mean precisely what the word would mean to a 20th century physicist - but close enough.

Right away I went looking on the internet to see what else Grupp might be saying.  YouTube has one of his lectures (in eight parts) - so far I've listened through the fourth.  (The statement above comes from part 1.)  So - I'm just beginning to explore these ideas.....

My Mind on Tape Delay

In the tradition I follow, we speak of three times, or sometimes four times.  The three are past, present, and future.  And the fourth is simply that which is not entangled with any of the three times -  that is, non-dual, enlightened mind.  As for unenlightened mind and linear time, I've always thought of the three times as similar to each other - just different segments of the time continuum.  But it dawned on me the other day that in fact, neither the past nor the future exist at all.  They are only memories and plans - concepts, thoughts in my mind now.  The present is all there really is - but grasping that present, capturing it, considering it, that actually doesn't quite work either.  By the time I have anything clearly in mind, it is gone - what I now have is part of the past, really; it's not the true present, fresh and immediate.  All my thoughts and conceptualization may seem like the present, and have an apparent present as their object - but by the time they are clear in my mind, they are also no longer really present - all of reality is on tape delay.  As I reflect on it, I never never actually get what is in the present.  I am just mucking about in a museum full of stuff from the past.  The 'real' present is all that is, the fourth time is the only time - yet not time at all, just ....

Patterns

An odd thing tonight in meditation - I was just sitting, my eyes pretty much fixed on the edge of the rug a few feet beyond my table.  The rug is an oriental one, and after awhile, part of the design coalesced into a rabbit's face looking straight at me.  It wasn't particularly realistic - but it was clear.  Of course there really was no rabbit-face in the rug's design - but my mind finds patterns.  This is something I've ruminated on before, but tonight another aspect of the whole dynamic struck me.  I myself am a found pattern - a certain imposed order that does not necessarily map to any underlying reality, just as the rabbit-face was only in my mind, or thoughts - not in the rug.  There are elaborate teachings in Buddhism that boil down to just this - all the material about the five skandas, for example.  What is real is something other than the rabbit that seems to look out from the rug.