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.

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!

A while back, I came across an article entitled “These are the bad things about early retirement that no one talks about” (sic).

Although I haven’t (to my knowledge) retired, I have some firsthand experience, having successfully avoided working for 11 of the past 18 years. And I don’t think the article contains any significant revelations.

Let’s look at the author’s five main points about early retirement, before I tell you the meaningful lessons I’ve learned from taking time off.

You will suffer an identity crisis for an unknown period.

I think this only applies if you largely derive your identity from your employer. In a time when corporations offer zero loyalty to employees, identifying with an ephemeral job is a dangerous, outdated delusion.

Since I’ve always had a strong sense of personality outside the workplace, time off didn’t erode my identity. Instead, it gave me the opportunity and time to fully indulge in activities that I valued, which has been extremely rewarding.
You will be stuck in your head.

This problem will only arise if you cannot fill your free time with meaningful activities.

And even if you can’t, a little time for introspection is probably good for you. But free time usually amplifies our existing inclinations: if you are by nature content, in retirement you’ll find lots of contentment; whereas if you’re a doubtful or insecure type, you'll probably be plagued by lots of doubts and insecurities.
People will treat you like a weird misfit.

If you've lived a full life, you’re probably already used to stepping outside other people’s narrow-minded expectations of you.

But if you stayed comfortably “inside the box” that society expects, then don’t you think it’s high time you stepped out and tried life as a weird misfit? It’s a lot more interesting!
You’ll be disappointed that you aren’t much happier.

If you’re financially able to retire early, you've probably already discovered the importance of having rational expectations. But if not, let me clarify for you:

When you retire, you will have lots of free time and the ability to choose how you spend it. Unless you spend that time doing things that make you happy, you won’t be any happier in retirement than you were before.
You constantly wonder whether this is all there is to life.

Yes this is, in fact, all there is to life. And it’s a miracle! You have all the time in the world, financial security, complete freedom, and lots of resources to find how to make that time meaningful and rewarding. If you do nothing but sit on the couch waiting for the world to entertain you, you’re clearly doing it wrong!

So that’s my response to the author’s absurd early retirement handwringing. Let’s dismiss this amateur’s fear-mongering and talk about the real issues surrounding early retirement.

The inertia of rest is insidious.

To be fair, the article’s author kinda dances around this vital life lesson that everyone should bear in mind. Rest, comfort, and sticking with the familiar can be important elements of stability, and can help you break your enslavement to compulsive productivity. But rarely will they provide a sense of achievement, satisfaction, or lasting happiness. A rewarding life requires initiative and effort, not lethargy and passivity.
Manage your fear of running out of money.

There are probably a few people who don’t have to worry about money during their retirement, but for most of us managing our shrinking nest egg will be our single biggest preoccupation.

It’s important to spend time on financial planning, but it’s just as important to develop the emotional skill of setting those worries aside. Don’t fill all that hard-earned free time with worry, fretting, and panic.
Plan for medical expenses.

The biggest threat to our nest egg is healthcare. Unfortunately, our health—and the amount of money we need for it—are completely unknowable.

However, that doesn’t mean they’re unmanageable. As a reasonable person, you can soberly address the risks up front, become an informed consumer, obtain professional advice, stick to a plan, and cultivate the trust that you will be able to manage through whatever circumstances arise.
Find the right balance between thrift and indulgence.

Again with money! Though to be honest, these issues aren’t really about money itself, but about how you relate to it.

My point here is to find a way to relate to money that allows you to plan and feel secure about your future, while also putting your savings to use in service of your own happiness, whatever that looks like.

It might be travel; it might be charity; it might be assistance for your grandkids. But the important part is relating to your nest egg in a way that’s mature but not obsessive, and fulfilling but not shortsighted.

So there you have it. In a nutshell: take responsibility for how healthily you relate to your most precious resources: time, money, energy, and health.

So I moved. Issat such a big thing?

For me, absolutely! Never in my life have I moved this far, and never before have I relocated beyond the familiar woods and towns of New England. Previously, my longest move was only half as far as this one, and that was more than 25 years ago!

It’s not just the distance that makes the move a big deal, but also the tearing down of my Boston life.

When I arrived in Boston, I spent the next quarter century carefully constructing my ideal life: a meaningful career, an amazing home, and financial stability, surrounded by intelligent and interesting people, in a vibrant and captivating city. With the passage of time, I exceeded my own expectations and achieved the life I’d dreamed of.

Obviously, the symbol of that success was my condo: my ability to finance it, its history, and its location at the very center of Boston’s urban life. Directly outside my bay windows were the Hancock Tower, the Pru, and the unforgettable campanile of New Old South Church. On any given day, if I looked outside I would see horse-mounted policemen, streetcorner buskers, shoppers indulging in posh Newbury Street shoppes, Hare Krishnas chanting, Critical Mass or charity rides, Patriots or Red Sox championship parades, the Pride spectacle, First Night festivities, classical or pop concerts in Copley Square, all manner of political rallies, the finish of the Boston Marathon, or the seasonal Santa Speedo Run… You get the idea: there was always something going on, and thanks to where I lived, my life was more eventful and enjoyable… Which makes it very difficult to walk away from.

For all these reasons, I love Boston more than anywhere else in the world. It was the home that I created with a reasonably successful adult life, and my condo was the physical symbol of that achievement.

Hopefully that helps you understand why leaving my condo and my city behind is such a big deal for me. I am turning my back on everything that I love and know and rely upon, and beginning again from nothing. It’s a huge challenge, and moving out of the safe, familiar, and controlled is not something I’m very comfortable with.

As if all that weren’t enough, I’m embarking on living with a woman for the first time in 22 years. Although my previous attempts didn’t last terribly long, I’ve hopefully learned something from those mistakes. But after two decades of happily living alone, cohabitating will be yet another major challenge to adapt to.

At the same time, the Boston I love has been changing out from under me. I’m reminded of how fleeting happiness can be, and that even if we could keep things from changing, humans aren’t wired to be happy in a static situation, no matter how pleasant.

So that’s the background. For some people, moving is just a regular and routine part of life. But after comfortably “settling down” in Boston, I find it downright scary to pull up roots and transplant myself into an utterly unfamiliar city.

