Ornoth

After sixteen years of vipassana meditation practice, I’ve heard a sizable swath of the dhamma. So it’s not very often that I run into something new: an idea that provides an exciting ah-ha satori moment of discovery, which happened so often when the teachings were new to me. So it’s a precious surprise when I find a new nugget of wisdom.

To be fair, this particular insight derives more from Western psychotherapy than Asian Buddhism, since it comes from Rhonda, a local meditation teacher who also doubles as a therapist. But that in no way detracts from its value.

In a recent post-meditation Q&A session, we were discussing a familiar character—the person whose life is overflowing with drama, problems, and chatter—and how difficult it can be to maintain inner quietude and offer compassion to someone with that kind of frenetic energy.

Rhonda offered a little phrase that—when brought to mind—can foster a sense of compassion for the embattled drama queen: “How much noise do you need to make in order to avoid feeling what you’re feeling?”

I found that a profound and novel way of relating to someone that in my own habitual judgment I’d view as annoying or problematic.

That question cuts through all their misdirection and reminds us that—beneath all the noise—there’s probably an underlying hurt or fear that the person may not even realize is causing their discomfort.

If you think it would be beneficial and they’re ready to hear it, helping them unpack and name that emotion might let them move forward without all the unnecessary drama.

But if you do so, tread carefully and lead with compassion. After all, you're essentially dismantling their avoidant coping method and asking them to face the problem, and not everyone will be ready or willing to go there.

But either way, I think this is potentially a useful and genuine way to stay connected—rather than withdraw—from someone whose primary relationship strategy seems like a demand for sympathy.

Think you’re gonna find Buddhism in Steeler Nation? I didn’t. When I moved to Pittsburgh, I didn’t expect to find many meditation centers; certainly not the diversity and convenience that I had enjoyed back in Boston.

I easily found Pittsburgh Shambhala, but Tibetan Buddhism is radically different than the Theravada Buddhism that speaks to me, and I’m uncomfortable with how they venerate their teacher, the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, to a fault.

Searching online, I discovered the Pittsburgh Buddhist Center, a small center run by three monks from Sri Lanka: one of the three primary Theravadan countries, together with Thailand and Burma. PBC even stream their Wednesday evening sittings, so I could get an idea what it was like before visiting. So that was the first place I checked out in person.

Their center is 40-minute drive out of town, which makes it inconvenient. The sangha is small, split about evenly between locals and Sri Lankan expats. Because of this, the practice retains a lot more of the Asian cultural context than the Americanized Vipassana centers I’m used to: there’s incense, offerings, extensive chanting in Pali, and their meditation sessions feature a lot of verbal instruction, which I don’t find helpful. Because of the Sri Lankan cultural influence, I haven’t felt especially integrated with that group.

On the other hand, they’re solid Theravadan, which is great to find in this town where refinement amounts to stuffing french fries inside your sandwich. And they’re the genuine article: fully-ordained monastics straight from Asia, rather than watered-down secular American teachers with no monastic experience. Even in Boston, being able to discuss practice and philosophy with a monk was a very rare and precious thing, and I never imagined that ongoing weekly contact would be available to me in Pittsburgh.

So PBC has pluses and minuses, but it seems like a place I’ll visit occasionally.

During my first visit to PBC, I was given a small pamphlet that listed the Buddhist groups in the area. That was a great resource, and one of the entries intrigued me. It was for something called “Vipassana Sitting Group”, which meets (at a Jewish temple, ironically) only a couple blocks from my apartment. Anachronistically, it listed no website and no Facebook page; just the personal email address for Rhonda, the organizer.

It turns out that Rhonda Rosen was of the same circle as people like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield and Larry Rosenberg: American hippies who practiced in Asia and returned to establish centers like CIMC and the Insight Meditation Society in Barre. Rhonda studied under the late Indian teacher S. N. Goenka, who is widely known for his rigid but effective teaching style. It turns out that she has run this small, unaffiliated meditation group under the radar for decades, generally following Goenka’s model.

