Ornoth

Since ancient times, mankind has been preoccupied by a quest for “freedom”. Even in today’s somewhat enlightened society, safeguarding our “freedom” is an almost daily topic of conversation.

But I wonder how many of us have ever made the effort to formulate in words exactly what that term means to us. And if you don’t know what freedom means, how can you possibly successfully attain it?

Freedom!

For me, freedom has three main components: choice, independence, and ethics.

First is the freedom to choose between alternatives. Where a man has no choice to make, there is no freedom.

And to be truly free, that choice must be largely independent of external influence or coercion. A man who is coerced or misinformed is not able to freely choose.

And finally, “freedom” has no meaning unless a person can make decisions based upon the values and beliefs that he holds as the product of his upbringing, education, life experiences, emotional makeup, and philosophy.

As a bonus aside, I’ll assert here that a person’s values are most often a uniquely individual balance between benefit to oneself and benefit to others, where the latter category might be further subdivided into one’s “in-group/family” and “outsiders/others”, however broadly or narrowly one chooses to make that distinction.

So that’s my operative definition of personal freedom; now let’s consider whether we do a good job attaining it…

We humans like to think of ourselves as complex, multifaceted, and diverse, as the pinnacle of evolution, and imbued unique capacities of intellect, free will, discretion, morality, and freedom of choice.

How ironic then that, across all cultures and times, the overwhelming majority of human behavior can be reduced to two very simple principles:

• Get more of the sensations that we perceive as pleasurable, and
• Get rid of the sensations that we perceive as unpleasant.

This two-line algorithm is not only sufficient to describe almost all human behavior, but that of nearly all animal life, down the simplest amoebae and paramecia. If it’s pleasant, move toward it; if it’s unpleasant, run away from it. It’s poignantly emblematic that the Declaration of Independence, one of mankind’s most cherished documents, proclaims “the pursuit of happiness” as a vital and basic “unalienable right” of all men.

What does it say about our vaunted sense of freedom and individuality if 99% of all human thought, feelings, and behavior can be boiled down to a ludicrously simple two-line program, the exact same one used by the most tiny, primitive unicellular organisms? Where is freedom to be found in slavishly obeying that biological imperative?

Here is where the Buddhist in the audience has something to contribute.

Without judging anyone’s individual spiritual practices, I would assert that Buddhism is not fundamentally about stress relief, quiescing our thinking, blissing out, self-improvement, earning merit for future lives, extraordinary experiences, psychic abilities, or deconstructing the self. Those things may or may not happen along the way, but I think that the core goal of the Buddhist path is breaking free of our instinctual programming by first understanding that we habitually live under a false illusion of freedom, then gradually learning how to find genuine freedom by ensuring that our thoughts, speech, and actions are driven by conscious, values-driven choices, rather than never-questioned blind reactivity and maladaptive habit patterns.

Realizing that pleasure and discomfort are the central drivers of our biological programming, the principal line of inquiry for Buddhists has been cultivating a more skillful and beneficial relationship to these influences. A key tenet is the principle of dependent arising, which describes the chain of cause and effect that explains how our relationship to desire creates our experience of dissatisfaction. My distillation of it goes:

• Because we are alive, we have senses.
• Because we have senses, we experience contact with sensory objects.
• Because we experience contact with sensory objects, we experience sensations. These sensations are immediately perceived as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral at a pre-verbal, instinctual level. Let’s call that the sensations’ “feeling tone”.
• Because our perceptions produce these low-level feeling tones, we instinctually relate to the pleasant ones with desire, the unpleasant ones with aversion, and are mostly disinterested in the neutral ones.
• When our desires and aversions arise, we react with craving and need, becoming entangled and increasingly attached to having things be a certain way in order for us to be happy.
• Because of our attachment to things being a particular way, in a world where we control very little and where change is inevitable, we suffer when our needs and desires are not met, and even when our desires are fulfilled, we become anxious knowing that it’s only temporarily.

This is the sequence of events that leads to our experience of dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, suffering, and unhappiness.

Of course, if dependent arising were an immutable progression, it wouldn’t be of any practical value in our quest for freedom. But there’s one key step where — with sufficient mindfulness, wise intentions, and skill built up through patient practice – we can pry open a tiny window in this sequence of events and grasp our one opportunity to consciously choose a different response.

And that window of opportunity presents itself in how we relate to our sensations. It’s telling that, looking back on what I’ve written above, aside from “pleasure”, the other word that appears in both my two-statement definition of human behavior and the Buddhist principle of dependent arising is “sensations”.

A Buddhist would say that the only place where we have the opportunity to influence our unrealistic expectations is found in how we relate to our sensations. If we can see our perceptions clearly and in real-time, as well as the pleasant/unpleasant/neutral feeling tones that they evoke, we can wake up from our unexamined habit of letting those feeling tones blossom into the reactive craving and aversion that drives most of our subsequent thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In each moment, if we can bring mindfulness to our sensations and our reactions to them, we can consciously choose to respond in a way that is less compulsive, less harmful to ourselves and others, and better informed by our values.

