On Being

Our minds constantly seek to be something in the future:  to be rich, to be doing something, to be with someone. Yet ironically the mind shies away from just being. To sit in the present and observe life is a challenge.  Thus I'm coming to view the mind as an organ of future thought and memory reorganizing. I'm not sure what to call the faculty that peacefully observes the present without needing to judge and categorize it. Meditation brings out this Observer. 

Was Gautama Siddhartha a Real Person

One of the most sensitive subjects in religious studies is whether a beloved religious figure was an actual, historic figure. Even for those people for who there is actual historic proof they lived, their lives are often shrouded in myths and legends. 

I have a number of thoughts on this topic. For one, does it matter if the teacher existed in the way our stories say?  Or are the teachings important?  I guess this depends on one's perspective.  

For example, can Christians find meaning in a Christianity with no historic Jesus or resurrection?  Does the Mormon church fall apart if Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon and there were no golden plates or guiding angel?  Does the Torah stand if there was no Moses?

In turn, what if the Buddha is merely a legendary amalgam of different people and their teachings?  Can Buddhism survive on its message if there is no clear messenger?

To this question, my personal answer is yes as a Buddhist.  After 2500 years, it is challenging to separate myth and history regarding Gautama Siddhartha. For me, the practice and teachings are what I find helpful and of importance. I would certainly like there to have been this one genius Buddha who expounded these teachings and served as a role model. Nevertheless, my belief system does not require a Buddha anymore than I need to know the essence of Italian cooking was developed by one incredible chef to be able to take delight in Italian cuisine.  The recipes live on and develop. I suspect Buddhism similarly developed.  And if there was a historic Gautama Siddhartha, I suspect he would want us to focus on the practice. 

Being Anchored

One form of meditation is called "tonglin" and focuses on visualizing yourself smiling, happy, healthy and surrounded by light. Then you visualize someone you love being happy, smiling, healthy and surrounded by light.  Then you proceed to visualizing the same for a person for whom you have neutral feelings. Finally you visualize this happy light around someone with whom you are having a troubled relationship.  In each visualization you picture yourself smiling and laughing with the other person. 

This meditation has produced some amazing results in my life. It has helped me deal with strong feelings of anger with other people.  It has helped me find peace and even joy working with previously difficult people. 

Today when I meditated and turned to a tonglin sitting, I realized that the anchor of this chain of joyful visualizations is the self. If one cannot first anchor yourself in love for yourself ("maitri" in Buddhist terms), then it is impossible to share this light with others.  Loving compassion for our own humanity and selves is the gateway and anchor for compassion for others. 

The Challenges of Happy Times

I think everyone enjoys it when things are going well, and we are happy.  Yet happiness also has some challenges when it comes to meditation practice. At least in my experience when I am unhappy meditation is a release. It is a way to sit down and contemplate balance and a mindfulness of being in the now. When I'm happy I'm often lost in little mental movies of all the future delights I'm expecting. Thus when I'm happy it is more of a challenge to make myself sit down and meditate. It is more of a challenge to find the balance in my life. It is harder to put down a happy expectation that it is to let go of an unhappy present. Good times also often mean that one is with friends and loved ones.  When one is in a new love or deeply in love with one's longterm partner, it can be very challenging to find the balance of not being attached to people.  

Yet meditation gives me balance. It also helps me to balance my relationships. Being mindful does not mean that you cannot love people. It also doesn't mean that you are necessarily going to become detached from them. In my experience, however, it does help me to keep a proper balance. This means for me that I do not look to make myself happy through another person.  It also means that it I keep my balance and realize that I am not here to make other people happy. That's their job. Likewise it is not their job to make me happy.  

Meditation helps me step back and evaluate all these feelings and emotions and actions on my part. It also helps me to shut off my thoughts for a bit so that I can regain it counterbalancing focus. Yet I do find that happy times are more challenging in terms of keeping my focus and meditating regularly. I've learned, however, that consistent practice brings me better quality of life, better balance with relationships, greater compassion, and an inner peace. 

The Peace of The Temporary

Spring is coming.  The ice in my driveway from almost two months of below freezing temperatures was largely melted last evening.  Winter can seem forever, but it ends.

