Ornoth

How does one find the words to eulogize a true hero: a dear friend, a tireless mentor, a great benefactor, and a true inspiration?

When I did my first Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride back in 2001, my coworker Jeremy—who was doing the AIDS Ride—told me about a group training ride starting at Quad Cycles in Arlington. “It’s run by this guy named Bobby Mac… You have to meet him!”

So one weekend I went out and rode with them. Bobby was a charismatic older guy who was the obvious center of the group. He’d bark out endless advice about how to ride, always interjecting a characteristic bit of self-deprecating humor or belting out snippets of songs from the 60s and 70s. He’d shamelessly (but harmlessly) flirt with the ladies, who all adored him. On the road, he always stayed with the slower riders, mentoring them and offering helpful advice for how to both survive and enjoy whatever charity rides they were training for.

Bobby Mac made riding fun.

Like so many other neophyte riders, I started out wearing canvas cargo shorts and a tee shirt, riding a heavy, flat-handlebar “hybrid” bike. Over the course of thirteen years with him, Bobby sculpted me into a spandex-clad veteran roadie who rides 10,000 kilometers a year on his carbon-fiber road bike and has raised over $100,000 for cancer research.

But I am just one person out of hundreds and hundreds of riders whom Bobby has encouraged over the years. Himself an inveterate charity rider, he and his team of “Quaddies” were often top fundraisers and volunteer crewmembers for several of the largest charity rides in the area. If you added up all the good works performed by Bobby Mac and the legions of riders he has encouraged, the sum total would be staggering.

As you can imagine, Bobby Mac was a huge part of the local community. He recorded several PSAs on behalf of charity rides and local cycling advocacy. No matter where we went, we’d always run into people who knew him. Whether you were a cyclist or not, it seemed everyone was friends with Bobby Mac. No matter who you were, he made it very easy to feel like you were his best friend.

We also loved Bobby for his idiosyncrasies. It was a mark of seniority if you could say that you’d seen him ingest anything other than Cytomax sports drink. Back when the ride stopped at Kimball Farm, Bobby proved that his popularity extended even to barnyard animals, as “Buff the Powerbar-Eating Goat” would run up to the fence to greet him and receive a treat.

As he aged, Bobby suffered from macular degeneration which gradually eroded his eyesight. I once watched him nearly ride straight into a sawhorse barrier that a road crew had put up when one of our regular roads was temporarily closed. It was a mark of real trust if Bobby let you lead him through a charity ride on unfamiliar roads he hadn’t already memorized.

Due to his worsening eyesight, we all feared that Bobby would eventually be unable to ride. Knowing that his time was limited, in 2006 we organized the first Tour de Mac, a special ride in his honor, complete with tee shirts, rubber wristbands, and an award presentation for the guest of honor. In 2009 we held another ride to celebrate his 60th birthday, which I recorded with an emotional writeup and video. Everyone loved Bobby, but despite repeated operations to maintain his vision, we all harbored silent fears about how much longer he would be able to ride.

However, Bobby wasn’t destined to live long enough for his eyesight to fail him. Three weeks ago, Bobby went into the hospital, suffering from pancreatic cancer that had metastasized. It was terminal, and last night he passed away in his sleep at home.

When his diagnosis first became public knowledge, the hospital’s staff very quickly learned how special Bobby Mac was. They weren't prepared for the hundreds of his friends who came to visit his bedside. The nurses put up signs, limited the duration of visits, and still more people kept coming, sometimes queueing up in shifts of ten at a time outside his hospital room.

The first time I visited him in the hospital, I had something special I wanted to share with him. When a rider surpasses $100,000 in fundraising, the Pan-Mass Challenge gives them a silver pin with the PMC logo as a lifetime achievement award. I had received mine six weeks before Bobby went into the hospital, after 13 years of riding and raising money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

I wanted Bobby to know about that accomplishment, and how it was due in large part to his inspiration. And that if I was only one of hundreds of riders he’d encouraged, then he’d achieved a whole lot of good in this world. His characteristically self-effacing response was to shrug off his role and emphasize mine, saying that I had long been the most dedicated of his charity riders.

It’s bitter irony to me that the man who was my hero and inspired me to ride the Pan-Mass Challenge was taken from us by the very disease I’ve raised so much money to combat. It goes without saying that this year—my final PMC ride—will be dedicated to the memory of my hero: Bobby Mac. It will be a very emotional ending when I reach the Provincetown finish line for the final time and lift my bike over my head, consciously copying Bobby’s signature victory salute.