When it doesn’t harm ourselves or others, pleasure is a vital part of living a fulfilling life. However, our dysfunctional habit of blindly following pleasure and running away from discomfort needs to be balanced by wise intentions like purpose, mission, and ethical values that are more complex but also more advanced in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this sense, the traditional Buddhist monastic way of life may go a bit too far in its inclination toward banishing or vilifying pleasure, rather than seeking a middle way that allows one to wisely examine, engage, practice with, and potentially master one’s relationship to pleasure and aversion.

Note that this isn’t the same as saying that “life is just suffering” or that one has to avoid pleasure and resign oneself to pain. What I’m saying is that we can learn how to relate to our desires and aversions more skillfully, rather than being mindlessly led around by them. And that is the only path to true freedom and living a fulfilling life of integrity, wisdom, and joy, and a life that is in alignment with our innermost and highest values.

Rhonda, one of my meditation teachers back in Pittsburgh, used to liken it to commuting on a familiar route. Taking the main highway might require the least mental effort, but it might not be the best, fastest, safest, or most pleasant route. The only way to know is to cultivate the ability to choose something different: something other than what comes to mind automatically.

Then she would describe her commute home on Ohio River Boulevard. She could stay on the highway, but the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had thoughtfully placed a big traffic sign indicating (the town of) “Freedom” with an arrow indicating the off-ramp (that’s it, above). True freedom is exactly that kind of off-ramp, giving us an opportunity to get off the limited access highway of compulsive reactivity and mindless habit.

If you want to be truly free – not satisfied with the mere illusion of freedom and the suffering that it entails — you need to be able to see beyond desire and aversion, beyond reactivity and habit. Freedom means being fully awake in every single moment, willing and able to make real, meaningful choices that are informed by one’s ethical values.

The key to success is developing the skill to be awake enough in each moment to avail ourselves of that little window in the chain of dependent arising, where our perceptions of pleasure and discomfort, if unexamined, can blossom into untempered desire and aversion. If you will excuse me hyper-extending an apocryphal truth: in terms of manifesting wisdom and living an ethical life, the price of freedom is eternal mindfulness.

Or so it seems to me.

Major milestones don’t come as frequently after 18 years of meditation practice, but this month provided a big one in my burgeoning role as a teacher: my first time having the honor of offering the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts.

Taking the Refuges & Precepts is the most fundamental Buddhist ceremony, and is frequently offered at meditation retreats.

The Three Refuges are a public statement of confidence in the historical Buddha as a regular human who came to a profound and useful understanding of how the human mind works; the Dhamma, or teachings he gave based on that understanding; and the Sangha, the community of like-minded practitioners. It’s helpful for meditators to relate to these vows as more descriptive of how one feels and where they are currently at in their practice, rather than something proscriptive that someone else is imposing upon them.

How important these vows are in the context of your practice, the specific technicals details of what they mean, and the consequences of breaking them are entirely up to the individual. You can view these as a solemn public statement that you are “A Buddhist”, or you can simply consider them an unnecessary holdover from uncomfortably devotional Asian Buddhist practices, or anything in-between. The Refuges & Precepts are only as solemn as you want them to be.

The Five Precepts are voluntary ethical practices that prompt the practitioner to increase our awareness of the skillfulness of our thoughts, speech, and actions, and to reflect on their impact upon our inner wellbeing.

The Precepts in particular can be uncomfortable for meditators brought up in the Abrahamic religions, where they can come across sounding like the Ten Commandments. However, the similarity is very shallow. A practitioner can adopt all, some, or none of the Precepts. In modern formulations, each Precept not only includes refraining from a particular unskillful action, but also cultivating a corresponding beneficial one.

In addition, taking the Precepts is completely voluntary, and there’s no requirement or pressure involved. They aren’t an edict imposed by some arbitrary external authority, but something one chooses for oneself because of the value and benefit one expects to receive by working with them. And there’s no one handing out punishments for failing to keep the Precepts.

Finally, the Precepts are vague, and (I believe) intentionally so. They’re meant to urge practitioners to look inside themselves and explore the subtleties of what their heart tells them is ethical and skillful. You would think that the precept to refrain from killing living creatures would be pretty straightforward, but our modern society raises complex questions in the ethical grey area that we must all face. Does that mean you can’t kill troublesome insects? Even accidentally? Does it rule out compassionate euthanasia or assisted suicide or abortion? Does it mean we cannot eat meat? And isn’t killing plants still killing a living being? And it’s the same with all the other Precepts; they encourage us to explore our own internal values and how well our real-world actions conform with them.

So that’s what the Refuges & Precepts are. Let’s get back to me…

I first took the Refuges & Precepts in April 2006 at Cambridge Insight, two years into my practice. I’d devoted enough time and study to be confident that I’d found a good home base for exploring how to live my life in accord with my inner values. When I took the Refuges & Precepts, it was deeply meaningful for me.

Over the years I gained knowledge and experience as a practitioner, then began slowly moving into teaching. The Refuges & Precepts were always in the back of my mind, and I hoped that someday I would be able to offer the ceremony to others. But I didn’t feel confident enough to volunteer until recently, now that I’ve got five years of regular teaching under my belt.

But it was the timing that forced my hand. I’ve always felt that the Refuges & Precepts should be offered in May, on the holiday of Vesak, which Buddhists observe as the day of the Buddha’s birth, his enlightenment, and his passing. When my Monday meditation group started lining up our May teaching schedule, they granted my request to take two consecutive weeks — May 9 and 16 – to offer the ceremony.

