On Trying To Be Buddhist

When I'm Gone

I'm listening to some rather sad, elegiac music - and in the way music does for me, it creates images.  This piece gives me a sense of my world going on after I have passed.  Just for this moment, it is profoundly poignant.  The world without me.

A year or so ago I had a similar experience as I meditated.  I was looking at my shrine, particularly the statue of Guru Rinpoche, which, having been blessed by my teacher and accompanying me for decades, is very precious to me.  I had a piercing image of this statue and all my religious things in someone else's possession - perhaps even a stranger.  Just as I have acquired things once cherished by others, so what is most dear to me will pass to family or friends, or strangers at some point.  These things will continue; I will not. 

Though I believe in the Buddhist tenet of rebirth, according to which I will be around in some form, unless I get enlightened rather soon, it will not be with any awareness of continuity.  All I have learned will be forgotten - the results of all my good efforts deferred to some unknown future....all my bad efforts like little scraggly chickens coming home to roost.

Reflections on Aging - 4 - I Give Up

I give up.

Last night I watched Digital_Nation, Life on the Virtual Frontier on my local PBS station.  The program was described as "An exploration of how the Internet and digital technology are changing the way people work, learn and interact."  After watching it - in itself a wonderful example of the technology it described - I just wanted to throw in the towel.  I can not keep up with new technology.  On one level, I don't need to keep up - a large part of it is irrelevant to my life.  I have no need to text anyone; I find the blather of Facebook mostly irritating; I don't need a Blackberry or Ipod to keep me up-to-date wherever I go - because I rarely go anywhere.  I'm just right here.

Still - all this new stuff, and the profoundly creative ways people are inventing to use it (Twitter is a wonderful example of this) have a great appeal, even if I don't need them.  This reminds me of times in my childhood when I longed for toys that one way or another I could not use.  Anyhow, long story short (as the current slang has it) - I don't need these things, so I don't have them, and thus I do not learn about them.  And slowly, this makes me more and more out of date.  Last night, I gave up.

And what is the effect of giving up?  Right now I have a sense of looking on at some activity or play that is becoming less and less comprehensible.  Part of me longs to try to keep up - for many reasons.  And part of me is sure that there is a better use of my time.   The task is to find it, and see what I may learn.

Aging and Memorization - 3

I've always been drawn by the idea of memorizing things.  In my childhood I learned  the whole of "Jabberwocky," among other things, pretty much spontaneously.  When I was in my early twenties and a new convert to Catholicism, I got caught up by the idea of memorizing the Bible - in Greek no less.  Part of my motivation was that if the Russians conquered us and forbade any sort of religion or worship, I would have my own memory to depend on to preserve scripture.  (Dear heaven, how naive - I'm embarrassed.)  Anyhow, I only got as far as the first two lines of the Gospel of John.  But I still remember them - in Greek.  A year or so later, after moving to New York, I put a bit of effort into memorizing some Shakespeare sonnets.  From my years of practice in the Tibetan Buddhist group I belonged to I have many verses of prayers in Tibetan. But this current project, to memorize The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena is different. 

It's no longer a question of simply memorizing, but of coming to understand this text and making it part of my life through this intense process.  In addition, there is still my initial intention to test out whether this would improve my memory, focus, and concentration over-all, but that is really tangential.

It was all going quite slowly through September, but in October there's been a small shift.  Now I can recall and recite the first three verses very clearly and simply - there is no feeling of trying to remember the next word or phrase - I know them.  And the meaning continues to expand.  When I return to Longchenpa's commentary, it makes more sense to me; several questions that have puzzled me for years are resolved by what these verses say.     

And, a bonus, I do feel as though I'm remembering other things more easily - very ordinary things like where I put my car keys, old memories, and the details of recent conversations.  I hope this gets stronger and is not just an illusion.

Aging and Memorization - 2

Now it's mid-September and I still have only memorized four verses of The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena.  I have continued to work on it, but find that for the most part, I'm just maintaining what I've already got.  The next verse is a long and complex one - I have yet to really begin to work on it. 

Toward the end of August, I began to despair of really getting much further and of my ability to memorize anything at all.  However - as I speculated in my previous post, it might be that the difficulty of the text is the root of my difficulty in memorizing it.  To test this, I first tried one verse from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, (FitzGerald translation.)  I got it in about fifteen minutes, went over it again a couple of times during the following week and have it still.  Ha. 

