tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57089043569614227492023-09-30T10:47:04.188-07:00THE WISDOM SPLINTERAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-25323696477489508722016-12-12T11:50:00.003-08:002016-12-12T11:54:05.628-08:00Blog #10 Mindfulness in the Time of Hate: Part 1<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">A story, to begin with: I was at the computer, watching the host
of </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The Daily Show</i><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, Trevor Noah interview
Tomi Lahgren, the </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px;">millennial,</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> conservative pundit. The interview was both painful
and beautiful to watch. It was beautiful to watch Noah’s skill in communicating
with someone who was his extreme opposite politically; and it was painful to
watch the unnecessary suffering that the guest apparently needed to tie to her political
opinions.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">As I watched, I couldn’t help comparing it to a somewhat contentious
exchange I was having with a stranger on
Facebook. Now, to be clear, I am an unabashed liberal/progressive, but as a teacher
and one-time co-director of a meditation retreat center, I have learned to not
wear my politics on my sleeve or anywhere else while I am working in such an
environment where there should be no divisions based on politics, creed or
class. It would be a mistaken notion to think that everyone at a soft-hearted
meditation event is a bleeding heart liberal. It's true that the majority of retreat
participants lean toward the liberal side of the political spectrum, but there
are plenty of conservatives as well, yearning for wakefulness and a more open
heart.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">But as we know, Facebook can be a minefield. It's a faceless
environment that invites the possibility for being a self-righteous ass and
speaking to people in a way you would hesitate to do in someone's face. How can
I be so sure? Because I have done it. I claim this expertise.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">When I find myself in seeming combat with a political adversary,
I usually write something, and then tone it down with an edit…or two…or many. I
am beginning to see when I am not being helpful or open and I’m not allowing
the other person the space to open up. How could they, if they first have to hear
past my contentiousness?</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">So I am trying to do my best, but this FB intruder is well-armed
with insults and weapons of mass verbal destruction. After a few exchanges I realize
this is going nowhere; there's too much anger and there is no real communication,
so I select the FB button that allows me to “See less of Jim.” Another internet
mercy killing.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Then, as I mentioned, I watch <i>The Daily Show</i> interview, and I see that Trevor Noah exemplifies
everything I am missing in terms of my patience, ability to listen, and having
respectful speech. I see how easily my intelligence gets hijacked, and I
wonder, how do I get from here to there?</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">I then move on to an online talk by Susan Piver, who is a brilliant,
warm and fearless meditation teacher/blogger. I love how she readily admits her
anger with the current political scene, but at the same time is humble and owns
her own responsibility to overcome angry thoughts and to act with love and
intelligence.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">She talks about how we are often instructed to separate what we
feel from what we do, but almost <i>nobody</i>
can do this. To bridge this gap, she recommends the practice of meditation. It’s
a great suggestion, but it’s also a very big package. It is deep with wisdom;
it is broad and wide with skillful means. I call it the Buddhist sign of the
cross – up-and-down wisdom; left-to-right skillful means…deep and wide…immense
possibilities in all directions.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">But when it comes to on-the-spot conflict, <i>that’s</i> precisely where I'd like to separate out the skill called <i>mindfulness</i>. The practice of mindfulness
had already been successfully separated out from the Buddhist tradition by Jon Kabat-Zinn
who extracted it for people with chronic pain.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"> <span class="m5786436345746622216s1">Fast-forward a few decades, and we see that <i>mindfulness-extracted</i> (if I may) has become
a huge phenomenon in the world of self-help. I used to be wary of that because
I thought, erroneously, that it was the sound-bite version of meditation proper,
but now I think it is an amazing skillful means. Why? For two reasons: 1)
because it has <i>already</i> been
distinguished in centuries past as a separable component of
mindfulness-awareness meditation practice; and 2) because I believe that
mindfulness is going to be the leading edge in making meditation practice more
familiar and, in our culture – not vice versa.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">So I say, <i>use mindfulness
as the can opener</i>. Mindfulness can be used anytime, even while driving. (Hopefully
we all understand that driving and meditating don’t mix!) I truly believe that
we need to take hold of this particular tool because there is such closed-mindedness
and closed-heartedness right now in the U.S., and I believe that we are in the
need of a humongous store of wisdom to penetrate this feeling of stalemate.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">As I watched Noah connect and communicate, I saw a tremendous
display of mindfulness. His patience was buoyed by mindfulness; his
intelligence was sparked by mindfulness; his listening was rooted in
mindfulness; and his speech was a vivid expression of mindfulness. It really
didn’t matter who won the day politically; he won the day in terms of
expressing our common humanity.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">As challenging as it can be for us to communicate across the
political divide – whether it be conservatives speaking to liberals, or liberals
speaking to conservatives – it can be enhanced with mindfulness practice. It
can be done with love.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">I am reluctant to say this because it is so cliché, but <i>love</i> is the answer. Contentious
arguments over Facebook do nothing but harm and polarize. As Martin Luther King
Jr. says, hate begets hate…so we need to stop; we need to <i>train</i>. A quick anecdote: One of my teachers – a martial artist –
invited his grandmaster to teach a seminar, and during the Q & A section,
he was asked "What is the meaning of life?" Without skipping a beat, he
answered, "training." It’s true; due to the power of our habitual
behavior, we need training. Nothing is going to change overnight or by magic. Ain’t
no miracle that’s gonna happen.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">How might we train? For starters, we not only extract mindfulness
from the mindfulness-awareness tradition, we extract the mindfulness of our own
natural, inherent experience. We extract mindfulness from our palette of
learning and listening skills, and apply it to all the words we say and hear</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">To help
convey this, let me offer my perspective on mindfulness. From one point of
view, mindfulness is a large umbrella of practices that includes meditation but
is not limited to that category, alone. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Meditation, itself, has two different
stages that we can refer to as </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">mindfulness</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
and </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">awareness</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">. The first has to do
with attention, or peacefully abiding – which is the mindfulness component; and
the second is the awareness component. That second component is sometimes called
</span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">panoramic awareness</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">, or it could be thought
of in a larger sense as “discoveries that come from mindfulness.” There are
other translations, but for our purposes, I will stick with these.</span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Mindfulness
begins with applying attention to what is called<i> the object of meditation</i>. We make the intention to keep our mind
on the object – oftentimes the breath – and our awareness lets us know when we
have strayed from that, so we bring our attention back to the object. Our
awareness also helps us understand why we strayed, how we strayed, and what all
of it means to us as human beings, trying to get by on a day-to-day minute-by-minute
existence that is too-often filled with distraction, chaos and self-loathing.
So, in our communication with others, if we bring our full attention to what we
are hearing (including tone of voice, as well as physical and facial
expressions) we can stay more present. But…that’s the easier part; the more
difficult part is keeping mindful of our own responses – our anger, our hurt
pride, our arrogance, our lack of trust in others. There is much to be mindful
of – a rich constellation, indeed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">There
is so much to be discovered, and sometimes the depth and breadth of those
discoveries are overwhelming and might be too much to take in. Nevertheless, I
believe that at bare minimum, we can extract the mindfulness component. I
believe that we can, at least, learn to pay closer attention; we can, at least,
train that as our contribution to help the world with this tsunami of suffering
that shows no sign of abatement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">What I
saw in Trevor Noah’s interview, was a refined skill in paying attention. I
haven’t the foggiest idea if he has even given a sidelong glance to the meditation
tradition, but it doesn’t matter; I can see is that something in his life experience
honed this skill, and <span class="m5786436345746622216s1">I am inspired to look
more deeply at my own practice to see if I can bring more mindful attention to
bear on my life. In the same interview I saw young, conservative, self-righteous,
Tomi Lahgren spewing hateful messages that I suspect she didn't even recognize as
intended to inflict suffering. As she proclaimed, she was just "telling it
like it is." She, like so many of us, seems to think that
self-righteousness can win the day. We fail to notice that our need to <i>tell it like it is,</i> is so often coupled
with a great deal of unnecessary aggression. We so regularly end up expressing
the pain that we cannot hold – the pain that we cannot contain. For some
strange reason, it seems OK in our self-indignation-culture, to hurt others. It
is not that the true divide is liberal vs. conservative; it is love vs. hate.