As the date approached, I sent out an introductory email to the group. After all, this would be very different from our usual sitting and dhamma talks, so I gave people fair warning and set expectations, and sent along the translation we’d be using. It’s worth noting that following the Covid-19 pandemic, the Monday group is still meeting in an online videoconference.

I think people heeded my warning, because only six people attended the first session, about half our usual size. My goal for the evening was to go over what the Refuges & Precepts are – the information I covered above – leaving plenty of time to answer questions. The explanation seemed sufficient, as there were only a couple questions.

The second session had seven people, as we lost one of the previous week’s attendees but gained two new ones. After a quick recap for the new people, I took a couple more questions, then segued into the actual ceremony.

In short, we read the Homage to the Buddha, the Refuges, and the Precepts. For each, I encouraged people to recite them with me in English, then I chanted the Pali version (and anyone who wanted to join in was welcome to), and rang the meditation bell. Because doing this online would have otherwise been a mess, I asked everyone to keep their microphones muted. It seemed to work out fine.

I wanted to follow CIMC’s custom of following the ceremony with a shared social celebration, and I’m really glad I did, because it helped me convey my joy and how special an event it was. For some people it was their first time ever taking the Refuges & Precepts; it was the first time the Monday group had offered them; it was, of course, also my first time offering them; it was the day of Vesak, the most important Buddhist holiday, observing the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and passing; and the Monday group’s fifth anniversary is close at hand. And talk about auspicious: there was even a lunar eclipse! It was a wonderful opportunity to share with each other the joy of our practice together, and seeing it bearing fruit.

I probably don’t need to repeat how pleased and honored I feel at being able to offer this ceremony for the first time to a dedicated group of friends and practitioners of varying levels of experience. For me, it was a resounding success, and a huge milestone in my meditation practice and my growth as a teacher.

Now I just have to turn around and teach Dependent Origination two days later to the other group I sometimes lead!

I suppose an end-of-year update is in order, since I haven’t posted to my main blog since last August.

It’s ironic that my last post covered Inna’s and my summertime trip to Maine, visiting my mother as well as my brother, who had made his annual trip from his west coast home on Vancouver Island.

Ironic because for more than three months now I’ve been back in Maine, caretaking my mother, who has repeatedly bounced back and forth between hospital and nursing home. After several weeks managing it alone, my brother joined me here, so we’re both dealing with another unwanted Maine winter. The only person missing from making this a full repeat of our summer visit is Inna, whom I’ve barely seen at all since last September.

So no Inna, no biking, no Begemot, no job hunt, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas. In their place there’s nothing but snow, ice, and freezing cold, amidst long, dark months spent inhabiting Maine’s fine medical institutions.

It’s hard to look forward more than a day or so. Mom’s health is a perpetual roller-coaster ride; meanwhile, there’s the added stressors of managing her finances, trying to dispose of her accumulated belongings, finding a nursing home placement for her in Pittsburgh, and figuring out how to transport her there. And lo! here comes tax season, when I get to file taxes for two!

To make this vacation extra fun, over the holidays I contracted a really nasty influenza. While that gave me recourse to avoid holiday familial obligations, it cost a solid two weeks of weakness, nausea, coughing, and other unpleasant symptoms that I’m just coming out of.

And I have to admit a very deep-seated depression regarding the election and the prognosis for American democracy. For whatever misguided reasons, the people have ceded control to a selfish, petulant, xenophobic, entitled, compulsive liar who seems intent on systematically dismantling everything America once stood for: quaint, 19th century concepts like truth, ethics, democracy, justice, rule of law, fairness, rationality, integrity, respect, and compassion. It’s astonishing and demoralizing to anyone who still believes in those averred American values.

Meanwhile, the people—from whom all power emanates—stay willfully and myopically focused on things that don’t really matter. It was painful to see so many people wishing “Good riddance to 2016”. If the loss of Prince and Princess Leia (sic) upset you that much, then I have some sobering news for you: 2017 and the complete trainwreck of a “post-ethics” Drumpf Presidency is gonna make your hated 2016 feel like a goddamn Carnival cruise.

So, yeah. Happy new year.

I must admit, I’ve always been kinda confused by vegetarians.

Many, if not most, vegetarians avoid meat out of compassion for other living beings. This is, of course, a laudable sentiment that I personally agree with and support. If I were a vegetarian, this would be my primary motivation.

On the other hand, vegetarianism that’s based on the sanctity of life doesn’t make much sense if you agree that plants are just as much “living beings” as animals. Is killing and eating a plant really any less violent than killing a cow or a lamb? Why? Is it because we feel more “kinship” with that cow than we do, say, a turnip?

The history of human ethical development can be viewed as a glacially slow progression of extending respect to other life forms. We began back in the caveman days, when Grog came up with the revolutionary idea that he shouldn’t cross the river and kill Kracken’s whole family, since they were kinda the same as his family.

Tens of thousands of years later, mankind is still struggling with the idea that people from the neighboring country are kinda the same as we are, even though they talk funny; that people are still people, even if they worship ridiculous pagan gods (or, heaven forbid, some blasphemous variation of our own); and that we are all one, even if our skin color isn’t.