With his innate charisma and his natural role as the center of a circle of people, Bobby reminded me a lot of my father, or what he might have been, if my father had been motivated by kindness and generosity. In that way, Bobby has been a role model for me, an inspiring example of what a fatherly male figure could be—and could accomplish—in this jaded, selfish world.

There’s one particular exercise in Buddhist meditation called “Brahmavihara practice”, wherein we use visualization to cultivate our capacity for friendliness, compassion, and joy in others’ happiness. Typically, we start by directing compassion toward someone whom it’s easy to feel affection for, then slowly work our way to people we feel ambivalent about, and then challenge ourselves to work with people we find difficult or hateful. But we start with someone who is often referred to as our “benefactor”.

Years ago, when I started that practice and was asked to identify someone whom I felt unalloyed affection for—someone whom I considered my benefactor—one person’s name immediately jumped to mind: Bobby Mac. Bobby was my exemplar of friendliness, affection, compassion, and generosity. In my opinion, Bobby was the absolute embodiment of the concept of a “benefactor”.

Bobby’s presence and personality made everyone’s world feel much more friendly, much more optimistic. He put a whole lot of love and goodness into the world.

And he took a whole lot of love and goodness with him when he left: both the love of his many friends which was directed toward him in his final years, and also the love and goodness that have gone out of this world with his passing. For everyone who knew Bobby Mac, the world feels a little colder and more lonely without his energetic encouragement and his incorrigible smile.

Here’s to you, my friend, my mentor, my benefactor, my inspiration, and my hero. As you enjoined us at the start of every ride, we will do our best to “ride with love in our hearts and smiles on our faces”, thanks to you, Bobby Mac.

I won’t belabor the ask, but if you wish to make a donation to fight cancer in Bobby’s memory and sponsor my PMC ride, you can do so here.

Back in October 2009, I kicked off a planned year of intensive metta (lovingkindness) meditation practice (start, finish). Metta is one of the four Brahmaviharas, also known as the Divine Abodes or the Immeasurables. These are four key virtues that are absolutely central to Buddhism.

About halfway through that year of practice, two things happened. The first was that I decided that upon the conclusion of my year of metta, I would then proceed to the next Brahmavihara, devoting another year of practice to karuna, or compassion.

The second thing that happened was that I learned of a document called the Charter For Compassion. Given that I was already planning to devote a year to cultivating compassion, that title immediately got my attention.

The charter was initiated by a writer in comparative religion named Karen Armstrong. She had won the TED Prize, which is given to someone who has a particular vision of how the world might be changed for the better. Armstrong’s goal was to craft a document based around compassion and the Golden Rule which all major religions could support, and use that universal agreement as a springboard for the growth of compassion worldwide.

Six months later, shortly after I began my karuna practice, I learned that Karen Armstrong was about to release a new book, entitled “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”. She also planned to stop in Boston on her book tour, so of course I reserved a ticket.

This post is mostly my review of that book, plus my reaction to her local appearance.

The title is an intentional reference to the “Twelve Step” program of Alcoholics Anonymous. While I don’t consider that a particularly auspicious linkage to make, it makes some sense. Armstrong asserts that the root of the problem is our preoccupation with our own ego, something that provides short-term gratification but is a long-term poison, and that letting go of our small selves is akin to recovery from an addiction.

Unfortunately, where I think the parallel fails is that the development of compassion doesn’t naturally lend itself to that specific number of steps. So the steps, which should be logical and flow from one to another, come across a bit muddled and not very clear.

One thing I was particularly interested in was her methodology for cultivating compassion. This is, after all, her how-to book, and I thought it would be fascinating to compare her approach to the Buddhist techniques I was already practicing in my metta and karuna practices.

Well, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of her methodology is Brahmavihara practice! The essence of the book is simply a description of these popular Buddhist techniques, with the few expressly Buddhist bits secularized. There was surprisingly little material drawn from other religions, other than historical corroboration. On one hand, that made me feel a bit of pride about the Buddhist approach, but it also disappointed me, in that it offered me few new insights.

Still, if it helps other folks cultivate compassion and introduces them to Brahmavihara practice, I’m all for it! Unfortunately, this is where the book seems to fall down.

My impression is that the book was written for an audience of highly self-motivated intellectuals. It reminds me of a yoga book that shows pictures of the asana poses, but doesn’t describe them or go into any detail about how to achieve them. For example, the entire chapter on mindfulness—Step 5—is only seven paragraphs long! In no way is that sufficient for a layman to master a technique that meditators spend years developing.