And we just don't know how to handle the implications.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p2" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">At the root of the solution is our capacity to overcome
ignorance. As we ignore the needs of others, we harm them just so we can wave
our political flag. And now we are in a trap of own making: as we ignore our
own needs, we fail to really know ourselves, and blame others for our own
ignorance and self-loathing.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">At the same time, it’s not simply a case of, "All You Need
is Love." Sure, that's what we need lots of. Oodles of. Truckloads of. But
there is no way around it: <i>We need to
train</i>. Our habits are deeply ingrained, so we need to train. We <i>can</i> train our insight. We <i>can</i> train our reactivity. I think there
is no way to wiggle around this.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span class="m5786436345746622216s1"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="m5786436345746622216p1" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Perhaps
we could use some discussion. Please leave your comments.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-42281456537555190482016-10-28T12:09:00.004-07:002016-10-28T12:14:26.050-07:00BLOG #9 The Little Trump Inside Us All<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One
oft-repeated comment said in support of Donald Trump in the early days of his
campaign was, “I like him because he says what I think.” What does that imply
now that his sexually demeaning and predatory history has surfaced for the
whole world to hear?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Naturally, our
immediate response is to distance our self from such reprehensible speech and
behavior. But I want to specifically ask the men – how much of our outrage is
about him? And how much of it is about us and our life in the world of men?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I would like
to offer a quote from a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition,
Acharya Fleet Maull. He points out, <i>"One
of the greatest psychological insights that human beings have ever come up with
is that the stuff that bothers us in other people is the most accurate and
direct window into our own stuff that we can ever possibly want.” To that I
would add, “So isn’t there at least a little Trump inside us all?”</i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">From the
point of view of our self-respect, dignity and virtue, this is difficult to
swallow. The majority of men abhor the idea that they are anything like Trump, even
if only to an infinitesimal degree. Yet I think it is to our benefit to
consider it carefully. I don’t want to be jailed as a whistleblower on the male
subculture, but whether it is by design or purely due to karma, most men have
been swimming in this sea of female objectification for their entire lifetime. We’ve
been lobbied to accept this purported natural order of things ever since we were
little boys. We heard it from the mouths of society’s dissolute as well as from
the big fish (the alpha-males and the sons of alpha-males.) We less-macho fish
have been schooling in the shallows, trying to avoid hearing and repeating
those odious messages, but very few of us come out unscathed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I doubt that
most women are shocked by this. Anyone who pays attention knows that most women
have encountered this abuse and ill-conceived, ill-sanctioned, male privilege and
violence throughout their lives. Yet, so many men – yes, even the good men who
are your husbands, boyfriends, sons and brothers – are loathe to admit to such
thoughts and acts that have been sanctioned and condoned by other males.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But it’s in
us. It’s like bacteria that are deeply enfolded in our guts, and it’s going to
take multiple rounds of antibiotics to get healthy. In other words, our problem
is going to keep showing up. Somehow, this reminds me of all the home movies
and photos I appear in as a child, in which I am endlessly calling out for
attention. I no longer have a defense for being one of the earliest photo
bombers in modern history – always making faces, wearing bizarre hats, clowning
and moping about – but I don’t really don’t know what compelled me to act out
and be so annoying. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When the family
gathers around these photos (which is always embarrassing) I say, “I don’t know
what made me that way. <i>I am a victim of
circumstances</i>!” So was I not loved enough? Was it karma from a past life? It’s
a joke, but it is also true; we all have an inheritance that we didn’t ask for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why do I
bring up this anecdote? Because we are not always in control of our
circumstances. For instance, my parents were gentle and kind; and so were my
brother and sisters; and so was my best friend – everyone looked over me. But
when I was a young, there were also children for whom a dark light was already
burning within them. So, yes…I was there, watching, when WL fed a captured box
turtle a lit firecracker; I was there when JT told his girlfriend to remove her
shirt, and we all felt her breasts; I was there when my friend WM got beat up
and kicked in the face with a heavy leather boot, and I didn’t do anything
because I was afraid. These are the things that happen along the way, as we
move from being a boy to a man. For the entire journey, we are challenged with
what to do and what not to do; knowing what’s right, and what’s wrong.
Hopefully, somewhere along the way, we figure out what is moral, and have
enough good examples to guide us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The three
vignettes I just mentioned, <i>still</i>
make me sad. I <i>still</i> feel shame that
I did the wrong thing – even when I wasn’t a participant, but just watching
from the shadows. Still, for many young men, my confessions appear rather tepid,
for they might have grown up in a world where the power of misguided,
destructive male energy had no limitations on horrifics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Whether it is
me, Father Anyname, or Donald Trump, we all started as guppies, swimming with piranhas
in rivers of violence, misogyny and racism – the unholy Trinity. And boy, are
we seeing the effects of that in our culture! The truth has arisen with a
vengeance. It is all over the news, coming to us with a frequency we could have
never imagined a few years ago: Blacks in America being killed for routine traffic
violations – or for selling single cigarettes outside a store? A presidential candidate, talking about
grabbing ‘pussies’? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which ring of
Dante’s hell are we in? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I promise you
that there are lots of men across America who are experiencing much fear and
shame due to the national media exposure of Donald Trump’s sexual predation. Add
to that, Billy Bush’s indefensible complicity, and you’ve got a snapshot of the
culture of men that has been overtly and tacitly condoning objectification of
women for centuries. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For men, this
is a bone-chilling wake-up call because we don’t want this magnifying glass on
us.Of course, since we didn’t want it and feared the truth of it, it came to us
anyway. What we are all getting now is a dose of forced mindfulness. Due to
ignorance and self-deception, we are now faced with the demand to pay
attention. A lot more attention. We just can’t live in a world of Cosbys, Clintons,
and Trumps—plus revelations of African-Americans being murdered by police every
few days—and not take responsibility for our complicity, whether deserved or
undeserved; whether huge or infinitesimal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As music
magnate, Russell Simmons posted on FB, “Things are not getting worse, they are
getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the
veil.” As horrifying as it may be, what’s been on the news is one of the best things
that has ever happened to us. Whether it is the detestable words and actions of
Trump, or the body cameras and civilians’ cell phone videos of police killing
unarmed black man, the world is demanding that we own up and wake up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Taking
responsibility means taking the vow to be more and more mindful; to have mindfulness
without limit. It may seem like a mild and inadequate antidote, but being
mindful and aware, not ignorant or oblivious, is critical. We can’t be whole
and healthy without owning up to what is buried inside us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Finally, with
regard to misogyny, sexism and the sins of ourselves and our fathers, I would
like to suggest that we <i>confess</i>. That
may sound like a fabulously antiquated notion, but confession is a way for us
to peel back and ventilate our camouflaged shame. I’m not talking about
confessing to a priest…I’m suggesting we take heartfelt ownership of the world
we have inherited by confessing, with great tenderness, to someone who truly
loves us and who we feel safe with. Even if it’s about something that happened
40 years ago. We have to gain forgiveness. As Robert Bly says, “It’s all right
if you grow your wings on the way down.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Russell
Simmons’s quote reminds us that so many sins of the world are finally becoming
revealed, and there is more to come. If we can hold tight, with love, we can
get ourselves free of the hidden shame that numbs us into fear and inaction. We
all know what tough love is; this is tough mindfulness, and there is no way
out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Women and
men: What are your thoughts about this? They are important. Please share.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-55012235536548196532016-10-05T13:45:00.003-07:002016-10-05T13:58:07.392-07:00Blog #8 You Can't Save Yourself by Saving Your Self<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><b>A Slippery Contradiction</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Everything is dissolving and
falling apart. Our houses, the street outside our house, our body…let’s face
it; our world is indelibly marked by <i>change</i>.