Here’s where I give vegetarians credit: they’ve extended that idea of kinship, and the compassion that comes with it, to other mammals. You don’t eat cows and pigs and dogs and lambs because, dammit, there’s something about them that we can identify with and care about. We don’t want them to suffer and die just for our convenience. Well done, Captain Vegetable!

But that’s just one more incremental step along a long path of ethical development: one more case of us realizing that just because something is different doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of our honor, respect, and compassion.

The next steps in our ethical development are obvious: extend that same degree of compassion to birds, fish, shellfish, and insects. Giving mammals preferential treatment over other members of the animal kingdom makes about as much sense as giving Jews preferential treatment over Muslims.

Oh. Right. We’re not quite there yet, are we? Maybe someday.

Objectively, fish and insects are life forms just like you and I, and the more we respect life, the more we must care about their suffering, too. There are already people who, instead of swatting them, escort their household bugs outside, being careful not to harm them.

Assuming we finally manage to extend our compassion beyond our fellow humans and other mammals, to fish and insects, it’s only a matter of time before we finally admit that plants are living beings, too.

And here is where I must ask of my vegetarian friends: why is the life of one stink bug more precious than our annual destruction of millions upon millions of tomato plants, or corn stalks, or Christmas trees?

The precedent has already been set of humans taking action to save an individual redwood or a swath of forest from being clear-cut. That action makes no sense unless the idea has begun to take root that all life—even vegetables!—is worthy of our respect and compassion.

Of course, I’m not arguing that vegetarians should stop eating vegetables, or ethically regress by resuming eating meat. It’s an unfortunate and unavoidable fact that right now, humans must eat formerly living beings in order to survive.

That’s an interesting realization, because it establishes an ethical dilemma for us: our survival requires us to kill living beings. Since most religions say that killing is one of the worst actions one can perform, doesn’t that mean that mankind is inherently evil?

That’s an interesting contrast to what we normally hear, which is that humans have a favored position in the universe. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all assert that man was created in God’s image, and Buddhism says that a human rebirth is a rare and precious opportunity to attain enlightenment. A good example is this quote, attributed to Anagarika Darmapala at the 1892 World Parliament of Religions:

To be born as a human being is a glorious privilege. Man’s dignity consists in his capability to reason and think and to live up to the highest ideal of pure life, of calm thought, of wisdom without extraneous intervention.

But how do we reconcile this self-congratulatory view of ourselves with the gory fact that every day of our lives we must kill and eat our fellow living beings?

Now let me set the question aside and take a bit of a side track, because that idea dovetails nicely with some of my own feelings concerning the sanctity of nature, and particularly trees.

Since childhood, when my summers were spent along wooded lakes in Maine, I’ve felt a deep spiritual respect for trees. In college, there was a particular pine tree deep in the woods behind campus that was “my tree”, where I’d go to commune with nature, and more recently I have similarly rooted myself to a particular spot near the Arnold Arboretum’s “Conifer Path”.

Combining this with my previous train of thought has given me a better reason to admire trees from a spiritual standpoint. Think about it: unlike us, trees don’t need to kill anything in order to survive. In fact, trees do zero harm at all, yet they have the longest lifespans of any complex living organism on our planet.

From a Buddhist perspective, trees are the epitome of equanimity, stoically accepting life as it is, with no need to control it or change it. They are equally connected to the air, the earth, and to water.

As a result, it is no surprise that euphemisms like “the Tree of Life” fill our language, and that trees play a central and symbolic role in all major religions, be it the bodhi tree that the Buddha reached enlightenment beneath, or the Judeo-Christian images of the olive branch and Tree of Knowledge.

I seem to be in implausibly diverse company in my respect for trees’ spiritual nature:

• Willa Cather: I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
   
• George Bernard Shaw: Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
   
• Friedrich Nietzsche: The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait, and both without impatience. They give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
   
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
   
• Mikhail Gorbachev: To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
   
• Ronald Reagan: A tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?

Trees give us a model of simplicity, acceptance, and meditative silence. If you searched the world over for the best master meditation guru alive, you could do no better than to follow the example of a tall, strong tree, standing silently while the world flows and transpires all around him.

If I was to be reincarnated after this life is over, I think, contrary to most people’s belief, that coming back as a tree might well be the wisest choice one could make.

And if you were looking for evidence of divinity in our world, I think this is where you should look. Surely the pattern of growth rings in a tree are the literal fingerprints of whatever force—personified or otherwise—created us.

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.

On May 2 I got to see the Dalai Lama. Hosted at Gillette Stadium by the Tibetan Association of Boston, tickets were not difficult to come by, since we ordered them early. Our contingent consisted of four people from CIMC (Mark, Shea, Erin, and I) and three friends (Annie, Andrea, Nancy).

I got up at 5:30am on a Saturday in order to catch a bus over to Central Square to meet up. The weather was light rain, with more precip predicted before it cleared up late in the day, so I rigged for wet weather. However, by the time we met up at 7:30am, the rain had stopped, at least for the moment.

The drive down to Foxboro was uneventful until we got off the highway and joined a large line of cars headed to the stadium, following mobile signs indicating “Dalai Lama ------>”.