Armstrong’s descriptions of the steps are not very clear, and are described en passant. The call to action isn’t clear, and the more expansive background material that’s provided is mostly of historical interest rather than practical instructions. So it feels like the Cliff Notes version of a book that should offer much more, and more practical, instruction.

What would such a book look like? Imagine if this book were put out by Wiley Publishing, and entitled “Compassion For Dummies”. It would take the reader through clear, basic, step-by step instructions. It would be succinct, but provide all the information needed for an uneducated person to understand what to do at every step of the way. In short, it would read much more like a how-to guide than an historical treatise meant to prove that compassion is a part of all the world’s religions.

On one hand, I couldn’t be more supportive of any effort to promote compassion in our modern society. But on the other hand, in order to successfully bring about substantive change, this needs to be a very practically-focused how-to book—one that speaks equally to lawyers, nurses, florists, and cabbies—and I think even well-intentioned people will find it doesn’t support and guide them as much as they need.

One final bit of surreal synchronicity before I close the book.

The twelfth and final step in Armstrong’s book is “Step 12: Love Your Enemies”. Two pages before the end of that chapter, Armstrong tells the story of Aeschylus’s drama “The Persians”. The play, which was staged only eight years after the Greeks defeated the Persians, surprisingly treats the Persian leaders as tragic, sympathetic figures. Armstrong uses this story to show the Greeks’ attribute of honoring their enemies. The central Persian characters are King Darius, Queen Atossa, and their son Xerxes.

In my previous blog post, I reviewed a very different book, one which depicts the history of cancer. Forty pages into the book, the author describes the world’s second earliest mention of cancer: the description of a Persian noblewoman who, after hiding due to the perceived stigma of a bleeding lump on her breast, had a Greek slave cut her breast off. The noblewoman is Atossa, years earlier. She humored the slave who had excised her tumor thus: although the King Darius was planning a westward campaign, Atossa convinced him to turn east, against Greece, so that the Greek slave might return to his homeland. This is what subsequently precipitates the Persian defeat related in Aeschylus’ play, that is cited by Armstrong. How bizarre that both these books—one on cancer and another on compassion, two of the larger themes in my life at the moment—would mention the same obscure Persian rulers!

Turning this review back to the positive, one thing I can say is that Armstrong is much more engaging and persuasive as a speaker than she is as a writer. Her talk was interesting, confident, and pointed. It also featured a clear call to action: her response to critics who said that the focus on compassion was “preaching to the choir” was that she “doesn’t mind preaching to the choir because the choir aren’t singing”, implying that although most people give lip service to the Golden Rule, they do not personify it in their daily lives. It was a very enjoyable talk, and quite inspiring.

I was accompanied by my dhamma friend Kaela, who also seemed to enjoy the talk. It was held at a synogogue in Brookline: the first time I’d been in a synagogue in many, many years. To my utter frustration, the first three topics that were brought up in the Q&A period were, in order: circumcision, Hitler, and the Holocaust. While I’m sure these are sensitive issues in the Jewish community, that degree of preoccupation reinforces stereotypes of Jews which I consider unfortunate.

If you are interested in the topic of compassion, I’d recommend taking a look at Armstrong’s Charter For Compassion. Feel free to read her “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, although I suspect it won’t be of immense practical use. Instead, I’d suggest looking into the original Brahmavihara practices, and one of the best books I can recommend for laypeople in that regard is Sharon Salzberg’s “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness”.

Time for a grab bag of Buddhisty observations based on some recent readings, dharma talks, and workshops.

At a recent talk, Ajahn Geoff was asked about the Buddhist concept of Right Effort: specifically, how to cultivate the discipline to perform actions you don’t want to do, but which you know will have positive results. To my surprise, he responded by outlining my longstanding belief that you must be guided by how you will feel on your deathbed about the choice you made. I’ve mentioned this guiding view of mine in blog posts from 2005 here and 2003 here.

My belief that the brahmaviharas of metta (lovingkindness) and karuna (compassion) are very similar was confirmed by Narayan at a recent CIMC workshop. The main difference is that compassion is more specifically targeted at suffering, whereas metta is a more general friendliness toward all, irrespective of the conditions of their life.

The phrases Narayan uses for compassion practice are “May I care for your [physical] pain” and “May I care for your [emotional] sorrow”. I feel that “May I” is semantically much weaker than “I do”, and “care for” is weaker and more vague than “care about”. So the phrases that speak to me most compellingly are “I care about your pain” and “I care about your sorrow”.

