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.

Buddhism and Its Branches

When someone tells you they are a Christian, they can mean a whole gamut of ideological and lifestyle choices.  Someone might be a celibate Roman Catholic nun.  Another Christian may be an Amish farmer. One might be a liberal Quaker academic while another is a deeply conservative, snake-handling Appalachian evangelical.  There are many flavors of Christianity.

The same goes with every religion including Buddhism.

I have trouble answering the question of what kind of Buddhist I am.  I have experienced a bit of various types.  Many years ago a guy I was dating at the time was a practicing member of Soka Gakkai USA, and we would chat together sometimes.  This is the same variety of Buddhism practiced by Tina Turner.

More recently another guy I dated in Colorado regularly goes on Vipassana retreats where attendees go for days without speaking, reading anything, or even making eye contact.  The meditant is deeply submerged in meditation and him/herself.

There are of course two main branches of Buddhism:  Theravada and Mahayana.  Tibetan/Vajrayana Buddhism is a third major branch that some classify as a type of Mahayana.

Frankly, I am not educated enough to know the clear differences between them.  The different branches share much in common and Buddhist retreat centers may have monks and lay practitioners of various types working together.  Here though is my emerging knowledge of this subject.  If any readers can share more light on the branches, I would be very grateful!

• Theravada (School of the Elders) is the oldest continuous Buddhist tradition.  It grew out of the earliest Indian Buddhist traditions and preserved many early Buddhist writings in the language of Pali.  Theravada flourished originally on the island of Sri Lanka before spreading to Thailand and Southeast Asia.  All Buddhists look to the Pali writings as authentic.  The Dalai Lama, a Tibetan Buddhist, has said that Buddhists should first look to understand Theravada Buddhism even if they belong to other branches.  Theravada Buddhists focus on reaching nirvana and thus becoming an Arhat but believe in this time period most beings cannot achieve Buddhahood.  I think of Theravada as Buddhism's Roman Catholicism/Eastern Orthodoxy.
• Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) is the Buddhism more common in East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan).  Zen Buddhism comes from this tradition.  Mahayana has a definite mystical quality to it.  There is an emphasis in Mahayana teachings on emptiness and the belief that all beings can reach Buddhahood.  In ways I think of Mahayana as Buddhism's Protestantism because there are elements in this tradition of breaking free of the need for priesthoods and a focus on individuals achieving Buddhahood directly.
• Vajrayana (Diamond Vehicle) or Tibetan Buddhism is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism that flourishes among Tibetans and Mongolians.  The Dalai Lama is one of this branch's key priests.  There are others too such as the Panchen Lama.  This school appears to emphasize various tantric practices (not sex!) to speed up achieving Buddhahood.  Thus, a person seeking Buddhahood as a way to better help others may identify -according to Wikipedia- with the path as much as the results.  So, perhaps you aren't a Buddha today but you can practice Buddha actions in speech, thought, and action today.  It is my understanding that Tibetan Buddhism also incorporates elements of the pre-Buddhism Bon religion originally practiced among Tibetans.

Since I currently do not belong to any sangha or congregation, I do not have a clear line of teachings from a single school that I follow.  Theravada's stripped down Buddhist basics appeals to me as does Mahayana's mystical practices and Tibetan's practical guides to daily living.  I guess I'll see where the road takes me.

The Buddha and Budai

This statue with the lit candle represents Gautama Siddhartha, the historic Buddha.
















This cheery wooden fellow on the right represents Budai, a figure in Chinese and other Asian folklore. Budai and the Buddha are often confused.  Budai is even known as the Laughing Buddha to make things more confusing, and he is associated with Maitreya, a legendary future Buddha who will return to the Earth when most of current Buddhism has been forgotten.  Maitreya is an accepted prophecy among some Buddhists.

Recently it has become fashionable to decorate with statues and images of Buddhas.  I have no less than 3 Buddhas and 1 Budai in my home.  Yet, there are no surviving images of Gautama Siddhartha from the first 600 years or so of Buddhism.  Many of our present statues of Buddha have elements from statues of Gautama Siddhartha carved in Gandhara in the 1st or 2nd century of the Common Era.  Gandhara was a kingdom in what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan.  Interestingly, the area became Hellenized through the invasion of Alexander the Great and his troops around 330 BCE.  Greek artistic influences created the first statues of the Buddha.

What did the historic Gautama Siddhartha look like?  We don't actually know.  Early Buddhist writings say he was a handsome man who had trained as a warrior when younger.  These writings praise his complexion. His early biographies say Gautama Siddhartha was born in what is today modern Nepal in Limbini.  He taught, lived, and died in northern India.  Ethnically, he belonged to the Sakya people.  When he was younger he lived a hedonistic life as a pampered prince.  Then he was an ascetic who nearly starved himself to death.  He probably had black hair like most South Asian people today.  In his days as a pampered prince perhaps he was a jolly, stocky man, but in his ascetic days he was almost certainly an emaciated stick figure of a man.  Traditional biographies state he lived until the age of 80, a very old age for his day.  Like all human beings, he changed over time.  

On Hope

I wrestle with the concept of hope as a Buddhist. I tend to consider myself an optimist, and hope is an arrow in my quiver of sunshine. After reading some of the works of Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, however, I've come to a place where I contemplate and wrestle with the complexities of hope.