We parked and joined a long line waiting to get in; and the line was growing longer at a rate almost as fast as a person could walk! Soon enough, we got through security and onto the concourse, where a bunch of Tibetan-themed vendors were set up. One of the vendors spoke to us about how the Dalai Lama didn’t want to use the throne the Boston Tibetans had fabricated for him, preferring a simple chair.

But there the throne was, set up on a stage at the fifty yard line on one side of the field. VIPs were seated in a small section on the field itself, while most guests were seated in the stands opposite the stage. Our seats were in two groups, at opposite ends of the field, but within the first three rows.

We were running a bit late, so we missed a couple of the preliminary bits, but almost as soon as we were seated a huge entourage of dignitaries and security thugs passed through an ornately-decorated gateway onto the field, including His Holiness, who climbed up to the summit of the throne and offered anjali to the crowd.

Full Photo Set

After a few more preliminaries, including a speech by Congressman Bill Delahunt, His Holiness began a two-hour teaching on the foundations of Buddhism, including the Four Noble Truths, non-self, and dependent origination. For me, most of it was familiar, but there were several bits worth noting.

He asserted that while mankind has made a lot of progress caring for our bodies, we’ve spent very little effort in caring for the health of our minds. He talked a lot about the Buddhist concept of non-self, and equated that to the Xist concept of submission to God. He also asserted that anything that arises solely as a result of existing causes and conditions must itself be empty.

I found it refreshing and inspiring to be in the presence of a major religious leader who could talk confidently about the Big Bang, Darwinian evolution, and religious pluralism without any sense of contradiction. However, I couldn’t help but feel that he was, like so many others, unable to successfully communicate the value of Buddhist practice to the average American. It also was kind of ironic to see his image shown up on the stadium Jumbotron, surrounded by tacky advertisements for coffee, automobiles, and credit cards.

His much-lauded sense of humor was demonstrated when he used his monk’s robes to cover his head to protect himself from the raw morning breeze, then bullied his fellow monks on stage to do the same. Later, he laughed when using his gall bladder removal as an example, showing that everything is impermanent and subject to change.

One bit that tickled me was his use of the term “Definite Goodness” as a synonym for enlightenment, liberation, or Nirvana. He used it repeatedly to refer to a very specific concept, so apparently “Definite Goodness” is something I should be aiming for!

The morning ended with a voluntary Bodhicitta ceremony, which includes the Refuges in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, plus the Bodhisattva vow to work for the enlightenment of all beings. This was to take the form of chanting three verses that appeared on the stadium Jumbotron. Unfortunately, the phrases cycled much faster than anyone could read them, and what should have been one of the most inspirationally moving parts of the day devolved into chaos thanks to the ineptitude of Gillette Stadium’s staff.

The lunch break was two hours long, and rather than fighting 15,000 people for stadium food, I spent that time studying the crowd. It was an odd mix of lifelong Buddhist monks, lay practitioners, Tibetan exiles of all ages, local luminaries, secular progressives interested in the battle for Tibetan freedom from China, and Joe the Plumbers who just wanted to say they’d seen this famous Lama guy everyone’s talking about. We even saw one punk kid wearing a tee shirt that said, in blackletter: Meditate and Destroy. Huh. Since the Dalai Lama draws such a diverse crowd, it must be incredibly difficult for him to formulate a speech that doesn’t bore or go over the heads of 40 percent of his audience.

An hour later, I went a grabbed a tiny lunch: two french fries and a bottled water for nine bucks. While waiting in line, I was amused by the anachronism of a robed monk walking around with his McDonald’s bag and drink.

By 2pm, the morning’s rain clouds had burned off, providing an auspiciously sunny day. The Dalai Lama returned for another two-hour talk. The ornate Tibetan throne had been retired and replaced with a simple chair, no doubt as a compromise between His Holiness and the local Tibetans. With the sun in his face, he wowed the crowd by putting on a bright red New England Patriots cap, which he wore for the rest of the day. He also used an umbrella as a sun shade for a time, and bullied his translator into taking off his suit jacket.

In the morning session, while talking in detail about the Buddhist tenets, he’d relied on his translator about half the time, but the afternoon session was almost entirely in English, since it was less technical and directed at a more general audience.

The afternoon centered around the idea that there is a set of common inner values underlying all religions: refrain from bad, and do good if you can. He also asserted that this must also be at the core of any secular set of ethical values. That allowed him to skilfully promote inner values equally well, whether the recipient of his message was Buddhist, Christian, agnostic, or atheist, without deriding any one of those paths toward those universal moral truths.

He also addressed the alienation of modern society by reminding us that man is by definition a social animal, and the importance of warmheartedness in cultivating connections and relationships with one another. One practice to undertake in order to promote this sense is to perceive the people around you as friends and comrades, rather than the more common daily assumption that you are surrounded by enemies.

After taking a few prepared questions, the day ended on the strange note of an accounting of the event’s attendance, revenue, costs, and profit, which will be used to establish a Tibetan Heritage Center in Boston. That completed, the retinue filed off the field, but not before a final wave goodbye from the 74 year old man, still wearing his Patriots cap.

Our crew regrouped in the parking lot to debrief. I discovered I had a mild sunburn on my newly-shaven skull. We then drove back to Cambridge, where some folks split off and the rest of us made our way over to Amber’s for movie night (Enlightenment Guaranteed), but that’s another story.

