Ornoth

“No matter how much I meditate, I’ll never become Enlightened, whatever that is.” So said an experienced practitioner during one of my meditation groups’ Q&A periods.

I had a strong and immediate reaction, because her understanding of Enlightenment is based on a frustratingly common misconception, and her despairing attitude is completely unnecessary.

To be fair, most Buddhist texts do an awful job explaining Enlightenment (aka Nirvana, Nibbana, arahantship). It’s usually described as a one-time, life-changing accomplishment that completely and permanently obliterates our greed, hatred, delusion, and all the doubts and dissatisfactions of normal life.

That’s a great goal to aspire to, especially if it motivates you to meditate. But there are three big drawbacks.

The first problem is that greed, hatred, delusion, and doubt are an unavoidable part of life, and no human being can fully eradicate them. Chasing such an unattainable goal engenders a whole spectrum of painful, destructive mental states that conflict with the growth of wisdom: insufficiency, striving, comparing oneself to others, frustration, self-doubt, and ultimately failure.

The second problem is that the idea of Enlightenment as a permanent state contradicts the Buddhist belief that everything is impermanent. As described, Enlightenment is a specific mental state, and all things—especially all mind-states—are temporary, ephemeral, and guaranteed to change. Enlightenment as a one-time, irrevocable transformation just doesn’t jibe.

And finally, in my experience Enlightenment simply doesn’t exist. I have never met any meditator—lay or monastic, teacher or student, male or female—who claimed to be Enlightened, or who claimed to have met someone who was.

So much for the formal, upper-case noun “Enlightenment” as described in the suttas and as envisioned in popular culture. But let’s draw a distinction between formal “Enlightenment” and the lower-case adjective “enlightened”.

The former implies a mythical, permanent, once in a lifetime achievement. But if we use “enlightened” to describe a particular action, or a momentary mind-state which may come and go over time, we come much closer to something useful: an action or state of mind that any human being could achieve, if only for a brief time.

What is an enlightened action? It arises from a mind-state of intimacy and connection with all living beings that struggle with suffering. Enlightened acts exhibit love, compassion, delight, and stability, and are free from self-referentialism.

While most of us don’t think that way most of the time, we can and do experience those ah-ha! satori moments of insight when we can see a different, more enlightened way of being. And our practice is to recognize those moments, allow them to guide our actions in the world, examine the results of those actions, and cultivate more such enlightened moments.

This is something everyone can experience and aspire to, without incurring all the striving, comparisons, and failure of chasing some grandiose vision of permanent “Enlightenment”. And when we view enlightened mind-states as temporary, they do not conflict with the law of impermanence. And most importantly, this ”momentary enlightenment” is eminently achievable.

And if you somehow still believe in that permanent state of “Enlightenment”, in practice that's still nothing more than consecutive moments of enlightened behavior.

So let me summarize my view of Enlightenment:

• Enlightenment is not what you’ve been told. Enlightenment is simply stringing together enlightened mind-states and actions more and more frequently.
• At first, this may not be quickly or easily achieved. But early results produce confidence and progress that gradually accelerates.
• Enlightenment is definitely not a permanent, one-and-done accomplishment. It’s something that requires diligence, effort, and commitment over time.
• It’s unrealistic to expect Enlightenment to erase all the complexities, doubts, and selfishness of normal life, but it will greatly reduce them.
• Letting enlightened moments motivate our behavior still results in the same radically transformed way of thinking about, relating to, and responding to normal life, enabling us to minimize our own suffering, and that of all living beings.

So don’t tell me you’ll never be Enlightened. The real-world possibility of Enlightenment is as close as the very next action you take.

Herakleitos of Ephesus might have been a bright feller, but when he asserted that “Change alone is unchanging,” he was dead wrong.

Most Westerners are at least familiar with the idea that change is inevitable. We do go through our lives with the idea that every so often something about our world is going to change. Although we only tend to remember that fact when it smacks us up side the face.

Us Buddhistical types also take pride in our ability to anticipate and accept manifestations of Anicca (impermanence), which our list-loving patron categorized as one of the three characteristics of existence.

“All conditioned things are impermanent. Their nature is to arise and pass away. To be in harmony with this truth brings true happiness.”