The other night my partner and I watched the first episode of Orange Is the New Black.  It is a series about an upper middle class bisexual woman who once carried a suitcase of money for her lesbian lover who was a drug dealer.  As a result she has been sentenced to 15 months in a women's prison in New York.  It is based on a true story.

There is a character in the prison nicknamed Yoga Jones.  She is an older woman who teaches yoga and seems to follow a Buddhist or at least yogic tradition.  The main character, Piper Chapman, is in shock at being in prison, and Yoga Jones gives her this interesting piece of advice:

Yoga Jones: Do you know what a mandala is?
Piper Chapman: Um, those are those round Buddhist art things.
Yoga Jones: The Tibetan monks make then out of dark sand laid out into big beautiful designs. And when they're done, after days or weeks of work, they wipe it all away.
Piper Chapman: Wow, that's, that's a lot.
Yoga Jones: Try to look at your experience here as a mandala, Chapman. Work hard to make something as meaningful and beautiful as you can. And when your done, pack it in and know it was all temporary.

I found this exchange really meaningful.  I am preparing for an important job interview, and I am finding preparing my job talk a rather anxiety-filled endevour.  This morning as I meditated I came back to this dialogue from the show.

One could look at the work of the monks on the mandala as futile or as a depressing analogy to death and mortality.  Nevertheless, I think the message is about happiness.

The joy of living is giving your heart and attention -your love if you will- to the present moment without worry about the future.  The future will always -ALWAYS- sweep away the past.  Religions die.  Cities crumble.  Professors retire.  Servers crash.  Heaven and happiness are found in the moment.  Placing each bit of colored sand and revelling in the beauty is important.  That broom will come whether the mandala is perfect or not.   Dye your sand.  Place it with care.  Relish the puzzle.  Laugh.

On Being Awake

Sometimes I contemplate just what Gautama Siddhartha meant when he talked of being awake.  The very title Buddha means the one who is awake.  A number of people I've known have thought being awake was a poetic way of describing the far more profound experience of enlightenment.  The term nirvana describes being in a state of enlightenment.

In movies and books, enlightenment seems very ethereal.  Sometimes it even comes with superpowers.  And when you die you just evaporate and ascend into a higher state like Star Wars' Obi Wan Kenobi. Enlightenment seems really different than my life of work, family, blogging, meditation, and going grocery shopping.

The thread I see in Gautama Siddhartha's teachings, however, emphasizes a very pragmatic focus on living in the Now and obtaining skills which anyone can learn.  So, the other day when meditating I think I may have awakened for a bit.  It seems somewhat grandiose to claim I have reached enlightenment, but perhaps I just have in a way.

For most of my day and even in my dreams, my mind plays out an endless series of movies in my mind. Some involve the past where I rehash old memories and often in the process reconstruct them based on my current understanding of the situation then.  More often than not, however, these mental films focus on what I should be doing in the future or little scenarios of what may happen.  I endlessly ponder what all is on my To Do list, what needs to be done next, and how to do it.  Sometimes I imagine scenarios that turn out badly with people shouting, rejecting or disapproving of me.  Perhaps I'm late with a project or I'm not attractive to them when I ask them out or I somehow am just not good enough.  These negative projections in my head create a huge amount of fear and anxiety.

On the flip side, I sometimes daydream of things going just as I hoped.  I win the lottery.  My current favorite restaurant is going to have the yummy broccoli casserole on the menu today when I go there for lunch.  My blog becomes immensely popular.  Aliens land and hail me as their God-Emperor. ha

For the years I have been meditating, the work comes in trying to still these movies.  It is hard work trying not to think.  Then the other day I just paid attention to the Now.  I made a breakthrough in mindfulness to get all technical.  I heard the garbage truck outside picking up the weekly trash.  I could hear my cat lightly snoring.  I could smell the comforting aroma of last night's dinner and my partner's scent.  I felt the parts of my skin that felt warm and my ice cold feet.  I could taste the tea I drank with breakfast.

When I looked inward at my body I could feel the tension and anxiety drawing my shoulders together.  I was balled up in a slight way as if expecting someone was about to hit me.  And I could mentally trace these fears to the mental movies that had been playing in my head earlier.