Overall, I’d say it was a very interesting day. While both a foreign head of state and the leader of one part of a major world religion, the Dalai Lama is also an eloquent speaker, a Buddhist scholar and monk, a refugee and leader of a people without a home, and a very humble person. It was enjoyable seeing each of those in him, and doubly so given his limited time left with us. His teachings were meaningful and of potentially great value to all the different types of people who attended. It was quite a day, and one I’m certain I will always treasure.

A couple days ago, I was walking down the street I overheard two girls talking behind me. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop, since we were walking in the same direction at the same pace.

One of the girls had just started a new relationship, and the other girl was asking about the guy, and the first question out of her mouth was “What television shows does he watch?”

Now, that freaked me out a bit. Like, are entertainment preferences really the yardstick that people use to measure someone’s character? Maybe I was just feeling sensitive after a meditation session, but I was struck by how pathetically shallow our society has become.

But they weren’t done yet. The other girl listed off his favorite shows and said that she didn’t like them. The only one I recognized was “South Park”, which—surprise!—doesn’t exactly qualify as “Television for Women”.

The inquirer then talked about how she and her beau had broken up because he liked to watch Sports Center, but she liked Gossip Girl. She was unambiguous that it was the primary reason they had gone separate ways. Wow.

The girls went on to talk about how important it was to fill the 7-10pm block of time each night with programs they wanted to see. At that point, I decided to vector off in a separate direction to avoid further deterioration of my world-view. Is this really how people live? People who think they’re deep, thoughtful individuals?

That hit me in a couple ways. First, it made me wonder what they would think of me: someone who hasn’t had a tv in 14 years, and hasn’t missed it a bit. If television is such an important part of determining how compatible two people are, I have very little hope of being some attractive lady’s “dream guy”.

But neither do I have much clue about how one might find a woman who is “deep” or “self-aware” by my definition of the word. In fact, the whole thing just makes me despair for the state of these clever apes run amok.

At the risk of self-aggrandizement, it reminds me of how the Buddha must have felt. According to the legend, after his enlightenment, people pleaded with him to impart his wisdom to them. But he demurred for several days, thinking that people would be unable to understand what he had learned. Sometimes I feel that way… Discouraged that so many people live their lives in complete unconsciousness, slaves to their habits and unexamined patterns of thought, yet at a loss for what to do about it.

The Buddha was finally convinced to teach by Brahma, the king of the gods, who said that there were people “with little dust in their eyes” who were capable of hearing his message. Like him, I have to admit that I’ve met some people who are exceptionally self-aware. They’re very few, but those people really do make all the difference in the world, and I’m very grateful for their presence in my life.

But they’re not people who base their mating habits on compatible Nielsen ratings.

Yesterday I was reminded of my introduction to fishing…

Each year, my parents and I would spend a week in the back woods of Maine at a camp owned by my uncle. My father fancied himself quite a sportsman, and I must have been about five years old when he brought me out in the boat with him for the first time.

While I don’t recall the specific event, I definitely remember the emotions involved. First you had to take a worm—pretty gross in and of itself—and then jab a hook through it multiple times. I didn’t know whether members of Phylum Annelida felt pain, but the thing was clearly displeased, squirming around in what appeared to be pain. I guess I didn’t really get why causing this thing pain was such a good thing.

Then there was actually catching fish. When you think about it, it’s an awfully brutal process. The fish attempts to ingest a barbed hook, then you drag the thing back to your boat by the hook, which is embedded in its face or esophagus, while it’s fighting against it all the time. Then you drag it into the boat, where it immediately begins to suffocate. Finally, if the little bugger doesn’t suffocate quickly enough to suit you, you club the little fucker with the little miniature baseball bat you keep just for that purpose. Even as a kid, I was repelled by the barbarism of it all.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. You’ve still gotta cut the head and tail off, rip the scales off, and take all the guts out. And then you eat it, which never made any sense to me, since I’ve never liked the taste of fish, anyways.

I don’t know whether that event set the stage for a lifetime of sensitivity, or whether it was just the first time some existing predisposition of mine was violated. But either way, I find I’ve been sensitized about harming others. I know other people are different, and that’s fine, but harming any animal seems to be a very deep violation of my base character. Not that I particularly wanted it to be that way; that’s just what I’ve observed.

All this came up yesterday while I was meditating. I’ve taken to finding a quiet place near work and sitting for half an hour at lunch. Yesterday I found a dock near where the Charles empties into Boston Harbor

While I was sitting, two guys came along, cast a line into the harbor and immediately got a strike. As they hauled the fish in, I stayed and observed it all, including his partner enthusiastically egging the fisherman on about eating his catch.

It brought up all those visceral feelings I had about hunting and fishing, and made me think about this year’s New Year’s resolution: to eat vegetarian one day a week. I’d made that decision primarily for ethical reasons, and I’ve been able to keep to it without abrogation. On the other hand, it’s been kind of inconvenient, and I had begun thinking about whether I’d continue that practice once 2007 is over.

