Ornoth

Some very predictable reflections and expressions of gratitude on turning sixty years of age.

First observation: I don’t feel that old. Quelle surprise, right?

I seem to be blessed with better health and fitness at this age than many of my peers, and I credit most of that to my active lifestyle, especially my cycling.

In my experience, happiness comes from surprisingly basic, mundane pleasures: wind and sunshine, being outside in nature, physical activities like cycling and kyūdō that keep me in my body, delicious food, the companionship of other people and pets, and the comfort and security of a stable home.

Despite having had my share of wealth, accomplishments, and experiences, I don’t think those are a reliable foundation for a satisfying life. They are pleasant ways to assuage the ego, but one’s ego is a completely untrustworthy guide. I’ve been most satisfied when I’ve been of service to others, whether I found that through nurturing aspiring writers, writing software to improve medical outcomes, raising money for cancer research, or helping others find the transformative insights that come with a productive meditation practice.

I’ve been very fortunate to enjoy a life that was mostly free of struggle, trauma, illness, and pain. So many things came easily to me. My life has been blessed, relatively easeful, successful, and enjoyable. I’ll retire with a heart absolutely overflowing with gratitude and treasured memories.

There’s very little I would change. I have surprisingly few regrets and little shame. I should have done a better job with dental hygiene and my dietary choices. But my only source of deep regret is my relationships. Relationships are hard, and I’ve caused more hurt through selfishness or unskillfulness than I would have liked. If you were on the receiving end of any of that, please accept my sincerest apologies.

For whatever role you have played in my life, thank you. I’m especially grateful to anyone who chose to keep me company for an extended duration of time. And my deepest thanks and recognition to Inna, my life companion for 25 years and counting.

Be well, all!

As it spread across Asia and the rest of the globe, Buddhism changed and adapted to the local cultures it encountered; however, Buddhism’s core goal—freedom from suffering—and its core method—contemplative meditation—have perforce remained constant… until recently.

Thus it’s understandable that the 20th Century Westerners who went to Asia would come back with a unique version of Buddhist practice that ought to work better for those of us brought up in the West than the original article. The hybrid Buddhism that we inherited from them had been distilled down to the essentials that would most appeal to educated middle class White people like themselves.

That meant discarding inconvenient concepts and practices such as reincarnation, myths & deities, miracles & supernatural powers, ritual & chanting, merit-making, the more esoteric states of concentration practice, karma, renunciation, non-duality, and non-self. That’s how American Buddhism became divorced from Asian, and enabled a diminished “secular meditation” with all the uncomfortable bits filed off.

That decision made some sense, as several parts of devotional Buddhism are at odds with our Christian heritage or directly contradict universally-accepted scientific laws. But the stylized meditation techniques that have gained such popularity in the American mainstream have also lost sight of the actual purpose and point of meditation practice.

The most facile example of the trendy “Mindfulness Movement” is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Obviously, learning tools to cope with stress is a Good Thing, but I can’t help but be saddened by how much got lost when the goal of meditation was reduced from the “eradication of the root cause of human suffering” to “just help me get through my day”.

It’s as if everyone in Asia had been inoculated with a one-time permanent cure for diabetes, but we Americans have shortsightedly continued carrying blood testing kits and syringes filled with insulin, only treating the symptoms of the chronic disease as they arise day after day.

Another painful example is how big business and professional sports have co-opted meditation as a cheap tactic for “guaranteed career success” and “enhancing peak performance”, promoted by well-heeled management consultants and wealthy athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Derek Jeter.

I’ve participated in several sittings and talks run by prominent performance-oriented meditation gurus, and always felt deeply uncomfortable. Because at their core, these programs and prescriptions are diametrically opposed to what Buddhist meditation is all about. Whether it’s vanquishing your business or athletic rivals, these techniques are designed to promote selfish desires and goals which reinforce the ego.

In contrast, Buddhism guides the meditator toward the understanding that no worldly attainments can ever provide deep or lasting satisfaction; toward relinquishment of personal desires; and toward freedom from our unexamined enslavement to the insecure demands of the ego.