We don’t like it because it’s unpredictable, and we want to always be assured
of what’s happening now and what’s going to happen next. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Being comfortable with<i> not knowing</i>—though considered
delightful by Buddhas far and near—is not our strong suit, so we seek security,
solidity and steadiness from a world that will give us none of that. Despite
our best efforts, the world remains out of our control. Still, we do our best; we
replace worn-out tires, we refrigerate our food…we might even take public
transportation in order to minimize global warming. It’s probably the best we
can do during our 80 year stint.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The world continuously, effortlessly,
falls apart and we spend our lifetime battling that. This struggle, although it
makes sense in our physical world, has less-than stellar-results in our
psychological world. Why? Because that unpredictability is even more problematic
with to our quest to establish “Me”. There is nothing more slippery and
evanescent than the thing we call “self”, or “I”…yet we live and die by it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Although this world that is
constantly changing, we nevertheless feel compelled to find something that is solid
and steady—a bulwark against instability. We long so deeply for something that
can give us a sense of security while everything else around us is continually
morphing. We just want a rock that will stand still for us in the middle of
this wild river’s turbulence.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The point is that you cannot
stabilize self. Self is an arbitrary definition we give to ourselves, and as
meditators, all evidence shows us there’s nothing at all we can hang on to. The
holding on that we do happens in many ways. We give it the name <i>ego</i> if we are too arrogant. Then we take
a snapshot of that and present it to everyone we encounter—even when our actions
are nothing to be proud of. Ego can also be built from a snap-shot of how
long-suffering we are—and even when blessings come our way, we pull out that snapshot
to maintain our continuity of depression; because our need for security lords over
whatever vacillates, every time. Ego can
also be built upon anger, blame, or low self-esteem…all of them become
snapshots that we treasure because they make us feel secure and unwavering. We
don’t want doubt; we want to be defined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><b>Monkeys!</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Our “Self” is a collection of
observations that we cobble together for convenience’s sake. We could take an
analytical approach to understanding this, but I like the traditional “monkeys
in the house” analogy to understand how we build a solid self out of ever fleeting
conscious moments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Let’s imagine a house filled
with monkeys…six monkeys to be exact. Each of these monkeys has a window to
look out of, and each window represents a sense perception. Now, we know that
there are five sense perceptions—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch; but in
Buddhist psychology, there is a sixth, which is mind. Like the other five,
perception is comprised of hardware (the organ) and software (the process of
perceiving). So in the case of the sixth sense organ we have (roughly) the
brain and its ability to sort through the activities of mind. The house is
obviously our body (or it could even be the head.)</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">But back to our monkeys.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Let’s imagine that these five
monkeys are sitting in front of five different ‘windows’, and the sixth monkey sits
in the middle of the house and keeps communication flow with the five. Each
monkey can only do one thing: monkey #1 reports on what can be seen; monkey #2 reports
on what can be heard; monkey #3 reports on what can be smelled; monkey #4 reports
on what is tasted; and monkey #5 reports on what is felt throughout the body.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">So our five windows—or better, apertures—are
our sense organs, or sense gates, and the sixth is the control room. Let’s
imagine we are in a restaurant and the sixth monkey (the coordinator, mind) –
asks the third monkey “What’s going on?” The third monkey says, “Man, something
smells good. It’s kind of like coffee, but something else happening.” The first
monkey says, “Hey, I see Jameson’s and they are putting whipped cream over it.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The sixth monkey puts two and
two together and says, “Oh yeah…Irish coffee.” He then calls out to #2—the
sound perception monkey, “What’s going on over there?” “Someone dropped a tray
of dishes. It’s so loud in here, I can hardly hear myself think.” #4—the taste
perception monkey shouts, “Oh yummy, wine, Full bodied. A bit oaky!” Then
#6—mind monkey says, “It’s a Chardonnay. California, Sonoma Coast, I suspect.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Monkey #3 is back online: “Wow,
where’s that nice perfume coming from?” Monkey
#5—“My nose itches.” Monkey #6, “Posture! Sit up!” Monkey #1— “Forget it, she’s
wearing a ring.” Monkey #6, “Alright everybody. Let’s all calm down.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">When you meditate—when you sit
down and calmly take notice of what’s happening—what phenomena arise; what
phenomena disappears…it works in exactly the same manner; the messages from our
sense perceptions continue unabated, but rather than being in a restaurant, we
are in a meditation space and #1 says, <i>rug</i>;
#2…<i>siren</i>; #3…<i>incense</i>; #4…<i>a lingering
coffee taste in my mouth</i>; #5…<i>my knees
hurt</i>; #6<i>…”When is the damn gong going
to ring?”</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><b>The Panoply of Thoughts</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Brain research tells us that
all of these perceptions are happening between 60 and 100 times per second; just
like the frames on movie film…giving us the illusion of seamless motion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And of course there is more: there
are thoughts, opinions, judgments, memories—and all of them carry on the same way
as perceptions—moment by moment, and in a constant cascade. Brain research also
tells us that we can experience upwards of</span><b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> 50,000</span></b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> <b>thoughts</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>per
day. This means approximately 40 thoughts per minute per person. A lot is in
play.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Let’s get back to “Self.” How
many of the 50,000 thoughts are nice, and how many of them are mean? Which ones
do we grasp to convince us that we are a nice person? How many of those
thoughts make us think. “I am a depressed person?” Which thoughts do we select
to cobble together to define “Me?” Which thoughts default to define “Self?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">This self, this thing we want
to protect, is ever-changing; nevertheless, we take a sample of all those
thoughts, emotions, feelings, judgments, and we decide we are like this or like
that. <i>But there is nothing solid there at
all.</i> We are simply trying to hold together what is always changing and
falling apart. We try to freeze a fluid situation, but it won’t freeze. One day
I’m depressed Alan; the next day I’m confident Alan; an hour later I am sad Alan.
Who is Alan?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">As much as I hold tightly to
identify myself as ‘depressed’ on a particular day, I hold myself just as
strongly to the idea of being ‘smart’ or ‘cheerful’ on the next. It doesn’t
matter if I’m happy or depressed, really—our “Self” just wants to be sure. It wants
to be uncontested. Ego, self, I—whatever we call it—it wants to be assured of
something solid in an ever-changing world…which is basically impossible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">We’ve been trained for this
since we were infants. We have heard, “Oh look isn’t she cute?; Oh naughty boy;
You are bad. Stop that…that’s a good girl.” The die was cast decades ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><b>Practice Brings Familiarity</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">When we practice
mindfulness meditation, and we practice with humor and curiosity, we train
ourselves to be interested in whatever arises<i>. We learn to become comfortable with contradictions. </i>Instead of
being addicted to <i>who we are</i>, we get
to be far more interested in <i>what we do—</i>and
how we conjure up a reality that is no more solid than the cloud I am looking
at outside my kitchen window. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The very sights, sounds, tastes,
thoughts and feelings that you experience at this very moment, also occur on your
meditation seat. The meditation seat is our laboratory; so can we give
ourselves some time to see whether or not these monkeys, thoughts and opinions manifest
the way that Buddhists have described for centuries?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">In Tibetan terminology there’s
something called <i>jung, ne, dro sum</i>. Arising,
abiding and ceasing—all three. These terms are fully aligned with this idea of
monkey mind. Thoughts and perceptions arise, stay, and then disappear. Then the
next one arises and disappears, <i>ad
infinitum</i>. Everything is in constant flux, and so are we. There is no solid
and definite “I”. Instead of fighting to freeze what will not freeze, we could
let go of our “Me” construction project, and trust our perceptions which are so
good, and so accurate.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">What do you think?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-12482125780665538332016-09-06T13:57:00.003-07:002016-10-05T13:50:53.989-07:00Blog #7 Don't "Meditate"<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Meditation. The word can be defined many ways. Inside the
four walls of a Tibetan meditation center, it might mean one thing. If you are
Christian, it means something else—the words “meditation” and “contemplation”
are the reverse of the Buddhist definitions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Or if you are a mindfulness teacher, you might say that
mindfulness is the same as meditation, provided you take out the messy Buddhist
parts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Or if you call yourself a meditator and you have a mate--and if your mate thinks that as a meditator you are behaving badly--they might
say “Why don’t you go and meditate on THAT!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">There’s no reason to argue about who is right or wrong,
the important thing is to understand what you are doing, because, as Sakyong
Mipham put it, <i>If you don’t understand
what you are doing with meditation, you will not do it for very long.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">In the Tibetan tradition, the word <i>meditation </i>is
shorthand for three interrelated disciplines: Hearing, Contemplating, and Meditating.
I like the way Acharya Richard John describes it:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">“’Hearing’
refers to taking in information in an accurate way. This was the method used at
the time of the historical Buddha, when disciples would listen to teachings,
remember them and pass along what they heard. When repeating the teaching, they
would often preface it with, "Thus have I heard…” <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">Of course, things are somewhat different now; with
current technology, it is possible to take in information from multiple
sources: we can read books, attend talks, listen to CDs, watch DVDs, or go
online. All of it falls under the category of ‘Hearing.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">“’Contemplating’
means taking what we have learned and making it personal, by chewing on it,
questioning it, unpacking it, and restating it.” <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">Contemplation is perhaps the most creative of the three because it
involves figuring out how we can make the teaching personal and pragmatic. It
could be as simple as reading a paragraph before going to bed and then dropping
the book to your chest in order to think about what you just read; or it could
refer to a flash of insight or amazement that came from something you just
heard on a recording – something that caused you to pause an audio file to jot
down a few notes that resonated with you deeply…or painfully…or both. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">You might even decide to re-read a quote 3 times so that
you are confident that you got the subtleties of the message. You might even read an interesting passage in
a book and reach for your yellow highlighter so that you can easily re-visit
that paragraph tomorrow. All of this is contemplation, which can be creative or
formal – as long as it is personal…that’s what matters most.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">“<i>Meditating</i>”
refers to the practical discipline, in which one takes an upright posture and
works with the breath, a mantra or another object of focus. It is the heart of
the tradition; the actual training. On a deeper level, meditation means having
a direct and personal experience of what has been learned and contemplated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">So, meditation can be thought of as the sum of these
three, combined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">But let’s pretend we know nothing of these concepts. What
if they never existed? What if there was no historical Buddha and we had to
figure out by ourselves what it means to be more awake and present in our lives?
What would motivate us to do so?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Well, we might note that our minds get continually
hijacked. We might want to understand why that happens. I heard this description
from an excellent teacher, Acharya Dan Hessey in New York City two weeks ago.