Needless to say, yesterday’s event convinced me to continue. The question now is whether I want to get more ambitious and go for two days a week. I’m undecided on that one. As I said a year ago, I really love meat, but on the other hand I’m making a concerted effort to live according to my higher principles. Perhaps I’ll just shoot for two days a week, but forgive myself if there are weeks where I only do one. After all, the goal is gradual improvement, and as many dieters know, viewing it as a binary all-or-nothing proposition just makes it more difficult to succeed.

But for now, I just figured I’d share those thoughts, and note that after my meditation, I decided I wouldn’t go for pastrami or my favorite cajun chicken quesadilla, but had cheese tortoloni instead.

I recently read Rachel Naomi Remen’s book “Kitchen Table Wisdom”, wherein the author relates the story of how she went from her purely intellectual orientation as a physician to a more spiritual place, as well as the stories of other people she came into contact with that inspired her.

Overall, the book didn’t really blow me away, but there was one story about the author’s childhood that struck a resonant chord, so I thought I’d record that here, since I think it directly addresses the anxiety that people feel about not knowing the “meaning” of their lives.

The author relates that her family always put together jigsaw puzzles without the aid of the picture on the box, in order to make it more of a challenge and a surprise. As a young girl, she was just learning what jigsaw puzzles were. She was attracted to the colorful pieces, but she intuitively disliked the darker ones, so she took the latter away and hid them, to the consternation of her parents.

As an adult, the author used this as a metaphor for how life’s meaning reveals itself to us. I’d like to share and extend that metaphor a bit.

Our lives are indeed like a jigsaw puzzle whose final image isn’t known until we place the final pieces. Each day we place another piece, but progress is slow and the picture only makes sense as it nears completion.

If you focus solely on what today is like, all you see is one minuscule piece of your life. Today’s piece of the puzzle might be light or dark, colorful or muted, busy or empty, but you really can’t infer anything about your life overall from this one little piece. And even if today is a dark or painful part, you can’t assemble a great picture without the contrast of light and dark pieces, just as you can’t go through life with only mindlessly saccharine-sweet days. You can’t complete a jigsaw puzzle or a meaningful life if you ignore, avoid, or deny the existence of its dark parts.

Our past is the part of the puzzle we have completed. We can step back and look at what our life has been like so far, what kind of image it makes and what meaning it holds. By looking at the past, we can begin to make some sense of our life, or at least our life so far. If you look at the past, you can start to see meaning, but things could—and will—change substantially from here forward.

The future is, of course, unknown. We know the shape and color of the past, but we only have limited knowledge about what our next piece of the puzzle might look like. It could be a carbon copy of today’s, or it might introduce a completely new theme, like the first appearance in a puzzle of a person or the edge of a building. Our lives might have been all ocean as far as we have seen, but the next piece could be the point where the sea meets a beach or a rocky coastline, or it could be the first part of a gorgeous sunset on a distant horizon.

One of the great lessons here is that looking for the “meaning” of your life is futile. Meaning isn’t something that you are handed; it’s not a mandate from family, church, or job. Meaning isn’t an input, but an output; you create that meaning with every decision you make and every action you take. Meaning is the result of living, and thus can only be seen retrospectively.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have principles that guide our actions. Just remember that the principles aren’t what gives your life meaning; meaning derives solely from the actions that those principles have promoted. Your principles die with you, and are only made visible to the world through your actions.

While at the same time, each and every action you take contributes to that meaning. Whether you live according to your highest ethics or just spend your time on autopilot, every day you contribute the exact same amount toward the ultimate meaning of your life. So if the meaning of your life matters to you, it’s imperative that you live each day according to the values you cherish most.

This is what I have learned: it takes great presence of mind and strength of will to live according to one’s highest values, and no one is perfect. We make mistakes. None of us are Mother Theresa, but over time we can gradually learn to see our autonomic behavior and then replace our mindless habits with better choices. That’s why Buddhism calls it “practice” and a lifelong path.

I recently read David Kundtz’s “Nothing’s Wrong: A Man’s Guide to Managing His Feelings”.

I guess the first thing to relate is why that book interested me. I grew up in a family where little to no emotion was visibly manifested. I was extremely introverted and intellectual. As an adolescent, I found myself becoming ever more angry, selfish, and hateful.

Then I started dating, which was an immensely transformative experience for me. I was confused by how impulsive my first girlfriend could be, and jealous of her stunningly carefree demeanor. I decided to try to incorporate this lesson into my life, thereby gaining a previously absent appreciation for beauty, nature, kindness, and humor.

Back then, I didn’t think the intellectual and the emotional halves of my personality could coexist, so I created separate, distinct identities for them. “David” was cold, calculating, and intellectual, while “Ornoth” was impulsive, open, and joyous. One or the other would be predominant for six months to a year, while the other popped up at odd moments, and then they’d reverse. In those days, someone close to me could see in my eyes when I switched gears. That took me through college and into marriage.

Despite all that, I guess the trend was for the cold intellectual to gradually reassert itself. My ex-wife’s parting shot to me was to give me a Mr. Spock tee shirt for my birthday, an unabashed reference to my lack of warmth toward her.

In the fifteen years since my divorce, I’ve changed more radically than I ever thought possible, but the basic disconnect with my emotions has persisted. I’ve worked hard to develop compassion and generosity, but no matter how hard I look, I can’t seem to detect what most women tell me is the essence of life: my emotions.