I’ve now been in Pittsburgh for two weeks. On the positive side, the mundane, practical aspects of integrating households have gone well, and kept me from excessive navelgazing (until now). Food and cooking will probably require the most adaptability, thanks to the most obstinate gas stove in the history of mankind.

In the meantime, the chaos of moving has thankfully relieved me of the duty to observe this year’s holiday season. Thanks to record-setting warmth, I’ve already completed four bike rides, exploring 75 miles of local streets: every road steeper than anything in Massachusetts. And I’ve had a few social encounters, which will remain a perpetual work in progress.

The attempt to sell my Boston condo has begun, although there’s stress there due to this being my first time through that process, as well as some chaos introduced by my real estate agent. I’m hoping it will be unexpectedly painless, but that’s probably not realistic. But there should be a bucket of munny at the end of it…

Which leaves the relationship to talk about. Inna and I have worked surprisingly well together thus far, given our historically divergent tastes. Although we’ve been close friends for 18 years, it’s still very early days and our relationship will evolve quite a bit over the coming weeks, months, and hopefully years.

With such a basal change, it will probably be decades before I can conclude whether moving out of Boston was the right thing to do. But had I not done it, I would always wonder whether I should or shouldn’t have. Making the move was the only definitive way to find out, and it makes sense to do it sooner, while I am still hale enough to handle the transition.

I’ll miss Boston and my friends there terribly, but after two weeks away: so far so good, at least.

Fourth of July is a time when Americans make a big deal about our freedoms. Freedom of religion, freedom of expression. Self-rule and freedom from oppression. Freedom of movement and career choice. Freedom to stockpile and use lethal weapons on one another. You’d think America would rank pretty high as a free and happy society.

But in reality, most Americans are neither free nor happy. And the reason is clear to see, codified for posterity right there in our Declaration of “Independence”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

[Use of “unalienable” and lack of Oxford comma/semis are Jefferson’s. -o]

Paraphrased: We think Life is an inalienable Right. We think Liberty is an inalienable Right. And we think people are best occupied in an eternal, unending pursuit of more and better “Happiness”.

I would be reiterating a familiar refrain in pointing this out: forever chasing happiness will not lead you to the Garden of Eden; it’s better understood as a real-world manifestation of the eternal punishment of Tantalus. We’ve been taught from birth that no matter how much capital ‘H’ “Happiness” we obtain, we cannot ever be satisfied. We are compelled to eternally chase an elusive vision of future fulfillment that, by definition, cannot ever be achieved.

The mindless pursuit of more and better: do you call that freedom? I call that enslavement.

We are neither free nor happy because we are constantly cultivating unfulfilled wants, unrealized desires which society compels us are necessary before we can be happy. No matter how many “freedoms” we have, our nation’s economy and our individual lives are structured around our inability to ever achieve fulfillment. And no matter how many things we achieve or buy, our “Happiness” remains as distant as ever. This eternal hamster wheel of wanting something we don’t have is the very thing that makes us unhappy.

The Four Freedoms

You think our country’s forefathers granted you enough freedoms to be truly free? You forgot about the single most important freedom of all: freedom from want.

The solution ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks rationally about it: if the pursuit of something cannot ever be achieved, then the pursuit must be abandoned.

To be truly happy, you must give up our founding fathers’ “pursuit of Happiness” and learn how to be not just okay, but happy with what you already have, and with the world as it is, complete with all its myriad problems and imperfections. The conclusion is Zen-like in its simplicity and profundity: to gain the thing you want, you have to let go of wanting that thing, and eventually abandon the very impulse of wanting itself.

Old people grok this more readily than the young. They’ve lived long enough to have acquired and achieved great things, seen how short-lived everything they worked for really was, and realized how little lasting happiness those things produced in the long run.

I can’t say I’ve freed myself from desire, but through my Buddhist meditation practice I’ve made surprising progress. By learning how to be at peace with life as it is, rather than chasing after life as it could possibly become, I’ve been happier, less worried about my status, more secure, less jealous, and more compassionate. By reducing my wants, I’ve adopted a much more a minimalist lifestyle, become more environmentally friendly as a result, and (perhaps ironically) become wealthier by wasting a much smaller percentage of my income on ephemera that ultimately prove unfulfilling.

Most important is that I’ve been “happier”. Lasting happiness cannot be achieved by pursuing it more and more intensely, but only by abandoning the chase and allowing oneself to actually *be* happy, in this and every moment, unconditionally and without disclaimer. Or the other way around: you will never *be* happy if you define happiness as something you don’t already have that you must eternally pursue.

America can only become the land of the free and the home of the brave if Americans become aware of and reject our “unalienable Right to the pursuit of Happiness”, which is just a tricky code phrase for the unending cycle of consumption and desire that keeps us enslaved to our petty wants.

I can’t help but point out the huge contradiction between the fictional stories we humans tell each other—which all end happily ever after—and the reality of our lives, which must invariably come to an unhappy end.

This won’t be the most joyful article you read today. It’s been lingering in my outbox for a while, as I struggled with whether sharing my feelings was worth the negative reaction they might elicit from readers. But I think it’s an important point to talk about, so I’m posting it as-is, despite my trepidation about whether anyone shares these thoughts and feelings or not.

Over the past year, I spent some time exposing myself to mainstream entertainment media: movies, television, and so forth. As I did so, I couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between my life and the lives of the characters depicted on the screen.

In that constructed world, happy endings aren’t just the norm; they are nearly inevitable. The romantic lead winds up overcoming all obstacles, conquering their foes, winning their love interest, and living out a long life. You have to search awfully hard to find a lasting tragic outcome in mainstream media. As a society, we seem unwilling to acknowledge that sometimes—oftentimes—things just don’t work out.

Even the bad things that happen along the way: in the stories we tell one another, they’re heavily foreshadowed, or else they’re somehow “deserved”. There aren’t any surprises: nothing bad ever happens purely by blind chance, and there are absolutely no unjust outcomes. No matter what the challenge, you can bet it is temporary and that the protagonist will overcome it in the end.

While I was observing all these media messages, the protagonist in my real-world life was beset with problems. Biking home from work one day, I was hit by a car that ran a stop sign, and had to foot all the medical and bike repair bills myself because American law simply doesn’t protect cyclists.