He described the essence of human beings as “travelers – traveling all the
time, always on our way to somewhere. There’s this constant quality of,
someplace to go; something to do; what is the next thing?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">He added, “We don’t experience where we are coming from,
because of the going to.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">So is <i>that</i> the
essence of our difficulty…our constant involvement with the next thing coming
our way? Is that the tendency we must counter with meditation--that we are
always traveling; always moving to the next best thing? Does that strike a
familiar note? Because if we are going to use this identical approach with our meditation,
it’s going to blow up in our face. It is going to fail, and meditation will be
just another way to make us feel more neurotic and inadequate. If we keep
trying to spiritually maneuver ourselves to become something else, or improve
this goofy mess called “me”…well, it’s going to be like trying to pull a rabbit
out of our hat<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Meditation is not going to magically transform us into a
new, improved me. We cannot adopt the approach: “out with the old and in with
the new.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">So…I suggest we don’t meditate…with quotation marks
around it; with air quotes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">How do we do that?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Instead of “meditating”, we work with our attitude. We try
to relax this “traveling.” Instead of trying to get to somewhere else, we "<i>Stay"</i> – as Pema Chodron says. It’s like saying,
“There’s a lot happening today…deliveries coming, guests arriving, etc. so I’m
just going to stick around and be there for whatever arrives. I'm going to just let it all
just come in. The whole parade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">The idea with “Don’t Meditate” is that we’re going to
feel <u>everything</u> that comes up. Like Trungpa Rinpoche says, we are going
to try to avoid sweeping <u>anything</u> under the rug, because when we
deflect, that is the enemy of meditation practice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">We could simply be there for the breath, and then when
our mind shifts over to the itch on our back, or the siren we hear outside, we
can be there for <i>that</i>. And if the
next thing we notice is a thought, we can be there for that shift over to
thought. And if we notice that we lost track of our breath, we can feel
ourselves shifting back, and <i>feeling</i>
the breath. And then….though this may be a little difficult to believe…when our
mind plunges into deep and painful emotions, we can be there for that, too. Yes...that too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">All of these elements are part of our communication with
our world; our sights, our sounds, our tastes, smells and touch. Even our
thoughts and our emotions. All this makes up our beautiful and amazing contact
with the world around us. Granted, we are not going to dispense with the tool
of meditation, the object of our meditation—the breath—because the breath is a very
powerful tool for communicating with nowness. But if we hope that meditation is
going to help us avoid paying attention to things as they are; but instead, fixate on our hopes for a imaginary, perfected, new and improved ‘ME’...then
we will have lost communication. We have lost our signal for Being. Here. Now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Real meditation (without the air quotes) means being fully
connected to the present, whether via body, mind, emotions, interactions, <i>or even society.</i> Society is sacred, our
social interactions are sacred—no less sacred than our Buddha Mind or Buddha
heart. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">So when you meditate, don’t “meditate”. Imbue your
meditation with the attitudes that make it work: curiosity; a sense of humor when
you find yourself being habitually critical and doubtful of your ability;
openness to whatever presents itself. All while you sit on your throne. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">To put it another way, we can sit with our thoughts and
emotions, with this kind of attitude:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">“Good
day, co-worker I am irritated with. I see you’ve come around again.” <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">“Hello
boss that I despise. Funny seeing you here again. Welcome to my meditation </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">session”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">“Hello
argument I am having with my spouse. Wow, we are quite busy today, aren’t we?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">“Good
morning self who pisses me off and can’t sit still…self that I sometimes
loathe. Let me give you a hug.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">To meditate properly, we take the attitude that whatever
arises in our mind is sacred. There is nothing we need to sweep away. Instead,
we choose to feel it all--sense perceptions, ayatanas…we <i>feel</i> them. Our thoughts, our emotions--we can <i>feel</i> them. All of these experiences keep us right here, on the dot.
Whether we are relating with our sacred wakeful self…or our nasty neurotic
self...we feel, we communicate—there’s nothing more holy or more spiritual to
search for.<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-77283233046980940542016-08-10T11:19:00.002-07:002016-08-10T18:33:06.987-07:00Blog #6 Meditation: Simple but Not Easy<div class="MsoNormal">
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While visiting MNDFL in New York City, I heard Lodro Rinzler describe meditation as “…simple but not easy.” It couldn’t be said better. It’s true: the instructions are simple and clear; but what meditation unearths tends to throw a wrench or two into the works.<br />
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In a talk I gave last night, I suggested one way we could work with this challenge is to consider some pre-meditation practice. Here are my remarks:<br />
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Let’s start off by simply paying attention – not to just one thing but to everything that is going on for us right now, at this very moment. But please, don’t meditate; don’t close your eyes; don’t follow your breath.<br />
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If you are paying attention, you can’t help but notice what’s coming through your sense perceptions, because our sense perceptions are ON, effortlessly. Our eyes let us know that we are playing in a field of visual perception; our ears let us know that we are playing in the field of audio perception; our nose and our tongue lie low but alert us to every change. Our skin and the nerve system throughout our body continually remind us that we play in a field of temperature, texture, pain and pleasure. When we pay attention we can’t help but notice these things. The sense gates remind us that we are alive. Awake. Woke.<br />
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Besides these miraculous characteristics related to body, we have miraculous characteristics related to speech. If we pay attention, we can’t help but notice that running along with our sense perceptions is constant communication through thought. We have words, sentences and paragraphs that are continually reminding us of what we are engaging with, moment by moment. If we are really paying attention we can’t help but notice the endless commentary that we produce – talking to ourselves about ourselves; talking to ourselves about others.<br />
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There is also a third category – paying attention to all the nuances and power of our attitudes and emotions.<br />
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All these elements are going on and are available to us if we are awake and paying attention. They might show up in feelings about the present, as in, “Man, am I hot.” (If you are younger, that could mean two different things; but if you are older it usually refers to something far less exciting.) Or, you might have attitudes and emotions with regard to the future, as in, “Oooo…look at that new iPhone 6! S! Plus! Me likey! Me want Apple Pay. Me want AirDrop and FaceTime!” There might even be emotions about past, present and future, all wrapped up in one: “I love her soooo much…..But I can’t believe what a jealous %#* she was last night…..That’s it! I’m through…..Arghhh! She’s driving me crazy. I need to STOP thinking about her. Stop. STOP. But, but I love her so much! I HATE this!”</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">–</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the endless wheel of passion, aggression, and ignorance.</span><br />
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If we pay attention we can’t help but notice all these things streaming through our consciousness. If we pay attention we can’t miss them.<br />
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Although my first instruction was to pay attention and not do formal meditation, the difference between them seems to be rather small. What is the difference? Meditation requires some attitude adjustment – like paying attention without bias. But if we’re truly being attentive, there’s lots of bias. A meditator is also supposed to notice thoughts and emotions without judgment or self-loathing. But if we’re paying close attention, we see lots of judgment and lots of self-loathing.<br />
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<b>What’s Inevitable</b><br />
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I don’t mean to short-circuit everyone’s discovery, but there are two likely conclusions you will arrive at if you pay close attention to the mind. These are 1.) “I am good” and 2.) “I am bad.” If you meditate, if you are practicing being Awake, there’s a good chance that you will experience endless variations on the themes, “I am good” and “I am bad.”<br />
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Negative and worrisome thoughts are part of our genetic endowment – after all, our cave-dwelling ancestors' survival was probably not predicated on their happiness index; they survived due to fear of being a saber-toothed tiger’s dinner. Be that as it may, we are naturally (and nearly effortlessly) high-functioning beings. We can think things out and can have incredibly deep insights. We feel. We naturally connect with the world. It is basic to all of us. It is inherent. It is good. We call this <i>Basic Goodness</i>. In momentary gaps of consciousness, we notice that we are naturally plugged in. The world flows into us. We don’t have to search for this connection; nor do we need to improve ourselves in order to find it. We have basic workability; we are basically good. Nevertheless, this is all rather confusing for a practice that is purported to bring your mind peace. Yes, you will notice this basic, elemental goodness…but you are also going to notice your “terrible badness.” A contradiction?<br />
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Well, as I said, meditation is simple, but it’s not easy.<br />
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<b>Confusion and Openness</b><br />
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Buddhist teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche once said:
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>You are good; fundamentally, you are healthy. Moreover, that particular health is capable of accommodating your badness as well as your goodness. When you're good, you're not particularly bashful about your goodness, and when you're bad, you're not particularly shocked by that either. These are simply your attributes. When you begin to accept both aspects of your being as energy, as part of the perspective of your view of yourself, then you are connecting with the fundamental goodness, which can accommodate all of these energies as part of one basic being. This is very solid and earthy. It is invincible in fact. (Work, Sex, Money p.35.)</i></span></blockquote>
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His son and heir, Sakyong Mipham adds that we are bound to notice that meditation will reveal our self-loathing and struggle. We may be fundamentally good, but we feel bad. So there is an important question to ask ourselves – are we going to try to shut that awareness down, or are we going to nurture it? If we choose the former, our meditation practice will blind us, stupefy us, and slow us down as we wait for it to help us become something new or someone else. We think that meditation is going to help us get better, but we don’t realize we need to start with the stepping stone of knowing who-we-are.<br />
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<b>We Are Innately Good, But…Let’s Get Some Feedback</b><br />
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We don’t have <i>innate</i> terrible badness; we have <i>temporary</i> terrible badness. And all of it is built on habit. The deep insight that is born of intensive meditation comes from noticing habit. We all have very well-established habitual patterns. How can we cultivate seeing those habits? Doing meditation? Sure, but I think we need more than that. I think we need feedback from others. And why not? Don’t they have the same measure of basic goodness and searing insight as you do? We might know someone who can be honest with us if we demonstrate that we are willing to own all that we are. There might be someone in our life that is willing to articulate truths about ourselves – truths that WE don’t wish to articulate to ourselves. If we hope to develop our attention and mindfulness, why not engage with others? Why not engage with a meditation instructor, a therapist – maybe your husband, wife, lover or friend? (Although, in such cases, I adhere to Brené Brown’s suggestion that you share your deeply personal conversations with someone who has earned your trust.)<br />
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There might be an argument against this, based on the ancient Buddhist slogan that says, “Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one.” What this means, basically, is that nobody knows you better than you. You know what’s going on with you. I think that’s true. But let’s consider something that Sakyong Mipham said, <i>“…the tradition of meditation came from a culture that believed in the inherent health of mind; but when a culture does not believe that, it makes the situation tense.”</i> Certainly, in our culture, there is much tension around accepting both positive and negative attributes. We are far too invested in our image which is often frail and prone to self-recrimination at best and self-hatred at worst. Sakyong Mipham has been telling us that our spiritual journey requires us to find a way to be who we are and relate with who we are. That means accepting ourselves in light of every mixed message that arises.<br />
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<b>Conclusion</b><br />
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Trungpa Rinpoche, who seems to have endless resources of psychological jujitsu, says <i>“…we accept at the same time the destructive qualities in our basic mechanism as well as the positive qualities in our mechanism, so we have no ground to have a battle at all.” (Glimpses of Shunyata, p. 14)</i><br />
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What does that mean?<br />
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If there is no ground for battle, that means there is no target. There is no fight between the so-called “good me” and the “bad me.” Instead, we learn to sit like a mountain. Regardless of storms and lighting that pass over it, we remain. If we are paying attention, we can’t help but notice all of this can go on without having to freak out. The difference between meditation and our experiment with attention is that we possess a few special ingredients that we can generously apply to our attention; and with these, we are able to hold all the positive and negative truths at once. What is foremost is <i>kindness to our self</i>; and what is deepest is <i>sense of humor</i> about how easily we can go astray. Along with humor and acceptance, honesty and fearlessness are our pre-meditation essentials. With these, we convert our meditation practice from a feel-good technique into a tsunami of appreciation for ourselves and our world.