All too frequently, I hear proclamations from people publicly known as meditation experts that completely set my nerves on edge. In their own literal words, meditation can: lower stress levels, help you drop all distractions that may interfere with winning, enhance peak performance, aid in the reduction of how chronic pain affects the mind, help you cope with the aftermath of a disappointing performance, strengthen your drive, boost your belief in yourself and your ability, build your athletic identity, improve sleep patterns, speed recovery time, enhance endurance, aid in proper fueling, and help control oxygen.

I’m sorry George, but the Buddha had a far more important and fulfilling goal than “speeding recovery time”, “building his athletic identity”, and “controlling oxygen”.

Through tireless self-aggrandizement and promotion, many of these business and sports meditation gurus have grown rich and famous as a result of dispensing their advice. I’m going to leave that contradiction aside however, as it’s too obviously hypocritical to waste time discussing.

Attending these completely secularized meditative self-gratification programs is kind of like taking classes at a prestigious cooking school, but disregarding everything except how to microwave a frozen burrito. It’s such a waste! Buddhism has a larger mission and so much more to offer than empty self-affirmations and greed-reinforcing self-talk.

I’ve also observed that when teachers introduce meditation practices to naïve Westerners, most of the reported short-term benefit is due to peer pressure or the placebo effect. For the practitioners I’ve known, their initial months of meditation were uncomfortable and challenging before things settled down and the practice started producing its slow, gentle results. But Americans have been sold a persistent fable that meditation will produce immediate and noticeable relief; so that’s what people report, after just a few minutes alone with their unruly internal dialogue.

For all these reasons, the majority of Americans think of—and relate to—meditation as if it were just another self-improvement project: a way to be a far more powerful, unshakeable, invincible you.

While there are undeniable positive side effects of long-term meditation practice, it’s not about building up, improving, or perfecting the self; it’s about letting go of the self, and liberation from the tyranny of the ego.

And the ultimate goal of Buddhist meditation—which the Western mindfulness movement has completely forgotten—is the freedom and well-being that results from the eradication of suffering in our lives: something many self-proclaimed “meditation experts” have a vested interest in perpetuating and profiting from.

Every time I venture into the job market, I’m shocked and more than a little insulted by the job titles on offer.

Let’s be clear. I am a professional software engineer focusing on user interface design and development.

I am not a Ninja or a Jedi. Nor am I a Rockstar or a Guru or a Wizard. I am neither an Animal, a Unicorn, nor a Unicorn Tamer.

And yet, those are words I’ve seen employers choose when posting job openings in my field.

“Sure”, you say, “but those are just metaphors. What they really want are the best coders they can get.”

By way of reply, I ask you to consider the primary attribute of a person who would respond to such an ad. While confidence is usually considered a positive trait, someone who thinks of themselves as a ninjajedirockstarguruwizard clearly lacks the perspective and balance that comes with an equal portion of humility. Whatever the term, employers who use such superlatives are communicating that the primary trait they are looking for is arrogance.

“They’re just looking for energetic, motivated, go-getter types,” you counter. “And is arrogance really a bad trait for a coder?”

Absolutely!

First, let’s dispel the myth that arrogance (or even confidence) is correlated with competence; it isn’t. That’s a simple association fallacy. While confidence can be the outcome of competence, confidence can just as easily be a symptom of delusions of grandeur. And I know plenty of workers who, despite their obvious competence, struggle with their self-confidence.

With arrogance comes a disdain for others which easily hardens to contempt. With arrogance comes technical hubris and the belief that anything done by other employees (and certainly other companies) is inherently flawed and inferior. If you’ve been around the software industry for any time at all, you will have seen countless examples of NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here). Arrogance is the most pervasive threat to any business process that is based on teamwork, knowledge sharing, and mutual respect.

When I see a developer exhibit arrogant behavior, it’s usually because they lack the perspective that comes from real-world experience; they haven’t been in the industry long enough to be confronted with their own mistakes and realize their fallibility, nor to appreciate the ingenuity and expertise of other practitioners. If I’m really looking for the best coder I can find, I’m going to hire someone who has made their share of mistakes, acknowledged them, and been willing to learn from them and improve their skills by asking questions of others.