On the way home another night, I had a solo bike crash that resulted in a mild concussion. But more severe were the injuries inflicted at the hospital, where a botched IV left me with a foot-long hematoma and an elbow that wouldn’t move for six weeks.

Not long after, I was diagnosed with a painful gall bladder, and had to radically change my diet while waiting two months to undergo surgery to remove it. Following the surgery, my symptoms came right back.

Next, after taking my cat to the vet, he had a mysterious reaction to the routine vaccinations, and the young, healthy pet that I expected to enjoy for many more years was suddenly and unexpectedly dead.

Since all of this happened while I was out of work, it left me struggling with unplanned financial pressures.

While living this discouraging reality, the preponderance of “happily ever after” stories on television seemed amazingly artifical. Although I wouldn’t pretend to assert that life is nothing more than suffering, it’s pretty clear that suffering happens to all of us. And some kinds of suffering will stay with us until the end of our lives.

When you think in terms of happy endings, in the real world nobody dies happy. Some people may accept its inevitability better than others, and some live long enough to welcome it. But in general, people who realize they are dying must be pretty profoundly unhappy about it. In the book of our lives, when we reach the final chapter, we all suffer our ultimate loss. In the real world—the one we live in—the hero always dies, and in all of history not one person has been born who lived “happily ever after”.

Whether it happens tonight or a few years from now, our lives inevitably end. We mourn the tragedy of someone who dies young, saying it was “before their time”, as if there were some cosmic sense of justice overseeing our lives rather than a blind roll of the dice. As a child, I was given an early lesson in that fallacy when my older sister—recently married and a new mother—died at age 21.

Even more tragic is the gradual decline and infirmity that inevitably comes with old age: having to somehow find the inner strength to be okay giving up everything we’ve ever been, seen, done, or enjoyed. As our future dwindles to months—to days—the grand story that we spent our entire lives constructing must end, and in a manner I would describe as “unhappily”.

So what is the point of my persistently rubbing this in your face? Is it just so that I can be a smug pessimist? Not really. It’s more that I felt a need to provide a more realistic counterpoint to the ridiculously fanatstic stories we’re indundated with by modern media.

I think it’s incredibly important that we acknowledge that we will die. While most people try to avoid thinking about death, for me it is a vital, pressing reminder to derive maximum joy out of each moment of every day. My intention here is actually constructive, rather than nihilistic: I encourage everyone to live and pursue their happiness with wisdom and insight that derives from that sense of urgency.

And another huge reason for this post—perhaps surprisingly—is to offer some collective sympathy. You and me and everyone we know: we are all in the same unfortunate position. Our lives—the beautiful epics we’ve worked so hard to construct—will end as tragedies. There will be no happy endings. As such, I offer everyone my sympathy and understanding and fellowship. Being alive and also being aware of the inevitability and proximity of death: this is a difficult, unpleasant, anxiety-ridden state, but one that we all share in common.

Believe me, I feel for you.

One the many lessons of meditation practice is impulse control. I don’t like that itch or that knee pain, but I’m trying to stay still right now. Can I relinquish the need to scratch or to adjust my position? What happens if I try?

In meditation, the underlying motives behind such movements—even these trivial ones—are brought into conscious awareness and examined.

And for me, these examinations have led me toward an interesting idea: that the root cause of almost all our movement is dissatisfaction with life as it is, and desire for things to be otherwise.

Humans—perhaps even all living organisms—are programmed to seek out pleasure and avoid the unpleasant.

From infancy, every movement we make is either to move toward and grab something we want, or to move away from or throw away something we don’t want. All because we have been programmed to believe that we’ll have the best life experience if we get what we want and avoid what we don’t.

And to a large degree, that works pretty well for us. We gravitate toward the people, the foods, and the music we like, and do our best to avoid those we dislike. And whether we’re infants or adolescents or adults, we usually do our damnedest to get what we want, or avoid enduring what we don’t want.

This drive is so basic and unexamined that the vast majority of what we do in life is in the service of this particular concept of “making things better”. We go through life wedded to the idea that perhaps someday we will reach some magical place where we are “happy”, needing nothing more to be fulfilled.

Few people actually think about what true happiness would look like. If we were truly happy, all that infantile want-based grabbing and throwing away behavior would be unnecessary. What would it be like to be truly happy? Wouldn’t all that motion which is impelled by desire and aversion simply cease?

And that’s what I’d like to talk about now: the idea that every volitional movement we make is an expression (or a manifestation) of our dissatisfaction with the way things are.

That in itself is an interesting insight that few people ever investigate. But if one were to take that idea seriously and allow it to actually inform our decisions, it would result in a life that is structured very differently than most of us experience and pursue in modern America.

I suppose it’s becoming a familiar trope that we cannot find happiness in the never-ending quest to change our world to better suit us, and that peace can only come through internal growth, so that our happiness isn’t dependent on forcing external circumstances to be “just right”.

But what that might look like is not so obvious at first.

So that’s one hypothesis: that if we were truly happy and at peace with life as it is, all that extraneous movement would simply stop. But that’s a very linear, American way of looking at it. What if we turned the underlying cause and effect relationship on its head?

One of the more useful techniques in modern psychology is cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is often summarized as “fake it till you make it”. Patients are asked to model attributes and practice behaviors they wish to manifest—such as confidence, strength, or independence—even if they don’t necessarily feel that way internally. The idea is that maintaining the appearance of a desired effect can be part of the cause that eventually makes the effect feel “real”.

If we approached the question of happiness and movement in the same manner, we flip the idea that “happiness causes motionlessness” idea on its head, and come up with a new hypothesis: “motionlessness creates happiness”.

Preposterous, right? Sure, the idea that sitting still might make us happier sounds ludicrous to most of us at first, but it’s actually the basis of many meditation practices. The benefits of silence and physical and mental stillness underlie the Buddhist samatha practice of calming the mind, as well as most yogic and Western derivatives.

Just ask the average Joe off the street to describe what meditation is and he’ll say ”sitting still and being quiet“. Ask him what it’s supposed to accomplish, and he’ll use words like: relaxation, stillness, calmness, tranquility, and peacefulness. The idea that stillness can somehow contribute to happiness is not as alien as our instincts tell us. In fact, it’s been around for centuries.