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© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-33277071353169933512016-06-23T10:20:00.001-07:002016-06-25T19:40:15.969-07:00Blog #5 Mindfulness: The Skinny<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Whether I enter my kitchen from the north or the south door, perched above each door-frame is a 4 x 6 note card, with the word CHANGE. Trying to understand change has been a persistent occupation ever since I was a child. I always wanted to change something, whether it was trying to be a better kickball player or a cooler guy altogether (Pointier black shoes? Longer hair?). I would also note changes in confidence and attitude, like when I slipped from being a 1<sup>st</sup> section trumpet player to being a denizen of the third. I was blessed with a stable family life, but schools and their concomitant circles of friends kept changing, which kept my radar highly attuned to “What is this now? Who am I now?”<br />
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As I look at those questions posed as a 10-year-old, I see that they aren’t really so different from my adult concerns. There are many things I still desperately want to change and things I don’t want to change...so my conclusion is that I am obsessed with change. I’m not sure that this logic is true for everyone, but what is true is that most of us want more happiness, which, by and large, means that something has got to change.<br />
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While many of our thoughts about change tend to revolve around relationships and finances, our most secret thoughts are about change from within. With the popularization of self-help, meditation, and therapy, we’ve certainly become much more sophisticated and optimistic about our potential for change; after all, what was once the province of the weird has now become highly visible and well-substantiated through research. We may have previously intuited that yoga, meditation, qi gong, and eating whole foods would lead to positive changes, but now we have scientific proof! (Finally…the great meditation masters can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that science has now proven their favorite pastime isn’t pointless!)<br />
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One of the more popular vehicles for change in recent years is the practice of mindfulness. Since the practice of mindfulness was born from the meditative tradition, there have been a lot of questions about its value as a freestanding discipline versus its value as a practice to be embedded within a larger constellation of practice, study and motivation. There are still unanswered questions on both sides of the mindfulness debate, and more long-term studies are needed to raise it to “irrefutable” status in the scientific and educational community.<br />
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Because of the many points of view surrounding the mindfulness question, there are various ways it can be taught. It can be taught very simply – completely sanitized of all its Hindu and Buddhist trappings; it can also be taught very traditionally, as in Tibetan Buddhism where the word “meditation” is shorthand for the interwoven practices of learning, contemplating and meditating – a lengthy and multi-disciplined approach to personal and societal change.<br />
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Spokespersons from both sides of the debate can be critical of the approach of their colleagues on the opposite side, but in my teaching experience, I’ve seen both approaches taught skillfully, and I’ve seen the value and wisdom of both.<br />
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The only shortfall I see occurs when the more challenging and sometimes painful aspects of mindfulness practice are not addressed, because to be perfectly honest, change is directly coupled with mindfulness. Change runs parallel with increased mindfulness. Here’s the thing: the tricky part of mindfulness is that it makes you…well…<i>mind-full</i>. It sparks curiosity and awareness. Mindfulness practice is deep; it is not cosmetic. Yes it can make you look and feel better. Yes there are many positive benefits – reduced stress, reduced levels of cortisol, increased levels of serotonin, and greater appreciation, overall, of the world around you and your place in it. But when you practice mindfulness, you can’t help but be aware of that which <i>undercuts</i> your mindfulness. The more training we do, (spoiler alert!) the more mindful we become of our shortfalls – you know, the things that could use a little bit of change.<br />
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What we have here is the old Yin and Yang – two sides of a coin, each very powerful. On one side of the mind-full equation, we become mindful of our goodness and well-being. We might even notice that our mindfulness is inherent; it is already our gift, awaiting further exploration. On the other side, we can’t help but be mindful of what I refer to (with great empathy and humor) as our <i>terrible badness</i>. If we are truly mind-full, we can’t help but acknowledge both our positive and negative tendencies. Oddly enough, it is not just our negative attributes, shame or self-loathing that we avoid copping to; for many of us it is just as difficult to acknowledge our virtues, our gifts and our natural intelligence.<br />
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To see <i>all</i> of this – not just how we highlight the positive and downplay the negative – is our gift. When we are courageous enough to unwind our habits, by first seeing them and being mindful of their existence, these elements conspire to produce the very best, most curious questions. These questions are far more interesting and are far more fertile than any treasury of answers we hope to unearth.<br />
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The best questions turn out to be those we avoid looking at, and cover up with our most clever justifications – questions that can open up our self imposed limitations; questions about how we do what we do, and why we do them; questions about how we hold back or how we deflect mindfulness. These embryonic questions rate far higher and deeper than the simple shortcuts we call <i>answers</i>. These questions are the jeweled treasure of mindfulness – maybe a little rusty and covered with dust, but precious, once uncovered.<br />
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As we are awakened by these questions, we come upon the verge of change. These questions allow us to finally score with mindfulness practice. We’re not just trying to enjoy ourselves more; we’re trying to be more <i>awake</i> – the true expression of mindfulness.<br />
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It has been noted that, for centuries, in the Buddhist tradition, there might have been an over-emphasis on the suffering that change brings us. More recently, in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition there has been more emphasis on the good news, such as our own inherent wealth and goodness; but I think it’s okay to revisit to the darker side of human psychology that comes out of the mindfulness-meditation tradition. The darker side tells us that all the very best, most profound questions arise from our difficulties, our pain, and our cognitive dissonance that begs and hollers for an answer.<br />
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As a pre-requisite to the answer, we need to have good questions, high-quality questions that we can chew on. With mindfulness practice, we become aware of all that we have not been paying enough attention to. All our goodness and all our terrible badness has been crying out for change, or tugging at us gently, but we just haven’t given it our full attention.<br />
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For our own benefit and for the benefit of the world, we must be fully awake and ready to face our darker, more obscure side – our self-deception. We have to. We must. We look at Orlando, Sandy Hook, rapists on campus, child molesters on airplanes – and we can’t just wince and turn away. As they say, <i>We Are Orlando</i>: our inability to face ourselves, for good or for bad, is rooted in the same inability as any perpetrator, with the blackest heart, that we see in the evening news. When I look at the video on YouTube of the guy with 264 rounds of ammunition, an AR 15, and a Glock easily hidden behind his shirt pants and pocket, I know we need to look at that which we don’t want to look at – our fear, our pain, even our horror.<br />
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Change comes from fearlessly recognizing our innate, indestructible goodness; change comes from fearlessly recognizing our terrible badness. Hopefully, our pursuit of mindfulness will not lead us towards ignoring either of these.<br />
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© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-54928884593989378892016-06-15T14:41:00.002-07:002016-08-10T18:25:50.412-07:00Blog #4 Every Name We Call, We Own<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is spring 2016, and here in America, we are deep into the season of passion and aggression. Earlier this week, close to 50 people were slaughtered at Pulse, the gay dance club in Orlando, Florida. That is certainly enough tragedy for one day…oh, except for the other 148 people that were killed by gunfire across America the very same day. <i>Two hundred eighteen</i>…that’s how many Americans were killed by gunfire that day.<br />
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And of course, it didn’t take long for the name-calling and finger-pointing to begin. But, that’s what we do, isn’t it? We assign blame. We want to identify who the enemy is, although the enemy is never “us,” it seems. Why is that? The vast majority of us are marked by passion; we are marked by aggression; we are marked by ignorance.<br />
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Our aggression may show up as nothing more than calling out “asshole” when someone cuts us off in traffic; it may show up as nothing more than pronouncing someone a “bigot” on Facebook; it may show up as nothing more than thinking, “Jerk!” when the guy across from us in the airport is talking way too loud on his cellphone while we are trying to read.<br />
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But wait...who are we directing our anger towards?<br />
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I didn't make up these examples. I have done all these things. I have that experience. I am an expert. I have been frustrated; I have been angry; I have been a bigot; I have been inconsiderate; I have been manipulative; I have been aggressive; I have been ignorant. And yes, I have much goodness in me also – I'm not just beating up on myself, but I am not blind to my own negative actions. I am unhappy with myself when I do thoughtless things.<br />
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When someone else does these same things, I get annoyed and think their actions are so much more unacceptable than mine. I dislike them with even more negative energy than I direct towards myself in similar circumstances. Why do I temper my own anger towards myself? Because I know that in the end, I have to take care of myself and minimize whatever damage I inflict. The question is, why am I not as aware of that need for self-care in others? I am not completely sure, and I need to remind myself to be more aware of my actions of body, speech and mind. What I <i>am</i> sure of, is that the reason I so clearly and precisely identify others' aggression, is because I have experienced that aggression in myself. It turns out that I am my own research model in my experiment to understand aggression.<br />