As you might imagine, I don’t consider myself a ninjajedirockstarguruwizard. Having successfully derived my livelihood from software engineering for the past thirty years, I have a pretty accurate understanding of my strengths, weaknesses, and the value I can add in any given situation. I do not hold the arrogant self-opinion these employers are looking for, nor do I want to work with colleagues who do; so as soon as I see such superlatives in a job listing, I simply delete it, unread, and move on.

There are additional reasons why I immediately reject such listings. By putting so much emphasis on the search for ninjajedirockstarguruwizards, employers are revealing some ugly things about their internal culture.

First, the company is exhibiting as much arrogance as the people they hope to hire. They believe that the company will (of course!) be compellingly attractive to the best coders in the industry. They think the best and brightest will be satisfied with the corporate culture, working environment, compensation, and growth opportunities that they provide. Ironically, once you look behind the curtain, you’ll find such companies rarely live up to their inflated self-opinion.

Second, the company devalues women. Immature titles like Ninja, Jedi, Rockstar, Wizard, and Guru generally don’t appeal very much to educated, professional women, who have struggled to be taken seriously even within their field. The few women who do interview probably won’t manifest the kind of arrogance that the company associates with “quality”. One further wonders what Asian expatriates must think of the casual use of culturally-appropriated terms like “ninjas” and “gurus”.

It’s unassailably clear that all those super-heroic job titles are designed to appeal specifically to adolescent boys. By emphasizing those terms in job listings, a company is telling me that their managers generally think of their development teams as a bunch of immature adolescents, and that I can expect to be treated in a correspondingly condescending fashion.

Sure, perhaps I’m being a bit humorless, but that’s just insulting, and not an experience I want to subject myself to. So I don’t.

Finally, I just want to confirm that the “Overly Zealous” and “Cookie Manipulator” in the title of this post did indeed appear as titles in job listings I’ve recently seen, along with “Enthusiastic”, “Audacious”, “Visionary Game-Changer”, “Badass” and “Programmer Extraordinaire”.

And one job specially asked for an engineer “with more cowbell!” (their exclamation point). Plus, believe it or not, one company sought a “Ruby Eating Python-o-saurus Rex”. What! The! Fuck! Yeah, that really shows that you will take me, my career, and the contribution I make to your company seriously.

And final (dis-) honorable mention goes to the listing for a “Principle Systems Engineer” (sic). I’m absolutely agog imagining what duties that might involve…

Update: My followup post contains a list of the more effusive job titles I saw during the two months subsequent to this article.

I recently completed my sixth “sandwich” retreat at CIMC: a nine-day non-residential meditation retreat that starts with all-day sittings on Saturday and Sunday, then evening sittings all week long, followed by another weekend of all-day sittings. All told, it adds up to about 50 hours on the cushion and a lot of sleep deprivation.

First let me relate some of the odd circumstances of the retreat.

Four days before the retreat, I had just begun my regular Tuesday night sitting at CIMC when we felt an earthquake shake the building. That was interesting.

Then, two days into the retreat we began feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy, which caused them to cancel Monday night’s sitting. It also canceled my planned trip to Foxwoods, and delayed the delivery of my new laptop for two days.

And then on Saturday, one of the cooks came in early that morning and fired up the stove and filled the building with natural gas, such that once everyone arrived at the center, the teachers chose to evacuate the building until the gas company gave an “all clear”.

So it was an interesting week. Combine all that with the usual sleep deprivation, a birthday, a doctor’s appointment, and my mother’s shoulder replacement surgery, it was pretty stressful.

Another interesting bit happened when I was outside, doing walking meditation in a local park. I looked down and saw the shackle of a padlock on the ground. Someone had used bolt cutters and cut the lock. When I’m on retreat, I’m always on the lookout for stuff like this; the obvious symbolism being unlocking one’s heart. It was only later that I read the word stamped onto the shackle: HARDENED… A very nice addition to the symbolism.

I really wasn’t expecting any major revelations. After all, this was my sixth sandwich retreat, and I knew what to expect: a whole lot of sitting and walking. But I actually came back with four major insights, which I’ll share in abbreviated fashion here.