Practicing and strengthening our ability to be motionless can lead us toward a deeper understanding that all our grabbing what we want and throwing away what we don’t cannot make us happy. And that perhaps our best route to happiness is to practice quelling the impulses that underlie all that grabbing and throwing: learning how to relate mindfully to our desires and aversions, rather than be mindlessly ruled by them.

The hard-bitten Americans in the audience will have an instinctive reaction to this. What, do we just stop moving, then? That won’t make me any happier! Do you expect us to just give up all hope of making this a better world for ourselves and our children?

No, progress inevitably march on. But it’s vital to see that the things American culture has told us lead to happiness simply have not and will never work. We don’t have to give up on progress and development, but we do have to accept that despite how much the conditions of our lives have improved, we aren’t significantly happier people, nor will our children be.

There’s a very real limit to what scientific progress has done (or can do) for us and our species in our quest for happiness. It’s about time we tried something else! Your happiness is what’s at stake.

I challenge you to put serious effort into exploring these kinds of alternatives, rather than blindly believing the illusion that getting what we want will someday make us “happy”. If more people did so, not only would we be significantly happier with our lives, but it would constitute meaningful progress, too: arguably the greatest advancement in human social and ethical development in two thousand years!

Twenty-five years ago was my wedding day. I wasn’t going to write anything about it, but I suppose a few off-the-cuff thoughts would be appropriate.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times: our relationship was the proverbial two-edged knife. I’ve always tried to treasure the amazing joys it provided; and these days I look back on the intense pain it ended in with a lot more compassion, both for myself and for the woman who accompanied me.

Lord knows neither of us were emotionally mature enough to manage that relationship very well. In that sense, the marriage was a crucible of self-learning. There’s nothing that will reveal your own faults more starkly than sharing your life with another person. But it also showed us our potential and our worth, as well.

Marriage caused us both to experience a lot of growth… it’s just sad that so much of it came as a result of our relationship’s unforeseen and rapid collapse.

For me, one of those lessons was that some questions will never have adequate answers. Why did it fail? How much was my fault? How much hers? How much was real and how much was fake? After the divorce, I found it difficult to deal with not having any answers; as a child I had wanted to live forever just so that I could see and know “how it all turned out”. With my marriage, I saw it and lived it, but I will never fully know what happened.

Another lesson has been that you can’t go back. I daresay we both lost a lot of our innocence when we separated. Many years have passed since then, but although time heals, deep wounds also leave enduring scars. The simple, complete faith I had in her—and she in I—isn’t something that I could ever extend again. You never love as deeply and vulnerably as you do before you’ve had your first heartbreak.

Looking back, the flaws we never saw seem obvious now, and trivial when compared to the connection and potential that we shared. If I were to remarry (an extremely unlikely event), would I make better choices now and avoid the mistakes that destroyed the most precious thing I ever had? I’m wise enough now to know that, no matter how much I’ve matured emotionally, it’s impossible to say. But certainly I’ve stopped believing that any woman is Snow White, and no man—even me—is Prince Charming.

The joys… they were amazing, fulfilling, and I will treasure them every day of my life. They haven’t invented words to describe how happy I was on that day 25 years ago. But those few years of joy came at the price of many more years spent bearing the pain of the breakup.

You might find it unsatisfying that I can’t resolve those two extremes and synthesize them into a single emotional state—positive, negative, or neutral—but that too is the complex nature of marriage and divorce. There is no unambiguous “bottom line”. It was what it was: the most amazing, the most painful, and possibly the most educational experience I’ve ever been through.

And that’s really all I can leave you with.

American Buddhists really like Rumi, the prolific Sufi (Islamic) poet and inspiration for the proverbial dervish dancers.

I can’t count the number of times he’s been cited in the dharma talks I’ve heard and publications I’ve read. So while my reading list was at an ebb, I picked up and read one of Coleman Barks’ Rumi collections, entitled “The Soul of Rumi”.

Now, I’m a prose guy. Despite the fact that words are my preferred medium of artistic expression, poetry rarely connects with me. So it should come as no surprise that I wasn’t particularly whelmed.

The elements of Rumi that appeal so much to Buddhists—his praise of silence and the meditative state, and his immersion in the present moment—aren’t the primary themes of his work. He is much more fixated on the mysteries of faith and the ecstatic experience of God, which make for kind of flat reading for someone as skeptical and practically-minded as myself.

But having said that, there are three bits that I thought I would pull out for contemplation.

The first two actually come from the same passage, where Rumi is, in typically non-linear fashion, addressing himself to hidden truths. Among the rambling, disconnected thoughts is the following sentence:

Look for the answer inside your question.

For me, this gets at one of the first premises of Buddhism, one of the ones westerners never seem to examine. When we are suffering the angst that comes from an unfulfilled desire or unanswered questions, we typically do not consider the quality of the motive behind our desire or question. Is it a wise question? Is it the right question to ask? What does that question tell us about ourselves and our spiritual maturity?

The Buddhist suttas include stories that describe times when the Buddha was asked metaphysical questions about the meaning of life, or the existence of God(s). When asked such theoretical questions, the Awakened One refused to answer, explaining that such unanswerable questions are not useful. They have no practical influence on how one should live one’s life, and thus are distractions from the cultivation of wisdom.

There will be times when you find yourself with philosophical questions like why justice and fairness do not prevail, or how a man can do harm to another, or why there is suffering. Before you look for the answer, look first at your question: what is motivating you to ask it, and is it a useful question to ask? You may find more wisdom in understanding the reasons behind your question than you will by letting the question lead you around in a fruitless quest for an answer.

A few sentences later, still addressing the source of answers to our spiritual questions, Rumi goes on:

The answer lies in that which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this. They make you clear. When they’re gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where to go.

The longer I live, the more I see how pivotal our understanding of death is to our happiness. As humans, it is our nature to take all our gifts for granted until they are taken away from us. A cell phone or a car or a television is just another everyday appliance until we have to live without it. But we take just as casual an attitude about our comfortable homes, our eyesight, and even our ability to string coherent thoughts together. We only properly appreciate these things when there is a real and imminent possibility that we shall lose them.

The ultimate possession we’ll lose is our experience of sentient life. Ironically, we spend most of our lives taking it for granted, assuming that we and everyone around us will live to a ripe old age just because it’s statistically more likely than not.