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A favorite saying from one of my favorite meditation teachers, Fleet Maull, goes like this:<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>"One of the greatest psychological insights that human beings have ever come up with is that the stuff that bothers us in other people is the most accurate and direct window into our own stuff that we can ever possibly want. So when somebody else is irritating us or doing something that we think is untoward, there's a good chance that if we turn the mirror and look at it the other way, that it's actually our stuff, or at least it's a strong correlate. Otherwise it probably wouldn't bug us very much. At any rate, that's where the juice is, that's where the learning is."</i><br />
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His and my teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, tells us that when we are brave enough to look at our own foibles, we won't find answers, but what is far better is that we allow ourselves to meet the questions we need to understand ourselves and to better interact with the world around us. What are those questions? <i>Who am I? What are these strange things that I do? Why do I do them, and what compels me to keep doing them?</i><br />
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These questions soften us up so that wisdom can enter our beings. As my friend, Melissa, suggested, they break up our addiction to certainty, because if there is one thing that drives our aggression, it is certainty. Extreme religious zealots are overflowing with certainty. I wish Omar Mateen could have lived with less certainty.<br />
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If we follow Fleet's lead, we might notice the parallel world of aggression: We might recognize that Rush Limbaugh’s vitriol undoubtedly starts with himself. We might recognize that Omar Mateen didn’t just hate gays, he hated himself for being gay-curious and then cranked that up into horrific violence. And then of course, there are are the Christian pastors who condone the killing of gays while citing scripture…and we all know what is in <i>their</i> hearts – yes; aggression and self-hatred. We know that because <i>we</i> know <i>our</i> aggression and self-hatred – hopefully not as extreme – but we know what it’s like, because none of us are wholly free from aggression.<br />
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We know quite well that we can’t fix others’ aggression; we can only work on our own. That is not terrible news, because it means that we are fully capable of opening up our own intelligence. We can allow the necessary questions to arise. We can see who we are. With the help of friends, acquaintances, therapists and/or meditation instructors, we can learn to absorb genuine feedback and take ownership of our own thoughts, words and actions.<br />
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We can grow the seed of our intelligence. According to Trungpa, we can take that seed of aggression and all the intelligence required to maintain it, and expand it outwards. That small dot of intelligence that labors so diligently at self-protection, can expand like a nuclear chain reaction.<br />
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A quick story.<br />
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A week ago, I was in a school gymnasium trying to exert some measure of control over the class I was about to perform with, and a huge, nonstop-talking, ninth-grader started to imitate me and make fun of me. As much as I wanted to make a wisecrack to put him in his place, I acted with decorum (even though I was rattled emotionally). I thought, “Well done!”<br />
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But that's simply not enough. As I thought about Trungpa and Fleet, I thought about the amazing intelligence that young ninth-grader possessed. He was extremely skillful at being noncompliant, as well as putting me down. One could say that he was masterful at what he sought to achieve. (And I should add that I have seen that same mastery in a third grader!) None of us welcomes or appreciates that kind of disrespect, <i>but man!</i> – it <i>is</i> crafty and it <i>is</i> intelligent!<br />
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My take away on that occasion? Instead of adding aggression to aggression, I need to recognize and acknowledge the fertile soil of intelligence in each individual, regardless of how it shows out. Rather than expressing anger, I could help others recognize the energetic brilliance that fuels their self-protection—even when it shows up as dullness or passive-aggressiveness. The bottom line is that aggression and ignorance is misspent intelligence. It is trapped intelligence, but it can be freed if we can learn to become more comfortable with uncertainty.<br />
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Truly dynamic intelligence is rooted in goodness, and self-acceptance. When not recognized and nurtured, it can cause us to die inside – and can potentially cost many innocent lives, as we saw in Orlando and across the USA last Sunday. When we, as a society, are unable to own up to our own aggression, we foment further aggression. And when that aggression is extreme and goes out of control, we need the resources to treat it professionally lest we create further suffering. Sadly, it's not likely to change, here, in this unending season of passion and aggression.<br />
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I am so sad for the victims and families in Orlando. I am so sad for us when our ignorance and aggression won’t allow us an opening to see ourselves, and we do and say mean things towards each other. Every name I call, I own. To remind me, I listen to Stevie Wonder sing Sting’s tune, <i>How Fragile We Are</i>.<br />
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<i>If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one</i><br />
<i>Drying in the colour of the evening sun</i><br />
<i>Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away</i><br />
<i>But something in our minds will always stay</i><br />
<i>Perhaps this final act was meant</i><br />
<i>To clinch a lifetime's argument</i><br />
<i>That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could</i><br />
<i>For all those born beneath an angry star</i><br />
<i>Lest we forget how fragile we are</i>
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© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-32837800485504770082016-05-19T15:18:00.002-07:002016-06-25T19:42:49.602-07:00Blog #3 Beyond the Dimming Fog<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
At this moment, I am in New York City, house-sitting for a family vacationing in Italy. I love coming to NYC to work because I find it easy to write when I am in unfamiliar environs. For instance, I have an unfamiliar refrigerator and pantry, which forces me to eat more simply; because I am travelling, I receive fewer calls and texts which reduces my activity; I don’t have my stereo, TV, car, musical instruments, etc., so hell…I might as well work.<br />
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I wrote my book, <i>When Bad Lands</i>, under similar circumstances. Two years ago, I was in NYC for five weeks, writing in a friend’s studio on the 11<sup>th</sup> floor on the upper west side. I worked hard on my writing, but when I needed to change the channel for my amusement (and for a quick energy fix), I would hit the elevator button, and in one minute, I would be walking down Broadway, where the world was jumping.<br />
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Two nights ago, I closed my laptop, descended onto Broadway and took the subway downtown to the Blue Note, to hear the legendary McCoy Tyner and to visit with my friend, Hope Martin. After the set, she and I discussed my recently completed webpage. I expected to sit back and rest on my laurels for having completed such a project, but she gave me some pushback. As she made comments about my work, I couldn’t help notice my mind drifting. I much preferred to plant my feet in the secure ground of what <i>I</i> had understood and unearthed, and I didn’t particularly want to listen to <i>her</i> observations, because her acute observations reminded me that I hadn’t really fully examined my own…in other words, there was still more I needed to investigate.<br />
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Hope provided me a mental sketch of what was coming into view for her, bringing together her experience as a long-time Alexander Technique teacher and a meditation instructor. Through her work, <i>The Shape of Awake</i>, she has observed the way people lock out awareness of the world around them, and how this shows up in their body and posture. When people hold attitudes, judgments, hopes and fears about how things are supposed to be, or how they are not measuring up, this all gets sublimated and transferred into the body. We’ve all learned that the mind and body are not separate, but it usually takes a build-up of stress for us to link these two.<br />
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Basically, when the mind’s experience runs contrary to the cocoon of habits we surround ourselves with, there is body tension. We go on lock-down. We busy ourselves trying to maintain and project an idealized version of ourselves or try to hold back our negative attributes, and by doing so, we limit our awareness and hold back on the world, as well. What is the result? We are not really in the world that surrounds us; we are trapped inside ourselves.<br />
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We’re probably quite familiar with this phenomena: the body tightens, the chest and throat tighten, the shoulders get tense, etc. As we know, these are signs of stress – signs of our hoping that things are otherwise, even when they are not. So we start feeling uncomfortable; maybe even angry. We feel a little off-balance; maybe even panicky.<br />
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As Hope explained this concept, a self-generated fog started to gather around me. Deeply shrouded in that fog, messages dimly reverberated in my brain, trying to be heard: <i>“Hey Alan, look – you’re being combative. You are being litigious. You’re trying to be right.”</i> (Of course, it is annoying to recognize this; but as I mentioned in Blog #1, the bane and blessing of my current existence is that I now admit to everything! I don’t want to, but I let myself admit to it. I let myself laugh, and I humble myself. I try to not be afraid of being a fool.)<br />
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Out of the mist, I begin to identify this schema I’ve concocted. I definitely hear Hope speaking, but my mind is struggling to sort out this confusion—which is that I am doing exactly what she has been describing! And yes, I am talking to myself in order to cut through my dullness…“Alan, not only is it true, what she’s saying, it’s happening <i>right now</i>, and it’s happening to you!” I feel my body tightening; I notice that I am not really listening; I’m preparing my rebuttal; I feel my body hunkering down...and here it is—<i>my body is doing exactly what my mind is doing</i>; it’s disengaging from the world.<br />
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Then it pops. It pops and I am grounded. I come back to my senses. I’m no longer lost in my body that is currently attempting to padlock my mind.<br />