One thing I’d been kicking around before the retreat was how much of our suffering is purely a fabrication of the mind. For the most part, when we’re suffering it’s because of an image of what things were like in the past, or how they are going to be in the future. If you stop and look at your real, present-moment experience, we’re almost never actually experiencing painful circumstances. It’s all just our minds telling us how bad things will be once we get to some future time. It’s like being afraid of shadows on a scrim.

Another item. I have a longstanding story that I’m different because when I meditate, no big emotional traumas come up. But this time I suddenly remembered something that does come up for me that doesn’t bother most people: physical discomfort! But how to work with it? It didn’t seem to me like there was much wisdom to be gained in just watching your own pain…

Well, I asked Michael in my teacher interview, and he had some great observations. He agreed that relaxing into the pain was a pretty useless pursuit. He also said that one could watch one’s relationship to pain, but that too wasn’t all that fruitful.

Instead, he recommended whole-body awareness as something that he’d found useful from his Chan practice, and that was later reinforced when I talked to Narayan. So I guess I’ll be trying a little of that, although I find it a challenge not to narrow the field of attention down to a specific part of the body.

Another thing that came up during a group discussion with Michael was the idea of continuity of mindfulness. He was of the opinion that it would be freeing and effortless, while I challenged him by asserting that it would be tiring and require continuous mental effort not to get distracted.

After talking it over with Narayan, I think the difference is between concentration practice and wisdom practice. In concentration practice (samatha), one must exert effort to continually bring the mind back from any distractions to the object of concentration (usually the breath); whereas wisdom practice (vipassana) is more relaxed, focusing on accepting present-moment life as it is. The only mental effort involved in wisdom practice is in staying in the present moment by steering clear of thoughts of the past or projections and planning about the future.

So in that sense, I’ve been spending a lot of time on concentration practice, and not so much on wisdom.

One final revelation actually related to the “homework” that usually accompanies the sandwich retreat. This year we were to observe when resistance arose and how we could detect it. I was pretty interested, because I tend to be a resistant type, and that resistance manifests as frustration, which then can sometimes escalate into anger.

For me, it was pretty easy to spot, because in most instances I started swearing to myself. Once was when I learned that a package I was expecting (my new laptop) hadn’t been delivered; another was when a magnetic card reader failed to read my card on the first swipe.

The connection between the triggers I observed was immediately apparent to me. In each case, I had an expectation that something would transpire in a way that was beneficial to me, and that expectation hadn’t been met. Even though they were minor things, they were upsetting because they impacted me. In other words, it was clear that the problem was that I was living from a place where my ego was dominant.

From there, I started playing with the idea of living from a place where ego wasn’t so central, relaxing my grip on my “self” (or its grip on me). I found that really interesting. Narayan cautioned me not to take the ego as a concrete thing; by viewing it as just a passing sense of self, I could avoid setting up a futile battle royal between my “self” and myself. Good advice.

So although I didn’t expect it, I came away with a number of things to work with, so it was a surprisingly productive retreat.

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”.

I just finished reading Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth”.

I’m not a big fan of Eckie. Like Landmark Education, he cherry-picks chosen philosophical points from various and diverse lineages and presents them largely as his own thinking. But more irritating to me is his penchant for making bald, specious assertions without bothering to support them with any argument or evidence. So I’ve got issues with some of his stuff.

The problem is that when he takes the time to explain his thinking, some of it is actually very insightful. His writing tends to be very accessible to people, and he’s gathered a loyal following. And I’m glad if anyone can instill any kind of spiritual change in our modern society.

The new book has more insight and fewer unjustified sweeping conclusions. Taken largely from Buddhism, it delivers one of Buddhism’s more difficult concepts (non-self) in a pretty palatable way.

The book is largely a deconstruction of how the human ego works, and its causal linkage to our inability to find happiness. If that sounds like a tough slog, it can be, but Eckie’s good at taking such stuff and making it real for people, and he does a good job of it here.

Not that I think this is a book for the masses. He assumes a fair level of familiarity with philosophy, meditation, and self-knowledge. In my opinion, this is an awesome book for someone who is partway down the path; it’s definitely too esoteric for a complete neophyte.

I’m not going to summarize the book here, since it’s chock full of subtle but vital points. But here are just a few nuggets that struck home for me.

