Ornoth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full Photo Set

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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