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Hope showed me that the body creates a great deal of resistance when the mind is fearful or feels threatened. As the mind and body collude to resist the truth of things as they are – thinking that perhaps we are not good enough, or we are being unjustly challenged – we block our world. We try to manage this cognitive dissonance between the <i>world-as-we-would-like-it</i>, and the <i>world-as-it-is</i>. We generate unnecessary interference so we can remain comfortably ensconced in our habitual patterns. Why? <i>Because, we really don’t want to wake up.</i> It’s too unpredictable out there, so we dismiss the possibility of engaging with the vibrant, pulsating, unpredictable world, and it passes by unnoticed.<br />
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Hope recommends that we become extremely friendly with this strange diversionary behavior, because it is actually quite precious to us—these are the activities that have helped us survive. At least, we <i>think</i> they do. We want to be in this world of our own making, because we think that’s how we have always survived and have moved forward. We allow the body/mind to lock down, and close the gate to protect this private space, this comfort zone.<br />
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An alternate strategy is to get close to our own misapprehensions, work with them as they are, and own them. As the very astute sociologist, Brené Brown says, <i>“How can we expect someone to give up a way of seeing and understanding the world that has physically, cognitively, or emotionally kept them alive? None of us is ever able to part with our survival strategies without significant support and the cultivation of replacement strategies.”</i> In other words, we can’t simply extract our confused habits and toss them aside. As is said, nature abhors a vacuum, so those things that have sustained us all these years can’t simply be dismissed. We cannot reject who we are and who we have been, because the more we chastise ourselves, the more confused we become and we harden ourselves even more than we already have.<br />
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When we own our habits and own who we have been—when we don’t fight that—we soften. We might even begin to relax. When we relax our body and mind, <i>that</i> is the best wakefulness—as good as that of any saint or sage.<br />
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How we move to this zone, is to pay more attention to ourselves. We <i>can</i> practice being on the dot…being spot on. Perhaps we could take up mindfulness meditation, which helps us to be kind to ourselves and fearlessly pay attention to our ever-shifting states of mind. In this way, we learn to stay with ourselves and our discomfort over longer periods of time. When we see ourselves as we truly are, without rejecting any part of it, we relax and become friendlier to ourselves over time. Not to be too blunt, but when we feel kinder to ourselves, we stop feeling we’re such fuck-ups.<br />
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I am grateful to Hope to be reminded that this journey is never done. I’ve only just scratched the surface of trying to adjust my own screen – trying to adjust my moment-by-moment outlook—so my path forward will bear fruit through kindness and gentleness to myself. As a great teacher of mine, Sakyong Mipham says, it takes wave upon wave of gentleness for us to make lasting changes in ourselves.<br />
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Does the mind, alone, change the channel on our ever-morphing psychological state? Definitely not...and the body is its marker. The body is proof. It provides us with definite clues as to whether we are being receptive to this brilliant world or we are trying to shut it down. We discover that we can’t hide the body’s message from ourselves, and we don’t need a dimmer switch to help us survive discomfort.<br />
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Can we free ourselves from our body’s lockdown? How about daring to take an even further leap and be willing to admit this not only to ourselves, but to the rest of the world—or at least to our close allies? My guess is that the world will love it.<br />
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© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-70491600655310236352016-04-13T09:51:00.000-07:002016-06-25T19:43:12.519-07:00Blog #2 The Overlooked Dharma<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ask any self-respecting spiritual type what “The Dharma” is, and you will be told that it is the teaching of the Buddha. Well that’s partially true. Dharma is not just the teachings of the Buddha; it is also a class of phenomena that the Buddha observed. And what is that classification? <i>Things that are actually true; not imagined.</i> Dharma means truth, law, norm, and what it directly points to is how things really are in our world, free of spin, e.g., the earth orbits around the sun; you were born of your mother’s womb; you will suffer in this life; your body will age; at some point you will die. These are indisputable truths. They are equally true for Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, conspiracy theorists, emperors and salamanders. <br />
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What the Buddha pointed us towards was the irrefutable truth of dharma; he made no claim to know <i>all</i> the dharmas—he couldn’t possibly—he didn’t live in every time, and he didn’t experience every individual’s life. He didn’t know the dharma of building Trump Towers—although he certainly knew the dharma of manifesting as a Trump. Dharmas can be mundane observations or cosmic principles—the dharma of an iPhone or the dharma of forgiveness. For sophisticated 21<sup>st</sup> century beings who believe truth is just a relativistic term, the possibility that there can be a dharma—a truth that is free of culture, race, time and prejudice—is a gift to the world…and a very provocative one.<br />
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The Dharma of Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, also serves as a template for the remaining dharmas. For example, we can see that his Dharma wasn’t based on personal bias—it had to be unequivocally true. For instance, the Dharma does not include statements such as, “That guy down at the end of the bar—that one right there…he is a dick head.” Or, “Your attitude is entirely unacceptable and I don’t have time for you.” Or, “Some people are real downers…you’ve got to stay away from their negative energy.” These are not dharmas; they are our cherished opinions masquerading as non-negotiable truths.<br />
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If the Buddha ever made such statements, we would not have respect for him. He didn’t give opinions; he wasn’t ideological; he didn’t offer salvation for believers, nor did he offer eternal damnation for nonbelievers. He simply spoke of the Dharma of how-things-are; untainted by projection or exaggeration.<br />
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So what is this Overlooked Dharma? It is dharma that we mortals can experience—<i>dharmas born of the wisdom, experience and clear seeing of our own inherent wakefulness</i>. After all, wakefulness did not only happen in ancient times; there is much modern and ancient Dharma that was not disclosed by the Buddha. There is the Dharma that Jesus taught; the Dharma that Mohammed taught—there is even Dharma on Oprah.<br />
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I watched Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday and saw Brené Brown give an outstanding Dharma talk on the subject of <i>trust</i>. I was already familiar with her dharma teachings on <i>shame</i>, so I looked forward to her research and observations on this equally woolly subject. She unpacked the term, <i>trust</i>, and described its seven qualities. You can examine these for yourself if you’d like to do a search on the Internet; but the point is that she was teaching Dharma. She was teaching based on keen observations, not on speculation or opinion.<br />
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Another mother-lode of dharma was often expounded by my friend Tom. Tom was an Irishman who loved to tell stories—which always required some embellishing or BS, so he didn’t <i>always</i> speak the Dharma. But when he did, it came out like a sharp sword—inarguable and undeniable. Tom was a streetwise Dharma King. For Tom, who grew up poor and gang-afflicted in Brooklyn, being observant was an essential survival tool. Although Tom was unable to figure himself out at times, he could definitely figure out other people in a New York minute. He couldn’t always discriminate his own bullshit from the truth, but he could see through mine instantaneously—and to my great consternation and benefit, he was unable to keep it to himself.<br />
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Here are a couple of my favorite street-wise dharma observations from Tom: “If you are trying to figure out what to do in a difficult situation; first, look at the <i>best</i> thing that could happen, and then look at the <i>worst</i> thing that could happen. Now, make your decision based on that.” Or, “Everyone has positive attributes and everyone has negative attributes. You have more positive attributes than you have negative attributes; that’s why you're a friend.” Because I was willing to ride the angles of refraction off Tom’s insights, I absorbed many great insights and dharmas from him. When I went through my darkest times, I was always amazed that his street-smart observations were as valuable as those of therapists and buddhas.<br />
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Because students of the Buddha have such a brilliant example of someone who knew how to discern a dharma, and communicate it clearly, they can err and consider only the Buddha’s Dharma to be sacred. Because the Buddha was a dharma star, it is easy to forget that we, too, are supposed to learn how to discern a dharma for ourselves—not simply adhere to one sacrosanct set of dharmas. When we don’t understand that the spiritual journey is one of learning to discern the truth, we miss a <i>lot</i> of dharmas. We miss a lot of plain truths. We get hemmed in by our sectarian leanings and instead, stop doing the most important thing required of a so-called spiritual person, which is getting to know oneself fully, without recoiling from any uncomfortable truths that may arise.<br />
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What benefit is there when we gently and fearlessly know ourselves, and own what we do? We develop genuine compassion—the hallmark of all the world’s great religions and all enlightened human activity. Compassion is born of understanding ourselves, because without it, we cannot truly understand others.<br />
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This morning, while conversing with my best friend, we laughed at tales of my dear and wonderful dad who passed away a number of years ago. While being one of the finest people I’ve ever known, he—like the rest of us—had quirks and foibles that sprung loose at the oddest times. I recalled how he, like so many men of his generation, never really got to recognize or acknowledge how much work his spouse did to keep the household running. It wasn’t until my mom passed away that he finally had to come face-to-face with the dharma of how to to operate a wash machine. I remember how sweetly he expressed his long-overdue appreciation for her work, and how very humbling this was for him. I also recalled how my younger sister once had to teach him to actually look at his servers in a restaurant and speak to them like they were regular human beings.<br />