Here’s one that amused me, because Eckie came to the same conclusion I did about the Existentialists: they got it right, but then wrung their hands over it, rather than figuring out how to live an ethical life based on their beliefs. “Some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, such as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, recognized alienation as the universal dilemma of human existence, probably felt it deeply within themselves and so were able to express it brilliantly in their works. They don’t offer a solution. Their contribution is to show us a reflection of the human predicament so that we can see it more clearly.” Thankfully, at least one group took the next step in human ethical development.

Here’s Eckie’s summary definition of enlightenment. It boils down to pure truth, although it does kinda hide the important implications of achieving that state. “Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate.” As I said in this blog post, your life is not what you *think*.

Tolle’s definition of karma was somewhat interesting. According to him, karma consists of the deeply-ingrained patterns of thought that you developed in the past, combined with unconsciously acting those patterns out through your behavior. In short, karma’s kinda like Socrates’ “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He’s emphasizing the importance of evaluating your thought patterns and behavior in every moment.

“Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.” This is definitional; if you’re looking for happiness, that means you haven’t got it, and you never will get it until you stop looking and realize that it’s not something you find or aquire at some other point in time. Happiness is something you *are*, not something you find or acquire.

“When you make the present moment, instead of past and future, the focal point of your life, your ability to enjoy what you do—and with it the quality of your life—increases dramatically. […] On the new earth, enjoyment will replace wanting as the motivating power behind people’s actions.” This is interesting, because it confirms that wanting is the source of suffering, which comes straight out of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. And it also points to the powerful joy to be found in enjoying the present moment. These are truths I have long lived by and can attest to.

Here’s a related observation about ego. “For the ego to survive, it must make time—past and future—more important than the present moment. The ego cannot tolerate becoming friendly with the present moment.” We are preoccupied with me, my potential, and my struggle to realize that potential. Every day, today—now—is perpetually viewed as nothing more than an uncomfortable interstitial state, a means to an end. It’s just the ego’s way of minimizing the importance of and distracting us from the all-important present moment.

Here Eckie addresses the question of how you set goals if you only live in the moment. “An enlarged image of yourself or a vision of yourself *having* this or that are all static goals and therefore don’t empower you. Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an *activity* that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole.” In other words, goals should not be things you *become* or *acquire*, but things you *are* or *are doing*. That puts them in the present and also makes them immediately actionable.

Finally, I want to describe something that happened to me as I began to understand Tolle’s explanation of the mechanics of ego. Basically, everything finally clicked for me, and it wasn’t merely a revelation about ego and non-self.

Looking back, I’ve spent much of the past seven years in philosophical inquiry and increasingly-earnest Buddhist practise. I’ve read thousands of pages of both source material and scholarly discourse. I’ve listened to over a thousand Dharma talks. I’ve spent man-months in formal meditation, both in retreats and in daily practise.

Over that time, I’ve become increasingly familiar with the Dharma, and gradually incorporated it more and more into my life. However, the Buddhist concept of non-self never really sunk in until now.

And now that it has, I think I’ve finally reached a turning point. I *know* the Dharma. I may not know every last little detail, but I know a lot of it. I want to say *enough* of it. It suddenly struck me that—in one sense—I’ve come to the end of the path. There’s nothing more I need to learn from written canon or Dharma talks.

I get it.

That’s not to say that I have mastered its application. Knowing the mechanics of surfing doesn’t mean one can go out and do a fins-free snap off the top. Actually living the Dharma is a lifetime’s practise, and much more difficult than merely understanding it. However, I think I can say that I know everything I need to know. Now it’s just a question of applying that knowledge, which, trust me, is challenge enough!

For some reason, the MBTA is the best place in the world for me to practice Buddhism.

First, it’s where I listen to most of my dharma talks. Sure, there’s talks every Wednesday at CIMC, but I listen to more of them on my iPod, from a number of really great teachers. I listen to talks on grocery runs too, but the MBTA is the place where I digest the majority.

Second, it’s where I run into the most people, and the most diversity. The brevity of subway interactions makes it the perfect place to try out changes in one’s mindset and the behaviors those mindsets produce. Buddhism isn’t very useful unless it’s practiced in engagement with the real world, and the T is about as real as Boston gets!