As Rumi says, you gain incredible clarity of purpose when you accept your own very real mortality. Every moment is to be savored; every experience—even every tribulation—is relished simply because it is the experience of life. You don’t need to ask yourself the meaning of life, because experiencing life provides meaning. You needn’t worry about what to do or where to go, because whether you are here or there, whether you are eating or playing racquetball, the fact that you are living outshines all other pleasures and pains.

But the person who doesn’t foresee their own death, who wrongly thinks they have all the time in the world, squanders their most precious commodities: life and time. They wander around aimlessly, without happiness, and without any sense of urgency other than an anxious feeling that their purposeless life has no meaning.

It’s an aphorism for a reason: life is short. It might sound ironic, but if you view life that way and value it like a precious commodity, you will enjoy it and find it more than fulfilling. Whereas if you view it as a given and value it like any unending resource, you are guaranteed to enjoy it less and find it empty and lacking in purpose.

Finally, Rumi has this to say about religious practice:

Hypocrites give attention to form, the right and wrong ways of professing belief.

I find this just as prevalent in Buddhism as any other religion. There are people who effuse about the retreats they’ve been on, the teachers they’ve studied with, the books they’ve read, and the objects of faith they’ve collected. It’s commonly referred to by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's term “spiritual materialism”, and is usually not highly regarded among American Vipassana practitioners.

I feel this somewhat acutely, since I’m not particularly attached to the ritualized forms of practice. In fact, I’m naturally skeptical of any practice until I can be shown and convinced of its value. A good example would be metta practice, which I only took to recently, after realizing the specific manner in which it would contribute to my spiritual growth.

The Buddha would agree. As stated in the suttas, particularly the Kalama Sutta, all his teachings were offered with the attitude of, “Try this and see if it is of value to you. If not, then disregard it.” So far, I have chosen to focus on Buddhism’s meditative and ethical practices, and disregard the more ritualistic, mystical, and dogmatic elements of contemporary Buddhism, since I do not see how they would be of value to me in my situation.

Naturally, I try to keep that skepticism reined in when others describe their own practices. The point isn’t to judge others, but to confirm my own belief in what’s right for me, free of the judgments and expectations of others. But I still find it discouraging when I see someone who is enthusiastically engaged in the outward forms of Buddhism (or any spiritual practice) without regard for the vital inner work that it points to.

Someone among my dharma friends recommended we read and discuss Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey”. She’s both a neuroscientist and a stroke victim: a stroke victim who recovered much of her cognitive ability, and thus can provide a singular perspective on the experience. She describes watching her linear, logical, linguistic left brain shut down, which left her with a powerful sense of peace and oneness with the universe.

I guess the first thing to relate is the context from which I approached this book. You see, I have a history with stroke…

While a few folks know that I have a brother who is fifteen years older than I am, almost no one knows that I once had a sister who was thirteen years older. When I was nine, she was 21, recently married, and raising an infant. While sleeping one night she suffered a stroke that left her in a coma, on a respirator, and my parents were forced to make the decision to terminate her life support. Although I was young at the time, that event established my relationship with death, and with stroke. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her husband to live through that nightmare.

During my adolescence, as my maternal grandmother aged, she too suffered a stroke, which left her seemingly lucid but without any ability to communicate. You could see her frustration as she tried to speak and the only thing that would come out was an undifferentiated string of “Buh buh buh buh”. This, too, became one of my nightmares: being fully lucid, but unable to communicate, being helpless to express my needs.

Also during my teen years, I was employed carting meals up to the various floors of the regional hospital, including intensive care and the psych ward. There I was regularly exposed to patients’ cries of agony as well as the endless mumbling of damaged patients reminiscent of my grandmother.

With that as personal history, my emotional associations with stroke are of strong fear, guilt, violation, outrage, and appalled-ness. You might imagine the strength of my reluctance to read a book about stroke— especially one that glorifies the experience—and talk about it with friends. But after considerable encouragement by my friends, I read it nonetheless.

I should point out that I have two strongly-held opinions that interfere with my ability to accept the author’s commentary unquestioned. The first is that I am naturally skeptical of anyone’s stories about near-death experiences; there’s just too many incentives to fabricate lurid details and no way to verify their stories. Second, I am naturally skeptical of anyone’s claims of achieving some euphoric, Nirvanic mental state; again, for the same reasons: there’s too much temptation to create a compelling—if slightly unrealistic—story, which cannot be questioned. Taylor describes that the massive injury to her brain immediately brought her to “glorious bliss” and “sweet tranquility”, “finer than the finest of pleasures we can experience as physical beings”, like “a great white whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria”; I find that far too hyperbolic a story to take purely on faith.

As I read the book, I was naturally disappointed that the author never talked about the fear, pain, and danger that is associated with stroke. She reports that her first thought upon realizing what was happening to her was, “Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! Wow, this is so cool!” As a brain scientist, she should have been acutely aware of the danger, especially once she successfully diagnosed it. She consistently portrayed it as the most positive thing that had ever happened to her, and rarely mentioned the mortal danger and crippling permanent debilitation that most stroke patients suffer.

The one thing she said that did resonate with me was the division of the mind into two cooperating but somewhat independent regions—the traditional intellectual left brain versus intuitive right brain schism—and how it can be perceived as multiple personality disorder. “It appears that many of us struggle regularly with polar opposite characters holding court inside our heads. In fact, just about everyone I speak with is keenly aware that they have conflicting parts of their personality.” During high school and college, I went so far as to perceive myself as having two distinct personalities: a cold, rational person with one name, and an impulsive, emotional person with another.

Yet Dr. Taylor goes on to villify the left brain and glorify the right with statements like, “Without my left brain […] my consciousness ventured unfettered into the peaceful bliss of my divine right mind”, actually (and to me, unbelievably) celebrating the freedom that came with her loss of cognitive ability. I find her characterization of logic as “fettering” and “inhibiting” versus the right brain’s “peacefulness”, “bliss”, “miraculousness”, and “divinity” appalling, both from the standpoint of denigrating the importance of man’s capacities of logic and rationality, as well as praising life-threatening brain damage. But I’ll speak more about that later.

Such was my response to “My Stroke of Insight” at an emotional level. Now let’s transition to my intellectual evaluation of the book.

Since I was reading this for my sangha’s local dharma friends, I’ll first talk about the parallels I see between the author’s experience and my understanding of the dhamma.