It’s undoubtedly a difficult thing for a woman to understand: that a man really doesn’t have the emotional range or insight into his emotions that is so basic to her. I can’t speak for any other men, but I don’t think I’m alone when I admit that I’ve spent much of my life honestly doubting whether I have any emotions at all, and whether I could ever detect any I had, however hard I try.

Thus, the book.

The first thing the book establishes is that men need a different vocabulary to talk about their emotions. Women’s emotions come from their hearts, but men feel things “in their gut”. By drawing attention to the body’s physical reactions, Kundtz actually echoed themes I’ve heard in my Buddhist studies, which emphasize the physical form and its state changes as the place to look for evidence of emotional activity.

The next logical step is, of course, for a man to become more aware of the changes in his body. That would seem like a potentially productive line of inquiry, although I found the way it was presented a bit unhelpful.

“The very first and vitally important thing you have to do in dealing with any feeling is really something that you must *not* do. Don’t bury it. Don’t run from it and don’t cover it over. Just stay in the moment and feel it. Just feel it. Don’t bury. Don’t run. Don’t cover. […] Got the idea? Just stay put; don’t run. Just feel.”

That kind of rhetoric does nothing to help those of us who have stopped, have looked, and found nothing. “Just take a few deep breaths and feel whatever you’re feeling” is not only an unhelpful tautology, but it’s also thoroughly frustrating for someone who has no idea how to “feel what they’re feeling”.

Kundtz talks about this ability to notice one’s feelings and says “Without this first step, all else is doomed”, but then turns around and says, “It might also be true that at any given moment you may not be feeling anything very strongly”. Well, duh. I can’t say I’ve “felt anything strongly” in years!

The underlying, common assumption is that men are all actively suppressing their feelings, because everyone has feelings, don’t they? As someone who is reasonably mature and has actively tried to sense my own feelings and come up empty, I find that a decidedly hurtful way to dismiss my difficulties. I may indeed have emotions, but don’t accuse me of being dysfunctional simply because my emotions are not as overt as a woman’s. Defining women as normal and men as inherently abnormal is both prejudicial and hurtful.

Beyond that, as Kundtz himself is quick to point out, “Nothing’s Wrong is based on the strong conviction that there is a direct and causal relationship between violent behavior in males and their repressed (buried) feelings.” If that were true, one might well expect me to be a mass murderer, given my longstanding and lack of emotion, which can supposedly only be explained by active repression. But it hasn’t happened yet, so far as I know.

Anyways, leaving that particular issue aside for the mo’, let’s turn back to Kundtz’s three-step program to male emotional fitness: notice the feeling, name the feeling, and express the feeling. Assuming I find some way to get past step one—the real problem—there’s still this final step of manifesting the emotion.

The next question is *how*. Okay, I’m feeling happy, and maybe I can even recognize that; now how do I make a conscious choice between the myriad ways of depicting that emotion in my actions? Should I skip and jump? Should I whistle a tune? Should I go buy a drink for a cutie at the pub? How do I choose? And don’t you *dare* tell me something useless like “whatever you feel like doing”, or I’ll rip your throat out. It’s not that easy.

When he starts to talk about expressing one’s feelings, Kundtz cites a 1998 Newsweek article that reads, “when people regularly talk or even write about things that are upsetting to them, their immune systems perk up and they require less medical care”. Kundtz interprets this as “The talking or writing is the third step. It externalizes the feeling.”

That’s actually extremely good news for me, because I do a *lot* of written self-expression, as the length of this entry attests. The very first thing I turned to when my wife left me was email. Ironically, even today my real-world friends criticize me because they see more of what’s inside me by reading my blog than by talking on the phone or hanging out with me. Another funny bit is that Kundtz not only mentions writing, but also specifically calls out cycling, poker games, exercise, and meditation as other avenues for self-expression, and those are all things I do quite a lot of.

Another interesting bit is how thoroughly Kundtz disses isolation. He opens one section with a quote from Men’s Health magazine which reads, “Lack of social connection is ’the largest unexplored issue in men’s health’”. He follows with, “If there is only one change that you make as a result of reading this book, please make it this one. *Please!* Determine somehow, some way, at some time to regularly get together with friends.” I found that kinda interesting, considering I’m really the epitome of the isolated bachelor, and have recently been pondering how to reach out and craft a few new meaningful friendships.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I disliked the book. It was reasonably interesting, and successful at raising all kinds of topics for reflection. I just wish there was a little more depth to his analysis of how to detect one’s own emotions. “Just feel what you feel” isn’t helpful at all, although I’ll start watching my physiological responses to see if they provide any clues.

One last bit, which is something of a tangent. In addition to the Mary McDowell quote I’ve posted about already, Kundtz also cites the following quotation: “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that’s my religion.”

I think that’s about the most eloquent statement of the Buddhist law of karma that I’ve ever heard. Satisfaction comes from taking moral actions, and immoral actions produce dissatisfaction. And I’m blown away that the speaker added “And that’s my religion” as a postscript. Can you guess who the quote was attributed to? I’ll give you a hint: he has a wretched hairdo and spends most of his time on $5 bills.

Imagine what might happen if we had a president today of a comparable ethical standard.