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Still, he was a very aware person, and I learned from him that we could reveal our seething irritations and blunders and laugh about how ridiculous we can be at times…like the time he purposely and repeatedly flopped his New York Times on the head of the airline passenger directly in front of him because the man tilted his seat back into my dad’s purported space…or the time we were at a drive-in restaurant, and upon receiving his handful of change, he put it in his mouth rather than putting the ice cream cone there.<br />
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We all have our moments where the dharma-of-what-is runs in high contrast to how we’d rather things were. We prefer not to acknowledge our actions at those times when we feel embarrassed about them or their unwanted consequences. (That we hide our embarrassing actions out of fear—that’s an overlooked dharma, too.) But to err is human—we've all had a foot or two in this boat of self-consciousness, trying to protect ourselves from being seen in an unforgiving light. We needn’t pretend things are otherwise.<br />
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A dharma occurs when we see the world as it is, free from projections, defensiveness and prejudice. One of the most potent repositories of Dharma is located in the back stacks of our personal library. There, the truth about ourselves is our passkey if we aspire to be fearless and own up to who we are. If we can’t embrace that aspiration, forget about religion, forget about your spiritual quest—none of it is going to flower until we really get to know ourselves.<br />
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None of it is going to happen until we fully appreciate our positive attributes, and stop ignoring our negative ones. Yes, it goes both ways—some of us hide from our goodness; some of us hide from our terrible badness. The key to become a genuine spiritual person is to stop lying to yourself about yourself. That’s the first Dharma…the primary Dharma. Without that, our Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Scientology, or secular humanism is just a screen-saver—a glossy and hypnotic diversion while our program rests on pause.<br />
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© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15890663175367455875noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5708904356961422749.post-16745832130819632142016-04-02T19:37:00.000-07:002016-06-25T19:46:04.774-07:00Blog #1 I Admit to Everything<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is 4 AM. I am awake and disturbed. I imagine I am not the only one going through this – there must be thousands of people in the world, who at this very moment are thinking, “How did I get to this place?” “Why am I such a mess?” or “Please let me get back to sleep!” to no one in particular. Our disturbances lie in the brain…everybody’s brain. If you don’t want to be disturbed, don’t look at the brain.<br />
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My brain, your brain…<i>all</i> our brains are intensely driven. They are also brilliant; they are <i>astounding</i>. The brain can execute even the most flawed psychological coding with extraordinary precision. We can update or re-program ourselves with the worst software if we so choose—and our brain will make it work. That can be problematic as our brain can quite easily hide mistakes in the background; it can distort our strengths and weaknesses so we don’t have to disrupt our programming; it can re-write our histories, and it can soothe all manner of contradictions so that we can justify any and all missteps. It can fly us too close to the sun, where we catch fire and burn.<br />
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What does this have to do with anything? On to the back-story:<br />
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Having taken well over a year to weather a painful but necessary breakdown, I decided to write a book about it. It was originally entitled, <i>Buddhist Wisdom for When You Feel Broken</i>. When I asked Michael Carroll, author of <i>Awake at Work</i> and many other titles, what he thought about my writing, he said I had a unique voice and story, “…but the title—it sounds like Pema*; but with tears.” (Michael’s a funny guy.) To pinpoint the book’s message more precisely, he suggested changing the title to, “Stop Fucking Lying to Yourself.” (Like I said…funny.) He also suggested I start right away on a second book.<br />
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His expletive-rich title stuck with me. He nailed it. It clearly identified the essential point I was trying to make—that we are so often trapped in our own story that we not only try to convince the world of it, we have the balls to try and convince our self. And we succeed. Why I find this fascinating is its applicability to self-identified “spiritual people” (like me) who feel they are essentially immune to self-deception by virtue of their spiritual practice.<br />
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I rewrote the book, entitling it, <i>When Bad Lands</i>. In it, I focused more keenly on the culture of lies and distortions we swim in, and what it would take to reverse that. The main diagnosis and antidotes were drawn from a number of sources, most notably my personal experience falling apart; some extraordinarily spot-on Buddhist teachings, and the work of social scientist, Brené Brown.<br />
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That seems to be a reasonable enough overview, right? Man loses self; Man finds self; Man writes a book about it. Up until this time, the driving force for me was to learn to overcome self-deception, and to hopefully reboot my spiritual pursuits and my meditation practice. It seemed to me that this was the obvious conclusion. I would start again with a fresh slate…a blank slate. Book written! Clean slate! Back to square one!<br />
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Go!<br />
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No.<br />
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It turns out that overcoming self-deception doesn’t mean that something is over; it means that something has just begun. As we know, nature abhors a vacuum; so in the budding absence of self-deception, I now find myself with a tsunami of self-perception. Surprise! It’s not peace and tranquility – it’s Perception! Lots of perception! Lots of self-perception! Didn’t see <i>that</i> coming.<br />
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On the surface, that might sound quite good; but it’s actually a mixed bag. Without a doubt, self-deception takes up way too much RAM, so if you can free yourself from that, the world can really open up. “Lots of Perception” is a definite plus and it can become increasingly stabilized through meditation practice. So it’s not something to acquire; it’s not something you strive for. It is something that shows up when your attention is not caught up in the past and the future. It’s a gift; that’s why they call it <i>the present</i>!<br />
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So here is the remainder in the mixed bag: I find myself now immersed in this new raw experience of witnessing <i>all</i> of my mistakes and confusion as they manifest. It’s like the genie in the lamp said, “Okay, you said you wanted to overcome your avoidance issues…<i>and</i> your self-deception? Alright, <i>Here Comes Everything!</i> Knock yourself out!”<br />
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So here it is…aggression, doubt, mistake after every mistake, irritation upon irritation—and there’s nowhere to hide it. I see that I interfere, interrupt, micromanage; I say irresponsible things and then I have to back it down to somehow regain the peace that I have shattered. So, I’m curious, audience—is <i>everyone</i> like this? Do we all slog through this parade of moving violations? As I look out, it doesn’t appear so. So let’s say, I’m a bit concerned. (I’m reluctant to use a smiley face, but :-)<br />
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Actually, I don’t feel terrible about this. I don’t mind admitting it at all, because I don’t feel it’s who I am; it’s just what I do. I have learned from teacher Fleet Maull that these habits are largely due to our unacknowledged <i>core wound</i> that we carry from childhood. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry; but for me, owning all this is a great gift that often causes much laughter between me and whoever is around to share in my circus. Mostly, I find it all very curious. I find myself amazed that as a long-time meditator, I have not discovered that legendary oneness or inner peace. I <i>have</i> discovered my inherent goodness, but I have also discovered my <i>terrible badness</i>. (He says lovingly!)<br />
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In following my own advice from the book, I really have done a pretty good job of <i>stopping fucking lying to myself</i>. I am confident that I have written a genuine Dharma book, and I feel my advice is good, but while in heavy pursuit of overcoming self-deception, I failed to consider that a clean slate would not be the likely or only outcome. Traditionally, the spiritual path allows us to really see what is there. So it is all there…for good and bad…and as in the title of this blog, I now have to admit to everything!<br />
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There are so many ways to talk about our goodness and our aspirations. But I think it is important that we talk about our goodness as well as our so-called “badness,” because what <i>is</i> spirituality if it doesn’t help us to know ourselves inside out and backwards as a prerequisite to whatever journey we are about to undertake?<br />
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So, it’s not pretty; it’s just necessary.<br />
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Am I the only one thinking thoughts like this at 4 in the morning? Probably not – people are feeling disturbed everywhere, at all times. At this very moment, I’m sure there are millions of people wondering how in the world their life turned upside down, and how they ended up where they are.<br />
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Anyhow, I wrote a book about this. I wrote a book how I fell sharply and precipitously into a hell of my own making. And then, through the help of an extraordinary group of teachers, I found a way to work with the situation. The results? Well it’s definitely a work in progress, but the result is that I’m having a really hard time being as ignorant as I used to be. Ignorance is bliss – it really is. But we can own it and challenge ourselves to take a leap in another direction.<br />
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I wrote the book, <i>When Bad Lands</i>, to give encouragement to people whose ignorance has caused them to malfunction—people who are spinning out, crashing and burning, all at once. I also wrote it for people who have concern or agreement about their spiritual practice perhaps being too biased towards peace or over-achievement. I hope you enjoy reading excerpts from <i>When Bad Lands</i>, (today I will post the first excerpt from the Preface.)<br />
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I write this because what I’ve described has been so painful, but so rewarding; therefore I thought it was worth sharing. I hope that you will feel moved to comment on the excerpts or on this blog. If it’s not your cup of tea, thank you anyhow, for dropping by!<br />
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*Pema Chodron, well-known American-born Tibetan-Buddhist monastic.<br />
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