I guess the obvious place to start is the Buddhist concept of “silencing the discursive mind”, which is the quite literal physiological fact of Dr. Taylor’s injury. She describes losing all sense of any “internal dialogue” as well as the ability to judge, decide, and interpret. This is something akin to the state Buddhists attempt to reach during meditation, with the obvious difference that they are not trying to permanently disable the ability to think; just to realize that thinking is not the primary road to happiness. In Buddhism, thought is a tool: not the only nor necessarily the best tool, but neither is it to be abandoned as wholly useless.

She also talks about losing her preoccupation with productivity and constantly doing things, instead simply “being” and experiencing the present moment. “On this special day, I learned the meaning of simply ’being’.” This is also something Buddhists intentionally cultivate, although again not as a permanent state.

One excerpt that I found particularly interesting was the following: “Sensory information streams in through our sensory systems and is immediately processed through our limbic system. By the time a message reaches our cerebral cortex for higher thinking, we have already placed a ’feeling’ upon how we view that stimulation—is this pain is or this pleasure?” This is almost a word-for-word transcription of the Buddhist concept of Dependent Origination, which states that when a sense object, a sense organ, and sense consciousness come together, there is something we call contact. Contact is a precondition for the arising of feeling (vedana), which says that every contact automatically creates a “feeling tone” that is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This feeling tone then predisposes the conscious mind toward greed, hatred, or delusion: the Three Poisons.

Another almost word-for-word cognate between Dr. Taylor and Buddhism is this statement: “To experience pain may not be a choice, but to suffer is a cognitive decision”. This is encapsulated in the famous Buddhist parable of the two arrows: the first arrow represents some unavoidable initial pain, either physical or emotional; the second arrow is the mental anguish and suffering that we create as a result of filtering that initial pain through our stories and unexamined programming, which harms us as much or more than the actual offense. As she says, “It’s important we realize that we are capable of feeling physical pain without hooking into the emotional loop of suffering.”

Taylor, in talking about brain plasticity, specifically calls out that unexamined programming and unknowingly describes the Buddhist approach to “practice” in several spots. In one place, she says:

Along with thinking in language, our left hemisphere thinks in patterned responses to incoming stimulation. it establishes neurological circuits that run relatively automatically to sensory information. These circuits allow us to process large volumes of information without having to spend much time focusing on the individual bits of data. From a neurological standpoint, every time a circuit of neurons is stimulated, it takes less external stimulation for that particular circuit to run.

So our behavior is largely a complex map of well-worn ruts. This brings up the obvious inference that we can change our thought patterns—our very neurological programming—if we do the work necessary to lay down new patterns. This is the very basis of both Buddhist practice and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: “I consciously make choices that directly impact my circuitry.”

In fact, she even goes so far as to agree with the Buddha that paying attention to the body and the present moment are the best ways of interrupting our solidly-ingrained patterned behavior.

Kamma even gets into the act, with Taylor emphasizing that we are all radically responsible for our own emotions, and the importance of recognizing and acknowledging one’s difficult emotions, rather than mistakenly strengthening them through denial, avoidance, or actively trying to make them go away.

The list continues, with the importance of compassion (“If I had to pick one output (action) word for my right mind, I would have to choose ’compassion’.”); sending energy to others, which is very similar to the Buddhist concept of lovingkindness (metta); and the importance of associating with like-minded friends.

There’s one concept that is specific to Mahayana Buddhism that Taylor touches upon, and it’s one that irks me in both contexts: the Bodhisattva ideal of “coming back to life after death to work for the benefit of other beings”. Taylor makes this exact claim with respect to her stroke and recovery, and I frankly find it tasteless and awfully self-aggrandizing.

With so many parallels, you might well think that Dr. Taylor is a bedside Buddhist. However, there are some differences worth noting, and I think they’re considerable.

The first is her assertion that brain cells do not regenerate. There is a longstanding argument about this in the field, but Taylor takes the position that unlike all other cells in the body, the brain is a static, unchanging set of cells, rather than one which gradually repairs and replaces itself over a surprisingly short period of time, like the rest of our bodies. As she says, “The majority of the neurons in your brain today are as old as you are. The longevity of the neurons partially accounts for why we feel pretty much the same on the inside at the age of 10 as we do at age 30 or 77. The cells in our brain are the same”. I found this to be an incredibly important fact, because Buddhists have long claimed that there is no element of one’s body that doesn’t change, and this is the basis for much of the Buddhist deconstruction of self and identity. On one hand, this seems to blow a huge, gaping hole right down the center of Buddhist philosophy; however, on the other hand, recent research has shown that the brain is in fact capable of limited regeneration, although it is a slow and infrequent occurrence.

Finally, I must close by again taking issue with Dr. Taylor’s assertion that losing the majority of our mental capacity is a good route toward happiness. She glorifies the process whereby she lost the ability to make sense of sight, sound, smell, language, temperature, vibration, to differentiate one object from another, to follow motion, to control one’s limbs, to even think. For me, this is not Nibbana; this is severe delusion of the worst kind; whereas Dr. Taylor describes the catastrophic failure of her brain thus: “The richness of this moment, right here, right now, captivates your perception. Everything, including the life force you are, radiates pure energy. With childlike curiosity, your heart soars in peace and your mind explores new ways of swimming in a sea of euphoria.” And most damning in my opinion, she goes so far as to say, “I wish there were a safe way to to induce this awareness in people. It might prove to be enlightening.”

Well thanks, Jill. I’m glad it was good for you, but I think I’ll pass on that offer. You may call it enlightenment; I call it severe brain damage. It is self-impairment far beyond the effects of marijuana, cocaine, or LSD. I will be guided by Buddhism’s fifth precept: “Abandoning the use of intoxicants that cloud the mind, the disciple of the noble ones abstains from taking intoxicants.” Cutting your brain in two and throwing one half away makes one something less than fully human, and thinking that such radical self-mutilation is a reliable path to lasting happiness is not the Middle Way; it is delusion of the highest order.

As always, YMMV. I’m just sharing my own personal reactions, which will of course have been influenced by both my own personal history as well as my predisposition as an overwhelmingly left-brained person.