However, the very language we use to remind ourselves about change masks an incredibly important point. When we say that “change is constant”, “change is unchanging”, or “change is permanent”, we obscure this basic and incredibly important fact: change is often lumpy as hell!

For the past couple years, my life has had only minor changes, most of which were easily prepared for. Let’s call that “normal change”. In contrast, 2013 has been a year where many long-lasting things I thought I could count on simply vanished. Not just one or two times, but in a comically long string of unexpected jolts.

What do I mean? Lemme walk you through a couple examples.

At work, we were abruptly informed that our 15 year-old company had been sold and the founder was outta here. In the next eight weeks, several of my coworkers departed, including half of my team.

Some time later, it was announced that the whole company was being moved to Las Vegas, and that those who chose not to relocate—including myself—would be out of work when the Boston office eventually closed. Ohai, job market!

Meanwhile, at my meditation center, two of the three founding teachers (the two who were married) are getting divorced. While that doesn’t impact me directly, at the same time the woman who had been the center’s executive director for 15 years is resigning, as is the guy who for many years has run the office and website.

The private “spiritual friends” meditation group I’ve been a part of is undergoing similar trauma. Three of our eleven members recently left the group to move across country, including our two primary founding leaders, who also provided our meeting space. A fourth member moved, but only across town and thankfully will be staying with us. And getting married.

Meanwhile, another member of the group has been unable to attend our meetings after having her first child, and I fear the same will happen with two other members who are also expectant parents.

So now we’re struggling with who will lead the group, where we meet, what constitutes a minimum acceptable level of attendance, and how we decide on and integrate a potentially significant number of new members.

Beyond my own circle, Boston’s been having its own upheavals. The local alternative newspaper, the Phoenix, abruptly stopped publication after a 40-year run. My neighborhood pizza joint—Newbury Pizza—closed after 34 years (plus a brief but ill-conceived stint as “Bostone Pizza”). JP Licks closed their 20 year-old Newbury Street ice cream shop. And the iconic Crossroads Irish pub has been shuttered, too, after lasting 35 years. All these places were the sites of important memories for me.

Then just this week, the organization that runs Boston’s First Night—the nation’s original First Night, founded in 1975—threw in the towel, as well.

And, of course, the topper for my city was the shocking bombing of the Boston Marathon.

These major changes don’t seem to be limited to the Commonwealth, either. Two good friends recently lost their jobs, including my big “angel sponsor” for my annual Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride. And one of my favorite places in Pittsburgh—Klavon’s, an original 1920s ice cream parlor—also closed.

The final straw was when I came home and received notice that the cat-sitting service that I regularly use has closed after seven years in business. Even my cat-sitters!

So yeah. 2013 is the year of excessive change. For me, it’s been more like carnage than change, actually. It’s like what Berenger must have felt like after seeing everyone else turn into rhinoceroses in Eugene Ionesco’s play.

All this, and we’re not even halfway through the year yet!

So don’t ever let them tell you that change is constant; it sure isn’t! Change is lumpy as hell. Expect the lumps!

PS! I completely forgot to mention the failure and/or replacement of my water heater, faucet, and disposall. Big lumps of impermanence, people!

The world has lost a beautiful, beautiful soul.

I guess it’s time for the promised Puggle update. You’ll recall that I took him to the vet on Wednesday the 14th for labored breathing, and he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, with only a short time left to live.

That day, the vet drained the built-up fluid from his chest, which gave him immediate, but temporary relief. My goal was to nurse him through to January, spending some quality time with him, and put him down right after New Years.

On coming home, Pug did seem to be a lot more alert and active, and was able to breathe like a kitten again. The vet gave me a green light to give him “anything he’ll eat”, so I spoiled him with chicken, scrambled eggs, bacon, SciDi dry (no accounting for kitty tastes), Swiss cheese, Jax cheese curls, and saucers of milk. We spent a lot of time together, and I took a bunch of movie clips of my fuzzy buddy on my cell phone.

As Christmas got closer, I thought I could get away for a couple days with family. I planned to leave Friday noon and return Sunday afternoon, and my cat-sitting service would visit once on Saturday and once on Sunday.