One of Buddhism's central Four Noble Truths firmly identifies expectations as the root cause of suffering. The whole of Buddhist practice aims at awakening people to a new perspective to overcome the pain of unmet expectations.

So, hope can equate to an expectation; a false hope. A person can hope an external force -God, your boss, that cute guy who makes deliveries to your office- will fulfill a hopeful desire. We regularly tell someone who is sick that I hope you feel better. Then there is the advice to someone facing a possibly terminal illness: Hope for the best and plan for the worst. 

 Alexander Pope perhaps best sums up the realities of hope in his An Essay on Man:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blessed:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

(If you are like me, I had to look up expatiates. It means to write at length about something...or as Southerners might say, to go on and on about something.)

Hope is a fantasy about tomorrow that seeks to comfort or numb today's feeling of incompleteness or fear. To again quote Pope, hope never is, but always to be. This seemingly helpful and positive approach to living can become an escape from experiencing the Now -raw and uncensored so to speak- to instead cling to a possible tomorrow, a divine plan that will work things out, a fate or karma or destiny or something Out There that is going to make everything ok.

Such a viewpoint, however, runs against much of what Buddhism's core beliefs argue. Pema Chödrön's writing conveys some of this viewpoint. In surrendering a reliance on hope for a better tomorrow, we can come to realistically find our strength in experiencing the Now stripped of expectations of how that experience will play out. Chödrön gently writes about our grasping for something solid in an ever-changing reality. Hope robs us of the Now. It is imagining how the flight attendant will bring you peanuts and a Coke in a little plastic cup before you gently land -when in reality you are in free fall towards humanity's shared experience of mortality.

Frankly, who wouldn't want to grasp for the peanuts and Coke instead of plummeting for an hour...or 50 years... towards Death? And if no hope, what do you say to someone who is sick? ...Sorry to hear you're ill...Sure, you could say this, but you aren't really offering any solace that things will work out. And isn't that what we all want people to assure us: that things will work out?

To paraphrase the movie Mommie Dearest, this isn't Pema Chödrön's first time at the rodeo. She's been divorced. She has faced her share of life's hurdles. And she has come out of these experiences and her learning with something of a no nonsense, gritty Buddhism; the kind of pick-yourself-up-'cuz-no-one-else-will pragmaticism that offers the advice you give at last ditch interventions. Chödrön isn't cruel. She preaches a loving message of maitri or how to develop a loving relationship with yourself as your best friend. She does, however, urge people to lean into the sharp points -as her teacher would say to her- of our fears. Give up hope for a fantasy future and instead live in the uncomfortable, shifting Now. Chödrön teaches us that if we lean into those sharp points -neither running from our fears or impaling ourselves on our terrors- we will release all those energies we use to avoid pain. We will become stronger and find the energy to deal with our issues in the Now. And we will be dealing with our own issues personally rather than hoping for some external help. It's not a Buddhism you'd likely find marketed at a Disney store, but it is a path towards a perspective that alleviates suffering.

So, does this mean Buddhists should abandon all hope, all ye spiritual seekers who enter? Not necessarily. Even the current Dalai Lama uses the word hope from a Tibetan teaching:

There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.'
No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster. -13th Dalai Lama

Here is my personal interpretation. To alleviate our own suffering, we must be awake to the Now. If there is a God, gods, Fate, or some destiny in store for us, we cannot really know. So, we have to work with what we do personally experience. When hopes are fantasies that imagine some better future that takes us out of the Now into a dreamy future, then we have to learn to wake up from these hope-dreams. Likewise, when our fears play out movies of some dark futures, we have to wake from these fear-dreams. Developing a perspective that helps us stay rooted in our own abilities and the Now is key. Meditation involving focusing on the Now through mindfulness techniques is a practical skill to develop this perspective.

So, chuck the hope-dreams. What remains, however, is hope as empowerment. Change is constant. Today's enslaved people are tomorrow's liberated nation. History tells us things change. History also teaches us that the actions we take now determine the future.

This leads us to another key concept in the Buddha's teachings: our thoughts create the Universe. Now, this statement skips some steps so let's dig a bit deeper. First, we think of something. Then we choose to act or not act. Our actions or inactions create some or all of the conditions which come together to define the Universe. And here in this formula there is a place for hope-plans. In the Now we can envision a better future that we want to build. Our hope becomes a blueprint and plan. It remains rooted in the Now and within us to create. There is a clear understanding that this future may or may not come into existence. It will depend on what we think in the Now and do in the Now that will determine the changes in the Now of tomorrow.

So, my perspective is that Buddhist concepts of hope involve a subtle perspective that differentiates dreamy escapist fantasies where some external force will create a bright, cheery future from plans for a different future grounded in consciously acting in the present with our own personal skills to bring about this future. It's the difference from sitting on the couch and hoping to lose 20 pounds this year from going for a 2 mile walk and hoping that if you keep going for walks you will lose 20 pounds this year. One kind of hope releases us from responsibility and action but keeps us in whatever situation pains us. The other empowers us to know our present is our future.

Or, so I have come to understand from my own readings and ponderings.