I recently attended a five-week practice group with CIMC’s teacher Michael Liebenson Grady entitled “Wisdom: From Reactivity to Discernment”. One of our homework exercises was to spend a week noting whenever we had a pleasant experience, and to explore the nature of our reaction to it.

So on the way home from that session, I started taking mental notes. I didn’t discern any particular clinging to pleasant experiences, but I did notice the quantity of them, so I started counting: one, two, three… By the end of the week I had noted over two thousand three hundred pleasant experiences, which translates to one every minute or two of waking time.

Now, granted, this was one of the first weeks in May, when everything was just coming into bloom. The week also included cherished time spent with my dharma friends and our expedition to see the Dalai Lama. But interestingly, the rate of pleasant experiences was highest when I was out on the bike, riding through the countryside, seeing a lot of sights.

Most striking, though, was the sheer number of positive experiences, especially in contrast with our homework the week before, which was to note negative experiences, which had numbered no more than a couple dozen.

That discrepancy really made me stop and reflect, and I’ve got a few thoughts about it that I’d like to share.

When you’re young, you spend an awful lot of time and energy focusing on improving the material quality of your life: getting a good job, a good family, and a good home full of material wealth. I did that once, and had some success at it. Below a certain point, there is a very real enhancement to quality of life by improving one’s material standing.

But there’s a limit. Contrary to the totemic human belief that more is better, beyond a certain level, wealth and stuff gradually lose their effectiveness in enhancing one’s happiness. At that point, how one relates to the world becomes more important than material desires.

I’ve long held the belief that, irrespective of circumstances, people make their own happiness and sorrow. Some people’s minds are just wired to see the good things in life, and they can see beauty in even the most unlikely places; conversely, there are people whose natural inclination is to overlook the good and see only the flaws and problems in life.

I was fortunate: I started transitioning from the latter to the former around the time I entered college, and I think I’ve made pretty good progress. These days, no matter where I go, I find myself surrounded with cool, interesting, and beautiful stuff: stuff worth not just noting, but thoroughly enjoying and celebrating. In the process, my perceived quality of life has increased dramatically, way out of proportion with the material reality.

But I was still surprised at the overwhelming number of positive experiences I was noting. Sure, I thought my life was good and I know I treasure parts of it that others fail to appreciate, but I never dreamed the balance was so radically lopsided. Sure, there are occasional, inevitable problems, but on balance I really, really love my life and the elements that comprise it, from the smallest to the largest.

I think the next step for me is to fully experience that imbalance and somehow integrate it into my overall sense of well-being and satisfaction. I still have a lot of behaviors, such as judgmentalism, that are lingering residue from a time when I thought life was less satisfying, less enjoyable. But if I am really that happy with my life, I need to put more effort into internalizing it, because someone with that strong a sense of satisfaction should project a very different presence than the one I’ve retained from my youth due to unexamined habit.

Granted, this wasn’t what the practice group was designed to bring out, but I find that the growth of wisdom is seldom so linear a process. It’s kind of like striking a vein of silver in the middle of a gold mine: unexpected, but equally precious.

I noted one other implication when I examined my reaction to all those pleasant experiences. According to Buddhist psychology, one would expect there to be some sense of clinging to a pleasant experience, a desire to preserve it or keep it from changing or fading away. While I looked, I noticed very little of that clinging in myself. I attribute that to the sheer number of positive experiences, and the confidence it gives me to let go of Experience X in full knowledge that there’ll be another pleasant Experience Y coming along very soon.

It remains to be seen whether this constitutes a more advanced form of clinging to pleasant experiences in general, as a class, rather than as singular individual experiences. Clearly, more sitting is required.

I’ll have another set of serendipitous revelations coming from that group, as well, but I haven’t gotten them down into phosphor yet.

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!

In episode two of “Don’t You Wish You Were Ornoth”:

I just realized that I have a job where ice cream can be expensed to the client.

I know it’s kind of redundant to say that Merkuns are stupid, but here we go again…

Most Americans seem to operate under a default belief that things are supposed to go right all the time. So when bad things happen, it’s reasonable to get upset—either with oneself or at someone else—and when good things happen, well, that’s just the way things are supposed to be, right?

This winds up producing an interesting effect. We spend a whole lot of time thinking about the things that didn’t go right—dwelling on them, rerunning them in our minds for hours, sometimes months on end—but we almost immediately disregard the memory of anything that goes well, because there’s nothing exceptional or worth noticing about a good day.

The result of this belief is that as we Americans go through life, we accumulate and remember a lifetime’s worth of disappointments, anger, and self-hatred, and we have difficulty remembering any times where we were deeply happy. We grant the worst of times a “stickiness” that we rarely extend to the best of times.

Why is it that we spend so much time and effort focusing on the negative? Why don’t we just choose to let those things go? Moreover, why is it that we never savor and dwell on the things that go right, that should delight us? Why don’t we give good experiences the same emotional weight as the bad? Surely that would yield a more balanced view of our lives, and it’d go a long way toward making us happier with ourselves, our lives, and the world around us.

Fortunately, I got over much of my chronic anger and self-hatred during my adolescence, and let it go much more in recent years. In fact, I think I do a pretty good job taking delight in the wonders and joys of my life. Because I don’t suffer from the mainstream blindness toward joy, I can look at our culture with an outsider’s perspective. When I do, I’m struck by the strong impression that most Americans prefer to live with a singleminded focus on the things that have made them unhappy. Is it any wonder our society suffers so much from existential angst?

I hope you’re not one of those people, because we all deserve joy, our lives all contain a large portion of things to enjoy and appreciate, and we are all completely capable of living joyful, fulfilled lives—here, now, and forever—if only we choose to.

When you lead an esoteric lifestyle, sometimes you come across something so strange that you can’t help but take note of it. In this case, I’m going to talk about a concept that is central to both Buddhism and polyamory.

This isn’t another long or heavy Buddhism post, but it does start out with one of the Brahmaviharas, Buddhism’s main virtues, which are loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. In particular, I want to talk about mudita, or sympathetic joy.

Mudita is the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being or good fortune, rather than begrudging it. The traditional example of the mind state of mudita is the attitude of a parent observing a growing child’s accomplishments and successes. Jealousy is the “far enemy” or oppsite of mudita.