Finally, I really don’t meditate that often on the cushion, nor get very much out of it. But for me, subway rides seem to evoke a certain philosophical state of mind that lends itself to the kinds of spontaneous insights people crow about having on the cushion.

Ironically, last Wednesday I had a pretty major insight on the subway, on the way home from the dentist, where I’d had an old filling replaced. It worked out great, because two hours later I was on the cushion for the regular weekly sitting at CIMC, which provided me with the opportunity to explore the insights I’d gained.

This posting is my attempt to record and describe those insights. It’s written more for me than for anyone else, so if you read it, bear in mind that these aren’t fully formed and polished for public consumption.

In fact, the ideas here will probably not jibe with your own. There are elements that will run strongly counter to the beliefs of my more “intuitive” type friends, and there’s a couple points that will equally annoy the logicians. In either case, I’m posting this more to explore and organize my own thoughts than seeking feedback.

Please understand that I’m not saying any of this is “truth”, even for myself. And I’m not looking for debate or argument about what the “truth” is. This is just my attempt to record a series of ideas that I think might aid my understanding of some key Buddhist concepts.

I cited a very pertinent truth in my review of Siddhartha: “Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.” So bear that in mind, too. What might be insight for me might sound patently obvious to you, or even utterly wrong. Oh well. Arguing about it won’t change anything.

So with all those disclaimers, here’s the stuff.

There are these three concepts in Buddhism, all of which haven’t made much sense to me yet. They’re called dependent origination, no self, and karma.

Dependent origination has always been explained to me thus: nothing that exists or happens occurs independent of some preceding condition. Everything that exists is predicated upon a set of preceding conditions. That is, nothing happens or exists all by itself, without cause.

Okay, that’s nice. Big whoop. In a word, DILLIGAF? What possible philosophical value does something so inane have? I mean, this is one of the most core tenets of Buddhism that gets mentioned repeatedly. I’m pretty sure Buddha himself is quoted as saying that if you know the Four Noble Truths and Dependent Origination, you’ve got everything you need. What’s the big deal?

Well, extend the metaphor to thought. Forget the idea that we control what we think; any fifteen minute meditation session will readily dispel that idea. That’s practically the first thing you learn when you sit. No, most of our thoughts arise in patterns that are in direct response to certain conditions.

What are those conditions? For the most part, they’re sensory input. If I see a particular thing, I’m likely to think certain associated things in response. If I feel a certain tickling, I’ll think there’s a mosquito on my arm. If I hear someone say something, I’ll respond in a way that’s pretty predictable for anyone who knows me.

While you might be able to exert a small degree of control, and there might be a modicum of randomness going on, the overwhelming majority of our thought is comprised of ingrained habitual responses to the sensory input we receive. And, of course, our thoughts are the conditions which drive our actions. We are essentially nothing but reaction machines, bumping into the world and reacting mindlessly to it in an immensely expanded version of Brownian motion.

That’s what I think dependent origination is trying to point at: that our thoughts, like everything else, are just autonomic reactions to the conditions around us. We think we’re the author of our own thoughts, and we’re fascinated by our selves, but if you really look at your own thoughts, you’ll find your mind is full of well-worn ruts that we traverse over and over again. We re-run the same thoughts—and let’s be honest, they’re really not very deep or complex at all—and it’s as difficult for us to veer out of those habitual patterns as it is for a hamster to change the direction of his Habitrail.

That’s also where I think “no self” comes in. If the world—including us, our thoughts, and our actions—is merely one immense chain “reaction”, and we’re all operating on autopilot, then is there really such a thing as a “self”? What am I, if I am just a collection of semi-autonomic learned reactions to external stimuli? We think of our “self” as something definitional, something essential, and something we control, but can we even say that it exists, when even our thoughts—the very things we use to define “me”—are wholly predetermined by our habits and predispositions?

To illustrate: at this point, the ideas I’ve described are sensory input that has been fed to your thinking process. And most people who read this will now be having thoughts that are their habitual—usually negative—reaction to the idea of determinism. So are you not even now playing out some of your tired old habits of mind?