Today I began another Buddhist document - Samantabhadra's Aspiration to Noble Deeds.  I've repeated this prayer many times over the years, but in different translations (and frequently just in Tibetan.)  So, although it's familiar, the competing versions I've used insure that I don't have it clear in my mind. 

This morning I started work on it - and within half an hour, I had the first two verses done.  They won't stick unless I work on them some more, but I think it won't take too much repetition.  Now I have to decide whether to continue or not.  Since this is one of the greatest and best known prayers that spans all the Buddhist traditions, it would be worth doing.  Another excellent thing with which to fill my mind.  But I'm not going to abandon The Precious Treasury.  It will be very interesting to compare my progress in each. 

Aging and Memorization - 1

In July I started to memorize The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena hoping that the mental exercise involved would make some dent in my forgetfulness and lack of focus.  I began slowly, working on one verse at a time, and since mid-July I've managed to memorize four verses (about one full page.)  While it's too early to gauge any of the effects on my memory, I've noticed a couple of other things.

First, the text I'm working on is religion/philosophy at its most rarefied, full of abstract terms used repeatedly in slightly varying combinations. This is very hard to memorize.  The occasional concrete phrase stands out by the ease with which I can learn it. 

Second, and more subtle, I'm noticing how the meaning of each phrase and sentence opens up as I memorize it. The more of it I have really committed to memory, the better I can see the whole all at once.  The full meaning emerges in my mind precisely as a whole in itself, not cobbled together through parsing and logic.  It's similar to the way words in a foreign language, as one really gets to know them, begin to mean something themselves instead of needing mental translation.  Furthermore, this feels good - the sense of clarity and understanding is deeply pleasing.  This is a different form of learning from accumulating facts or data.  

This also stands in sharp contrast to how I feel after I've been on my PC for awhile, reading blogs, checking up on web sites I follow, Twitter, Google News, etc.  Then I am both overstimulated and drained at the same time - mildly and vaguely uncomfortable and dissatisfied, despite having encountered new ideas, facts, people. 

I'm enjoying this experiment in itself, and wondering how it will develop.

Reflections on Aging - 3 - Not Always My Mind

When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, whenever something unpleasant or disconcerting happened to me, I attributed it to my mental state.  And I was often wrong.  At one point, for example, I was troubled by a lot by dizziness and disorientation - which I sometimes described as "having trouble staying on the sidewalk."  I assumed it was some odd physical expression of my inner psychological 'imbalance.'  Breakfasting with a friend, lamenting the situation, and also complaining about a headache that was bothering me that morning, I was startled by her brusque response, "Oh for heaven sake, you've just got a sinus infection." 

Of course!  And one Sinutab fixed it (for that morning anyhow.)  How could I have missed it? I'd lived my first few years in a low-lying area along the Connecticut River where everyone had sinus - we were all experts at recognizing an attack, and using old-wives remedies (no Sinutabs back then) to relieve it.  However, I hadn't had an attack in years, had forgotten all about them, and, as I wrote above, was in the habit of seeing everything going on as the effect of my neurotic habits of thought.  But the fact was, it wasn't my mind - it was my body. 

Now I find something similar happening in regard to aging - I tend to interpret everything unpleasant as yet another sign of a failing body (and brain.)  And again - I can be wrong.  A case in point - I've noticed in the past couple of years that I'm having more and more trouble concentrating.  When I come across an interesting article on the internet, about two paragraphs into it, I'm overwhelmed by a desire to look at something else - check my email, resume shopping or search for some little thing I want on eBay - anything else as long as it's different.  Similarly, when I sit down to write, a sort of pale nausea accompanies every thought - it's very hard to focus on the point I want to articulate.  Advancing years and failing memory and focus - yes?  No. 

No.  I was much relieved to read in Nicholas Carr's recent book, The Shallows, that my experience is quite common among people who spend a lot of time on the internet, no matter what their age.  Here's Carr's experience:

"Over the last few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going -- so far as I can tell -- but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I'm reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the terms of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Carr's first chapters fill in the background to this 'rewiring' and the following ones detail the brain processes involved. (I was surprised at the progress that's been made in recent years, in determining just how our minds/brains work to store information and retrieve it.  For more on this, see Carr's book, the work of Eric Kandel, or the series of interviews by Charlie Rose with leading scientists in the field.)  Building on this information, Carr suggests (as do others) that our current habits of touching lightly on the surface of whatever we encounter - whether on the internet, in the various media, whatever - then moving on to the next thing, results in a weakening of our capacity to focus and attend closely to anything in particular.  It becomes more and more difficult to take immediate experience and consolidate it into lasting memories. 