Compare that with the term “compersion”, which is commonly used in polyamorous circles. Compersion is what you experience when you take pleasure in your partner’s other relationships. It isn’t the erotic feeling of voyeurism, but the satisfaction that comes with enabling your partner’s genuine happiness. Compersion is also seen as the opposite of jealousy, which is when one feels pain as a result of a parter’s joy.

As you can see, the poly concept and the Buddhist one are essentially identical, describing a state of empathy and goodwill toward others that is otherwise completely alien to our modern culture.

I’ve repeatedly mentioned my own revelatory first experience with compersion when I was living with Ailsa, with one of the better descriptions appearing here. I find it amazing that I have been drawn, under very different circumstances, to these two completely disparate communities where the same concept is so central.

The one way that the Buddhist definition of sympathetic joy surpasses that of compersion is this: some Buddhists believe that as one cultivates and develops mudita, one becomes more secure in the abundance of one’s own inner happiness, which makes it easier to celebrate the joy of others, as well. So far, this has been true in my experience, and it will be an interesting exercise to continue to develop this trait further.

That’s all. It might not sound like much, but I just found it really surprising that these two communities with very different agendas espouse the same uncommon idea.

I found the following clipping very interesting. It’s similar to how I envision my old age: a time to reminisce about the life I’ve led.

A life of solitude does not have to be a life of loneliness
By Donald M. Murray, Boston Globe Correspondent | January 18, 2005

When I was 40 I was warned about the loneliness of old age, but now that I am twice 40 I find I enjoy the community of the self.

I have been surprised and grateful for the support Minnie Mae and I have been given by family, friends, and neighbors, even some whose names I do not know.

The importance of the support from the community has been so dramatic that I have overlooked the importance of the increased time I spend alone, since Minnie Mae unfortunately needs the care of an assisted living community.

Of course I miss her. In the 53 years we have been together our lives have grown as one. Each morning when I wake, I still expect to find her at my side, but the loneliness that I had feared has become a blessing, not a curse.

I enjoy the trivial freedoms of living alone. I can get up early or late, nuke and eat a one-course meal of peas, only peas; turn the volume on the hi-fi up and the TV off; sit at my computer at 3 a.m. if I can't sleep; keep a refrigerator without eggs or milk.

True solitude, however, takes me far deeper into the self than the freedom of the trivial. I realize I was bred for aloneness. Some of my ancestors, I am sure, spent their days alone, in a small rowboat fishing out of sight of Scotland.

Others spent weeks, perhaps months, hunting alone in the great forests of Scotland before the English slaughtered the trees so they could provide fuel for the early factories of the Industrial Age.

I feel those great-great-great grandfathers and beyond in my genes, and alone I can travel back to live with the ancestors who programmed me for solitude.

I was blessed with a sickly childhood and that wonderful condition called convalescence, and spent weeks in bed reading, daydreaming, and being introduced to classical music on the radio by Walter Damrosch.

I like waking in an empty house, walking from room to room, listening to the silence, different in each room. Shadows share my rooms, and they become friends, and we laugh at how they scared me at bedtime when I was young. The painter's light at the edges of the day changes each room from hour to hour.

It takes an hour of sitting alone to empty my brain of yesterday and tomorrow. Then it fills. I am the boy who explored the Ashuelot River by himself; the soldier who was sent, alone, to find the British Army so we would not attack each other; the newspaper reporter who felt comfortable on the sidelines, taking account of life.

Alone, pleasing no one but myself, I keep exploring my many lives, what was, what is, what might have been.

I no longer travel to the Norwegian Coast but I am a tourist in my past, surprised at those who worry about an old man's lonely life.

I'm crossposting this. I'd originally posted it as a reply in a friend's LJ, but I'd like to keep a copy of it here.

The more I see, the more convinced I am that happiness has little to nothing to do with life conditions, and everything to do with outlook.

Happiness equates to satisfaction, I think, and satisfaction is about not having unfulfilled desires. Desire can be alleviated in one of two ways: get what it is you want, or stop wanting it.

Unfortunately, American society has this dysfunctional concept of ambition that means "never satisfied", but few people seem to have the insight to make the very basic association that "never satisfied" also means "never happy". So many people fall into that trap of "success without joy". No matter how much they get, they can never be happy, because their empty bankrupt sucking soul needs more.

To me, that's the key to understanding why some people seem to be innately happy and most people are innately unhappy, all irrespective of their lives and possessions. The answer is so simple that it's almost underwhelming: stop being so unhappy! Or, as the Buddhist would say, stop all your grasping and happiness will just happen.

The problem is, you can't tell an unhappy person that, because they can't hear it, and no amount of giving them what they desire can ever cause their restless desire to cease.

I appended the following to a discussion of life goals that my buddy awfief started in her journal. I figured the thoughts might be worth preserving in my own journal.

I've made my own happiness my life's study, so I'll share a some of the things I've found by responding to a couple statements I saw above... Hope the insight is valuable.

I'm already a very happy person, what more do I need from life?
I have been perfectly (and I mean perfectly) happy with my life upon three distinct occasions, each about 6-12 months in duration. The problem is that those points are ephemeral. Even if you've achieved everything you've ever wanted and you think your life is perfect, it's impossible to keep it that way. Happiness isn't something you achieve and are done with; it's a constant pursuit, because people constantly change, and your life circumstances also are under constant change. For me, the ultimate meaning of life is the constant struggle to maximize happiness. Oh, and one more tangential bit: the one thing you'd want from life, even if could perpetuate that perfect happiness, is, ironically, change. Even though most of us have this static vision of our goal of "happiness", we have a nasty habit of never being able to accept a static state for very long. Even when it's bliss...

If I ever got to a point where I wasn't still working towards any goals, I'd be pretty worried.
Why? To me, this sounds like the traditional modern American overachiever and acquisitiveness ethic. Why do you need to want more than you have, even if you are well off, and living in the most prosperous society the planet has ever seen? My response is that if you never let yourself be happy with what you have, then you'll die never having allowed yourself to be happy. That's really sad, and moreso when most of us are surrounded with luxury and priviledge.

I'm not necessarily basing my entire life around it...
IMO, if you're not basing your entire life around it, then it can't very well be a life goal, can it?

Just some thoughts. My apologies if they sound confrontational; they aren't meant to be, but I find that with this topic it's often beneficial to try to shake people up a little from their well-worn paths of thought.

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