When I tried to survey my emotions just in that second, I felt this kind of splashing ocean of feelings going in every direction.  I could identify an emotion only when I asked about an object or situation.  Otherwise, emotions were like asking What's the color of now?  Well, that plant is green.  The lamp is brown.  Yesterday's underwear in the hamper is red.  Emotions and characteristics attach to objects and situations.

So then I went deeper and asked who I was observing this.  What did I feel.  And I felt nothing.  I didn't have a color or an emotion or even an identity.  I simply was the calm Observer.  It was peaceful.  I didn't have superpowers.  I couldn't move things with my mind (I've tried!).  I simply was awake to the Now.  The mental movies of memories, expectations, and fears were stopped while I observed what was happening in me and around me now.

I've pondered this state a lot.  I've tried and got better at entering it when I'm not meditating by being mindful of this exact moment and what is going on with it.  Strangely, there is this kind of miniature shock like when you are concentrating and someone suddenly turns off the radio that has been playing in the background or knocks on your door.  My attention shifts from a mental place to an awareness place.  I awake.

I am new to this path.  I'm sure there are many more experiences down the Middle Way from which I will learn.  Perhaps I will find enlightenment is something more, but I increasingly think the Buddha was teaching us to awaken to the Now and learn to turn off the mental movies.  To be awake in this way opens a whole new perspective to life which I will examine in another post later.

A Belief without Superpowers

From The Golden Child movie to the wonderfully Buddhism-influenced anime series Avatar:  The Last Airbender, being enlightened or connecting to this state appears to give you superpowers.  Some Buddhist stories alledge Gautama Siddhartha had superpowers such as the ability to remove grass from a polluted well or to calm a drunk elephant.  Yet, a number of animal trainers have been known to calm crazed animals by approaching them with calm.  Many of these miracles appear to me to be legends attached to the story of the Buddha or 'superpowers' known to exist in other people with the proper training or attitude.  After all, Hindu holy men in India walk on hot coals, sleep on beds of nails, etc.

When the Buddha was asked about miracles and performing them, he pointedly said:

I dislike, reject and despise them.

The Long Discourses of the Buddha, A Translation of the Dīgha Níkāya by Maurice Walshe, Wisdom Publication, Boston 1995, p. 176

I think there is ample room for other Buddhists to contradict what I'm about to say, but I do not think Gautama Siddhartha had superpowers.  He grew old and died.  The core of his lifelong message was that anyone could wake up with proper training and living in the Now.  He pointedly viewed theism, astrology, miracles, and expectations that something outside of ourselves would save us as ultimately unknowable, frustrating, and counter-productive.  The more I study Buddhism the more I find the core message to be wonderfully mundane.  Superpowers seem extraneous to this message.

Years ago I found this image comparing Gautama Siddhartha and Jesus.  I forget where I found this image, but the Christian author meant this as a way to show Jesus was divine and the Buddha was not.  Yet, this image helped push me to consider Buddhism.  Frankly, if I met these two men today, I would think Jesus was crazy unless he performed some miracle right then and there which I could see and experience.  What this image claims for him is supernatural in much the same way a belief in Zeus or Frigga would require me to believe stories outside of my lived experience -and untestable by me- were real.  Did such beings really ever exist?  Are there practical applications and messages to my life that do not require me to suspend belief and have blind faith?  How can I tell if a prophet and the stories later written down by his/her followers are true other than by faith alone?

I came to Buddhism because in this image and in teachings, Gautama Siddhartha's practices seem applicable to my daily life.  I can be an atheist, Muslim, Christian, etc. in my thinking on my ultimate fate, I believe, but Buddhism teaches me how to live today.  The Buddha doesn't seem crazy and/or supernatural.  There is a minimum of superpower stories and mumbo-jumbo to cut through.  

At least, my own construction of my personal Buddhism increasingly emphasizes a very pragmatic view to Buddhism.  Many other people seek spiritual guidance in their daily lives and find it in Christianity, Islam, Wicca, etc.  So, as Anais Nin reminds me:

We see things as they are, we see them as we are.

So, I do not mean to offend or demean other spiritual paths.  For me though, I seek a pragmatic spirituality that pairs with science and reason.