This seems to me to also drive the definition of karma. Contrary to the simplistic interpretation, karma isn’t about being rewarded or punished in a future life for your behavior in this life. Nor is it some puerile idea of cosmic fairness, where we later will reap the results of meritorious or unwise actions.

Karma is exactly this: your habitual reactions and patterns of thought predispose you to certain kinds of experiences, interactions, and outcomes. If you always view the view from a victim’s point of view, you will only see the ways in which you are victimized, and you will continue to be a victim. If your thoughts and habits are those of an unhappy person, you are very likely to continue to be an unhappy person. The way you think, which is largely formed in childhood and became well ingrained in adolescence, makes you what you are. This is karma.

However, Buddhism does include something of an escape pod from complete determinism. We know that we cannot control our reactionary thoughts and habits, but as I asserted earlier, most of those habits have been learned. In theory, it should be possible to indirectly influence our thinking, to un-learn our old habits and train ourselves to react to the world with new patterns which aren’t as inflexible, adolescent, and self-destructive.

If you can, through practice, create ever the slightest space between perception/stimulus and reaction/response, you have a chance to get inside this reaction engine and maybe change your response.

Humans are singularly blessed. We are the only species on this planet with the ability to see our own mental and emotional programming. And it is this facility which allows us to—hopefully—influence that programming by examining our knee-jerk reactions and replacing them with more mature, compassionate actions. It’s neither a short nor an easy path, and replacing our mindless habits is very arduous and frustrating work.

And the most frustrating part is this: how many people actually do it? How many of us examine our programming, our mindless patterns of behavior, and then pursue the arduous task of changing? How many are even aware of their programming? Sadly, it’s a bogglingly tiny minority.

But this, I think, is exactly what Buddhism is pointing at when it talks about “the unconditioned”: the ability to bring a freshness of mind to each new situation, in a way that is well-considered and compassionate, rather than based in mindless reactions, adolescent insecurities, and the confusion that comes with acting out of the ego. And the unconditioned is just a synonym for nibbana.

So these are the thoughts that have been circling around my head this week. And yes, these thoughts also are as dependent upon conditions as any others. I’m just fortunate that my life conditions brought me to Buddhism, that I happened to be listening to a somewhat pertinent dharma talk, and that I was in a fertile practice space like an MBTA train, so that these thoughts could occur.

I hope these ideas represent progress in understanding concepts like dependent origination, no self, karma, and the unconditioned. And if they have any value for you, I freely share them. As with everything in Buddhism, realizing something is the first step toward freedom, but it’s also the easiest; putting one’s realizations into practice, especially in daily life, is the real, ongoing challenge.

So, having just finished William Barrett's "Irrational Man", I was parsing my local Barnes and Noble for other works on Existentialism. I just can't get terribly excited about plowing through the original works of Nietzsche or Heidegger. I'd plowed all the way to the end of the alphabet before I came across a thin trade paperback with an ugly green spine. But what really caught my eye was the title: "The Wisdom of Insecurity". Well, that certainly has an Existential ring to it; I picked it up for a closer look.

The back cover was even more promising. Here are excerpts from the two reviews printed on the back:

"The wisdom of insecurity is not a way of evasion, but of carrying on [...] It is a philosophy not of nihilism but of the reality of the present—always remembering that to be of the present is to be, and candidly know ourselves to be, on the crest of a breaking wave."

"How is man to live in a world in which he can never be secure, deprived, as many are, of the consolations of religious belief? The author shows that this problem contains its own solution—that the highest happiness, the supreme spiritual insight and certitude are found only in our own awareness that impermanence and insecurity are inescapable and inseparable from life."

Well, that corresponds rather stunningly with my own belief that although life has no inherent meaning, that lack of externally-mandated meaning is incredibly empowering, because it gives man the freedom to infuse his life with whatever meaning he chooses. So I picked the book up and blew through it.

One interesting fact is that the book was originally published in 1951, about the time of Existentialism's prominence in postwar Europe, and seven years before Barrett's book. It also was well before the study of eastern religions became fashionable in the US.

Eastern religions? What do they have to do with Existentialism? Well, Barrett's book actually documents that there are some very strong similarities between Existentialism and the eastern philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism, which accept the finality of death and assert that life is without inherent meaning, while providing us with examples for accepting those facts without lapsing into nihilism.