I was not only relieved, but this gave me some ideas about how to alter the situation.  If the problem lies in not exercising the brain's ability to create long-term memories, then I will do something to cultivate that ability. In particular, I will start to memorize my favorite Buddhist text, The Precious Treasury of Basic Space.  The range of benefits from this project (if I keep at it) will go beyond strengthening my focus and memory - it will keep before my mind some of the finest, most profound words ever written about ultimate reality -

Here's the first verse -

"Homage to glorious Samantabhadra!"

"Naturally occurring timeless awareness - utterly lucid awakened mind -
is something marvelous and superb, primordially and spontaneously present. 
It is the treasury from which comes the universe of appearances and possibilities, whether of samsara or nirvana.
Homage to that unwavering state, free of elaboration."

Reflections on Aging - 2 - The View Changes

Another aspect of getting older for me has been a shift in my viewpoint.  All my life I've been accustomed to thinking ahead - plans for the next day, the next week, details of projects for the future, plans to improve my finances, my weight, lists of books to read; I've kept notebooks with outlines that I wanted to expand into well worked out essays.  There were friends and acquaintances that I wanted to spend more time with and get to know better.  And of course there was spiritual practice - I tried to keep at it day by day, but also looked forward to a more intense level of practice sometime in the future.  At work I considered new projects in part for how they would look on my resume.  I looked steadily toward the future. 

Then, when I was fifty, and had just completed a very difficult project, it dawned on me that I would never top what I'd just finished.  Not long after that I began to see that my resume was loosing its importance because I was nearing the end of my working life.  This was a pleasant prospect.  Although I enjoyed my work - except for the stress of the job itself (computer support) and always being on call - my pleasure was simply that of solving puzzles and making systems work; it was not a vocation that I would miss when I left it. 

By then I'd also begun to notice how much longer my view into the past had become.  I looked back at decade after decade of my own life - and from knowing various family members and hearing family stories and reflecting on our whole family's past, my view seemed to stretch even beyond my own time into that of my parents and grandparents. All of the 1900's seemed familiar, as though I'd lived it myself, because I'd tasted the flavor it had for Grandma and Grandpa, and my aunts and uncles.  There's a certain richness to this experience as well as something strange, almost like remembering a past life.

But as the past expands, through the passage of time itself as well as through knowing other's lives, the future is contracting.  Just in this wonderful era when scientific knowledge is exploding, and I have the leisure to explore it, I can no longer realistically think of studying everything that fascinates me.  I do not have the span of time required - even if I am very fortunate.  I hear of experiments and studies that in a few years or just a few decades will tell us so much more about our world, and our reality.  This future is exciting - and yet, in a few decades at the most, I won't even be here.  One afternoon while meditating, I looked up at a beautiful statue on my shrine, and an image flashed through my mind of a stranger meditating before that statue sometime in the future.  Things that I treasure may still be here, may still be treasured by someone, but not by me.  The poignancy of that moment brought tears to my eyes and though it passed quickly, it left its mark. 

Of course for a Buddhist there is a context for this awareness - it is even a blessing to be reminded over and over to use my resources well.  And in the Buddhist context these reflections are not grim and depressing.  In contrast, our western view of aging is practically to deny the process.  "You are only as old as you feel..." and so on.  There is a strong push to see older people as essentially no different from people in their twenties and thirties (just more medicated, I'm afraid.)  Their interests and activities remain the same - and it's thought wonderful that they can still keep up with all the things they always enjoyed.  Unfortunately this view misses almost entirely the real differences - and so the value in them is left unexplored.  I can't say what that value is - I'm only starting to consider it myself, but it is one of the things that makes my own life interesting right now.  I am old and this process is fascinating.

Reflections on Aging - 1

I think I'm officially old - at least if you count looking at the behavior of younger generations with bewilderment and incomprehension as a major sign-post.  I've been noticing this for awhile - but I've finally hit a point where it all comes together.  That is, my generation - at least the part of it that I know at all - really is different, and there's a pattern to the differences.  People have changed - and are changing - in very specific ways.