On Wednesday, I noticed that Pug was starting to have difficulty breathing again. However, I thought I’d have enough time to bring him in to the vet’s after Xmas. But Thursday night he was so bad that I concluded that I’d bring him in and have him put to sleep Friday morning before I left Boston.

But when the time came, he seemed pretty good. He didn’t seem to have any difficulty breathing, and was pretty active, as well. So against my prior plans, I left for Maine, hoping Pug would be okay over the weekend.

Well, as you have no doubt surmised, he wasn’t. About 4pm on Christmas Eve, the petsitter called to tell me how he’d found him. He covered Pug with a sheet right where he lay.

After a perfunctory holiday observance, I headed home at 3pm today. His body lay there, just as beautiful as he’d been in life. I had to get through the tasks of moving him, putting him in a box, taking him down to the animal hospital to be cremated, and saying goodbye forever. On Christmas Day.

I don’t know how I could even begin to relate to you what that cat meant to me. Every day he was a source of joy, love, amusement, and warmth. He was a dear, dear friend, and one of the most central parts of my life. I shall be hard pressed to find another companion like him.

I guess I can take solace in the realization that his suffering is gone forever. But boy, has he left an immense, gaping hole in my heart.

May you be blessed with devotion and companionship as unwavering as that you gave to me, my dear friend. Namaste!

While listening to one of the Zencast Dharma talks on the way to work this morning, Vipassana teacher Gil Fronsdal made an interesting assertion: that the wisdom we usually associate with our elders might not be a result of a wealth of worldly experience, as most people assume. Instead, he posited that such wisdom comes from close proximity to death.

Think about it. There are comparatively young people who have had near-death experiences which have forced them to confront their own mortality. Almost invariably, they come out of those experiences transformed, with a tremendous new appreciation for the preciousness of the brief time we each have on this Earth.

Now, “proximity to death” doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has to come close to dying. The loss of one or more loved ones might cause one to reflect on how one lives one’s own life. What’s important isn’t one’s age or that one has had a near-death experience; this transformation happens when an individual openly contemplates their own death, sincerely accepts and internalizes their impermanence, and lets an omnipresent knowledge of their own mortality inform the decisions they make.

I’m always surprised when people say they find that kind of orientation morbid or depressing. It’s only morbid if you haven’t accepted the fact that you are going to die. Might be seventy years from now. Might be next week. But it also could happen before you finish reading this article. Living your life denying that it’s going to end someday just doesn’t seem the path of wisdom to me. Someone who lives like that will suddenly find themselves on their deathbed, wishing they’d done things they haven’t done, and wishing they’d said things to people that they’ve always left unsaid. In short, ignoring your mortality is a surefire way to end your life full of regrets.

At the other end of the scale, accepting your mortality doesn’t mean living in constant fear. Wisdom is about accepting that it can happen, and will happen one of these days. That knowledge gives you the impetus to find a way to do those things you really want to do and tell people the things you really want to tell them.

If you’ll forgive the horrible linguistic coincidence, it’s like the gentle pressure of having a deadline. If there are things you want to do “someday”, it’s more likely you’ll do them if you know there’s a deadline than if you can put them off eternally. And no matter how much you might wish otherwise, death will not be put off eternally.

That’s the real revelation here. Accepting the grim fact that our lives are ephemeral doesn’t make you depressive and fearful; instead, the knowledge of death liberates you. It encourages you to get the most out of each day and each relationship, and it prompts you to clean up your “stuff” with the other people in your life. That way, when you do reach your deathbed, you can be satisfied that you lived your life well and have left nothing undone or unsaid and—most importantly—with nothing to regret.

Ironically, this belief is something I’ve held for a long time. Whenever possible, I have tried to make decisions based on the criterion of which choice I would regret more, when viewed from the perspective of my deathbed. Somehow I stumbled onto that piece of wisdom years and years ago, and it has really served me extremely well. It’s very heartening to hear a Buddhist teacher sanction the same basic concept: that wisdom comes from proximity to death.

I can’t say whether it’s a philosophy that will work for you, but I offer it here for your consideration. I would be delighted if it helped you get more enjoyment and contentment out of your life. After all, as they say, you only go around once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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