Beyond that, the author of "The Wisdom of Insecurity", Alan Watts, is widely-known as a master in comparative religions, and as an interpreter of Zen Buddhism in particular. In fact, "The Wisdom of Insecurity" doesn't talk about Existentialism at all. While it's certainly not a book about Buddhism, either, it does focus on a topic which is the foundation of both Existentialism and Zen: how to deal positively and productively with the belief that life is finie and has no inherent meaning.

I have to say, of all the philosophical books that I've read in the past year, this one is by far the most impressive, because it concerns itself less with stating the problem, and more with how to respond to it.

The first chapter does review the conundrum of modern western man.

"Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees—unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death. [...] But what are we to do? The alternatives seem to be two. The first is, somehow or other, to discover a new myth, or convincingly resuscitate an old one. [...] The second is to try grimly to face the fact that life is 'a tale told by an idiot', and make of it what we can. [...] From this point of departure there is yet another way of life that requires neither myth nor despair."

The second chapter describes how man's knowledge of the past and future often overpowers our ability to live fully and completely in the present. Worse yet,

"if I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week's meals become 'now.' [...] To plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absured than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me 'absent'."

Chapter three introduces the great Platonic schism, the division of man into the theoretically "eternal" conscious seat of thought versus the earthly, temporal seat of passions and infirmity. It also describes the confusion that results from mistaking thought and theory with chaotic, unpredictable reality.

"Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be 'intelligible' in this sense is to want it to be something other than life. [...] To feel that life is meaningless unless 'I' can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch."

The logical conclusion of the Platonic separation of mind and body is revealled in chapter four.

"The brain, in its immaterial way, looks into the future and conceives it a good to go on and on and on forever [...] We are perpetually frustrated because the verbal and abstract thinking of the brain gives the false impression of being able to cut loose from all finite limitations. It forgets that an infinity of anything is not a reality but an abstract concept, and persuades us that we desire this fantasy as a real goal of living. [...] The interests and goals of rationality are not those of man as a whole organism."

Chapter five refutes the traditional western preoccupation with security and permanence.

"There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature momentariness and fluidity. [...] If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. [...] What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful [...] The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security. [...] The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call 'I.' [...] Any separate 'I' who thinks thoughts and experiences experience is an illusion."

Chapter six reveals that a positive experience of life depends on fully experiencing the moment that is 'now'.

"It means being aware, alert, and sensitive to the present moment always [...] Once this is understood, it is really absurd to say that there is a choice or an alternative between these two ways of life, between resisting the stream in fruitless panic, and having one's eyes opened to a new world, transformed, and ever new with wonder. [...] There is no rule but 'Look!' [...] By trying to understand everything in terms of memory, the past, and words, we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view."

In chapter seven, Watts continues on this theme, but adds to it the Zen concept of the unity of creation.

"When, on the other hand, you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full [...] The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. [...] When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. While there is life there is hope—and if one lives on hope, death is indeed the end."

Chapter eight continues the theme of living 'now' fully.

"If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. [...] The more my actions are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am incapable of enjoying any pleasures at all. For all pleasures are present, and nothing save complete awareness of the present can even begin to guarantee future happiness."

The final chapter returns to a review of religion and a prospect for a genuine spirituality based on Existential principles, and the futility of basing fulfilllment on some future post-death state.

"It is one thing to have as much time as you want, but quite another to have time without end. [...] We desire it only because the present is empty. [...] To those still feverishly intent upon explaining all things, [...] this confession says nothing and means nothing but defeat. To others, the fact that thought has completed a circle is a revelation of what man has been doing, not only in philosophy, religion, and speculative science, but also in psychology and morals, in everyday feeling and living. His mind has been in a whirl to be away from itself and to catch itself. [...] Discovering this the mind becomes whole [...] In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself."

Unfortunately, that hardly does justice to the insights described more fully in the book. Still, it will give you a flavor of Watt's thought, some of the commonalities between Zen Buddhism and Existentialism, and how accepting both death and the essential meaninglessness of life need not lead into nihilism nor despair. It certainly hasn't done so in my experience!