First - we seem to be in a time of no-consequences.  I and most of my contemporaries were raised to consider the  possible results of our actions and patterns of behavior.  There were (grossly oversimplified) two major reasons for this: even if not explicitly religious, we were under the influence of what could be called the tag-ends of religion-based ethical systems; and life was harder.  Not spectacularly harder - most of us didn't have to walk miles to school, or rise before dawn to care for farm animals, wear clothes handed down several times over from older siblings (or relatives), or such.  But we were affected by our actions - there were always consequences.  If we broke something, it was not casually replaced; we actually had to pay for purchases because there were no credit cards (imagine!)  So to have something often meant to save for it ahead of time.  There were fewer do-overs and second chances.  If we made mistakes, or did something wrong, it was remembered.   There were no birth-control pills, and abortions were not easily or safely to be had.  Whatever we did reverberated for years.  People remembered - this probably had to do with the fact that we weren't always drowning in information.  Information itself was harder to get, and had much more value, and therefore, so did education. 

Life has changed radically in the decades since my childhood - I don't need to detail how each of the things I've described above has changed.  But I do want to be clear that this is not a rant about how life was better back then.  For a lot of us, what we experience in our childhood forms the base line of normality and goodness.  That is an illusion of course.  Moreover, much of what has happened has been beneficial, or at least had a good side to it.  The personal freedom that we now have is to be treasured.  However, some of these changes are destructive.  That doesn't make them bad - but it is important to see that they affect the way we live and behave, they are the basis of further changes.  The issues are, what are these changes, and do we want them?

Aging

Today I am seventy.  That is old. 

I've always disliked the phrase, "you're only as old as you feel,"  even though by that measure, I'm not old at all.  But I would rather fully acknowledge my years if that is what's needed to access the changes in perspective and insights that those years hold.  It seems sometimes that when people use that phrase what they really mean is, "be twenty-five forever."  Physically that's a pretty good age to be - but mentally, psychologically, spiritually - no.  It's like insisting on only one food to eat, or one small aspect of the view to look at, one friend and no others.  It misses more than it preserves.  I will take it all, thank you - I want the entire banquet, even though not all of it is to my taste. 

Old Age

In the winter 2006 issue of Buddhadharma Magazine, in a regular feature called "Ask The Teacher," the question was put,

Is there a Buddhist perspective regarding practitioners who become afflicted with Alzheimer's disease or dementia?

As those of us who are part of the first generations of dharma students in this country reach old age, I suspect this will become an important (and disturbing) question. 

This also resonated with me because I know of one very fine, elderly, teacher whose mind is no longer at all clear.  Several months ago, when I mentioned this situation to a friend of mine, she was startled.  She asked how someone with such spiritual accomplishments could be so affected by the aging process.  Her basic thought was that enlightenment and senility are mutually exclusive. 

I've been thinking about this myself for quite awhile, and my friend's reaction underlined the question.  It brings back a memory of another conversation with one of my own teachers a number of years ago.  A fellow-student had remarked something about mental failure in the process of old age, something that implied that enlightened or highly accomplished meditators were immune to this.  My teacher replied that this was not so at all, and she gave a concrete example.  At the time, I was shocked - just as my friend was recently.  And the idea of this limitation to the effects of meditative achievement discouraged me.  It made it all seem a bit of a sham; enlightenment doesn't really make a difference. 

To return to the magazine article, the first teacher to respond described the use of familiar methods and gave the example of a man who applied mindfulness to his anxiety as he became more and more disoriented, and was able to relax, at least in the early stages of his disease as the use of familiar ritual and practice provided him with calm.  Several other such examples were given.  In a way this responds to a slightly different question: how might meditation practice be used to cushion the mental effects of aging. 

Then the second teacher spoke of a great master who, though very much affected by some sort of "senile dementia" nevertheless seemed to suffuse with "love... the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit."   This is different - at least at some level, this master's attainments, which were the root of his compassion, were still intact. 

The third teacher, Geshe Tenzin Wangyal, spoke in terms of how each of us could prepare for old age.  He spoke of dream yoga, and how by practicing awareness in the day time, awareness and clarity within one's dreams can develop.  As he put it,

By practicing with clear light as you enter sleep, experiences of clear light will awaken at a time when you normally lose awareness....If you [later] become diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia...then, in those moments when you loose the reference points of self, clarity will naturally dawn.

This is more encouraging - and it makes sense.  This clarity isn't just a good focus on your ordinary train of thoughts - rather it is what is there as the ground or field in which those thoughts arise.  It is emptiness, I think, something that is not easy for most of us to recognize.  It's both unlimited and immediate - perhaps unaffected by the loss of control over the ordinary train of thoughts that arise from it. 

So - my personal conclusion is that if you become accustomed to this clarity, it can not be lost, even when your ordinary thinking processes are unable to function.