While on the topic of the compassion workshop, I should mention the following. Although I am currently halfway through my intended year of intensive metta practice, my current intention is to follow that up with a year of intensive karuna practice. That’ll cover the first two brahmaviharas, but I do not plan on devoting the same time and energy to the remaining brahmaviharas of equanimity and sympathetic joy.

When someone expresses dismay with the phrase “It’s not fair!”, I have always taken glee in pointing out that “Life isn’t fair, and you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed if you expect it to be”. I have recently begun to appreciate that although life indeed isn’t fair, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have compassion for those who suffer from life’s injustices, and take action to remedy them.

The two figures on the table behind the teachers’ platform at CIMC are Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (aka Guan Yin, Chenrezig), and Manjusri, the bodhisattva of transcendent wisdom. It seems a bit odd to have them so honored in a Theravadin meditation center, but it does underscore how relaxed CIMC is about borrowing from other Buddhist lineages.

We are often so preoccupied with planning about the future or reminiscing about the past that we aren’t paying any attention to the present moment. We must be present for our minds to process the sensory input we receive in each moment. If we are absent, one might say that we are “Out of our minds”. Are you “out of your mind”?

One of the observations in the Pali Canon is that our egos exhibit certain seemingly contradictory impulses: the desire to exist, and the desire to not exist. These can be seen, of example, in the desire to “leave one’s mark on the world”, or the parental impulse to live solely for one’s offspring’s benefit, losing oneself in something other than one’s own life. The Buddha stated quite clearly that these are not helpful preoccupations. However, many Buddhists also espouse the idea of cosmic unity: the view that we are all one entity, one living expression of universe, rather than many unique and separate individuals. To me, this seems to be just another, more politically correct manifestation of the desire to not exist. Submersion in some anonymous universal being is just as much a manifestation of the ego’s desire to find oblivion as any other human activity.

One of the ways that karma works is by one action setting up the conditions that influence one’s future state. For example, if we choose not to pay back a debt, we have created the conditions that cause others to mistrust us. Thus our bad acts indeed precipitate negative reactions from others, which impinge upon our future lives.

In “Walden”, Thoreau writes about mankind’s advancement of science and contrasting lack of progress in the ethical sphere thus: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Technology is a tool that multiplies our capabilities, but it’s up to man to create something meaningful with that enhanced capability, and our philosophies haven’t advanced in any meaningful sense in the past 2000 years.

One way of looking at mindfulness is being mentally and physically present and open to the beauty in each instant of life in its fullness. If there is so much beauty and joy to be experienced in this world (and I believe there is), that raises the question of how to avoid being overwhelmed by it. At any given instant, I am presented with all kinds of sensory input and myriad potential objects of attention; so if I am to appreciate any of it fully, how do I choose what part of that experience to focus my attention on? This difficulty is compounded by the Buddhist affinity for what is called “choiceless awareness”.

One of the reasons western society is so focused on acquisition as a method of seeking happiness is the very affluence we have achieved. Consider the experience of a child going through a mega-warehouse toy store. The child is presented with thousands of wonderful things that create and fortify his sense desire. But even though his parents might give him numerous toys that far exceed what children in most other cultures would have, no parent can buy everything in the store, so the overwhelming majority of that child’s experience is being repeatedly told that they cannot have what they want. This cultivates an incessant feeling of lack, which over time solidifies into a longlasting sense of dissatisfaction, with a particular focus on acquisitiveness as the solution to life’s inherent disappointments. The scenario of a child surrounded by toys—seeking happiness from material objects they cannot have—is played out throughout adulthood as we are enslaved by our compulsive desire for the newest electronic gadgets, a sleek car, a wonderful home with the nicest television and kitchen appliances, and a trophy spouse. But ultimately it is the very profusion of consumer goods available to us that makes us feel deprived, impoverished, and unloved.

Most American adults suffer from some form of self-esteem issues. As a result, our childcare and education systems have changed to place an immense emphasis on cultivating self-esteem in our children. Today’s youth have grown up in an environment where they are not criticized, they are not disciplined, and they never face emotional hurt. However, since they have rarely if ever seen one of their peers suffering and in emotional pain, they have also never learned the skill of compassion. And even if they do see another person hurting, their own lack of trauma means they haven’t developed the ability to empathize with another person. To one who has never been hurt, the sight of another person’s suffering brings up feelings of aversion and disgust and fear rather than compassion; others’ suffering becomes something that divides and separates people rather than unites them in sympathy. By putting so much effort into raising children with a strong sense of self-esteem, we have accidentally raised a generation of youth who are self-absorbed and stunningly lacking in the virtues of empathy and compassion.