Much like CIMC, her group is entirely made up of Americans with very diverse levels of practice experience, and she too has stripped off all the Asian cultural baggage in favor of a familiar secular, earnest, practical focus. She also maintains running verbal instructions during meditation, which runs sequentially through anapanasati, body scan, and metta.

Being so similar to my previous practice at CIMC and IMS—and conveniently located in my neighborhood!—I’ve attended Rhonda’s group more regularly, and have found it a lot easier to integrate with. My biggest frustration is that I can’t attend both her group and PBC because they meet during the same Wednesday evening time slot!

With attendance varying from 8-24 people each week, Rhonda’s group has a new and interesting dynamic for me to explore. It’s sort of halfway between the large-group formality of CIMC and the small-group informality of my little kalyana mitta spiritual friends group.

What do I mean By “formality”? At places like CIMC and IMS, most discussion is Q&A, where students pose questions that are addressed by the teacher, but students are usually discouraged from addressing one another’s questions directly. It’s a more centralized model where the teacher is the sole authoritative voice. In contrast, my KM group had no teacher, was completely egalitarian, and individual practitioners simply kicked ideas back and forth.

I’ve been carefully sussing out whether Rhonda wants her group to be more centralized or more open, and she has consistently encouraged me to offer my own ideas and experiences during group discussions. And with twelve years of study and practice under my belt, I often have useful ideas to contribute and experiences to relate.

With things to offer and encouragement to contribute, this group feels like a safe little laboratory for me to test the waters and find my own voice as a potential future teacher. That’s not a vocation that I intentionally pursued, but as people express appreciation for my comments, I become more aware of the value I can share, and more confident in my ability to articulate it in a way that others can receive. It’s a very new and interesting place to find myself, and so far I’m enjoying it.

This past weekend Rhonda’s group held a one-day retreat at the Zen Center of Pittsburgh, which sounds lofty but it’s really just an old farmhouse twenty miles out of town. I attempted to bike out to the retreat, but broke a spoke and had to abort my ride and drive out.

The retreat itself was nice, with about twenty people attending… And also three cats who live there, which I found delightful. One even came by to meow inquisitively a couple times during one of the sittings! It was nice to share a little more of an experience with Rhonda’s “regulars” beyond our short Wednesday sits.

For myself, I did have one minor insight, although it takes a bit of explaining to convey.

We’re all familiar with the geeks who desperately try to score points by knowing more about everything than everyone else, who turn even casual conversations into opportunities for one-upsmanship, to everyone else’s annoyance.

Behind their lack of social grace, all those people are trying to do is win others’ respect and admiration; they think that people will like them if they can show how much they know.

I’d use the word “mansplainers”, but that is a hatefully sexist term that does an injustice to most men and fails to address the women who exhibit the exact same behavior.

Those of us who realize that people don’t respond well to unwanted corrections have largely given up on offering them. A more fatherly approach that I usually take is to offer information only when it is useful or expressly desired.

Even though I’ve long-since abandoned the impulse toward parading my knowledge and one-upsmanship, I was surprised to realize that I still expect that being knowledgeable and competent will cause people to like me.

But that’s not necessarily true. In Rhonda’s sitting group, I’ve been trying to offer advice, suggestions, and insight to less experienced practitioners… no more than once per day, tho! My contributions have been really well-received, so my image in that group is generally one of knowledge and competence. But does that mean they like me? Not at all.

Maybe they like me, and maybe they don’t. Probably people’s impressions vary from one end of the spectrum to the other, based less upon how I present myself, and more determined by their own character and backgrounds. Demonstrating knowledge and experience isn’t a requirement for being liked, and actually doesn’t correlate well with social favor.

I’ll try to keep that realization in mind as I continue to build relationships with the people in the group and explore my own voice as an experienced practitioner.

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.