ornoth

This spring, my Experienced Practitioners practice group finally closed the book on their interminable preoccupation with metta. Next fall we will take up a new topic which I’m particularly excited about: renunciation!

In our final sitting of the spring “semester”, Narayan gave us a new homework exercise to practice with over the summer break: “What would it mean to me to renounce suffering?” So I’ve been sitting with that question for a few weeks.

“Suffering” is an important but somewhat ambiguous term in Buddhism. The similie of the two arrows, which I’ve mentioned before, is key. If you stub your toe, that’s simple, objective, factual, unavoidable suffering. That’s the first arrow.

The second arrow is all the optional, unnecessary mental proliferation that we add on top of that: “I’m such a klutz! I’m always stubbing my toe. I hate my body. I’m a worthless person and unlovable and everybody hates me and I should just be taken out behind a barn and shot rather than continue to be a burden on the rest of the universe!”

This might surprise some of you, but all that additional “stuff” actually didn’t come from your big toe or from other people or from the rest of the universe; it came from your head, and you piled all that on yourself. The second arrow only ever comes from one place: your head.

Unfortunately, when a Buddhist says “suffering”, it’s usually not clear whether she means only the first arrow, only the second arrow, or both. That’s why, when I was doing my year of karuna (compassion) practice, I specifically differentiated between those basic life experiences that we can’t avoid (the first arrow, which I call “pain”), and the unnecessary mental suffering we manufacture ourselves (the second arrow, which I call “angst”).

Having said all that… My navelgazing with respect to renouncing suffering pivots on understanding what the questioner means by “suffering”: pain, angst, or both? Between these two poles, I see five different ways to respond, but only one real answer.

Let’s begin by working with “suffering” as unavoidable pain, with or without the optional angst.

The first (and by far most popular) way to respond to pain is avoidance. If this is how you renounce suffering, you believe that life would be grand if only you could avoid everything that might be unpleasant. Or at least minimize it.

How’s that project going for you? That’s nothing more than reactively hiding from the unavoidable, just like any other unenlightened, pleasure-seeking slob out there glued to his recliner with a fistful of Doritos and a Bud. I think you’ll find lots of examples who’ll tell you that’s not a particularly effective method of “renouncing suffering”.

The second way to escape suffering is to deny that it even exists, which is a surprisingly popular option, especially among people younger than age 50. “Death isn’t going to happen to me, nor will I ever get sick. I’ll never be in pain, or grow old and frail, and I’ll never owe the government any taxes, either. When I look back on my life, it’s been one long series of easy but emotionally fulfilling victories.” A Buddhist would call this delusion, one of the three poisons, rather than any effective method of renouncing suffering.

Both of these strategies fail because there is no way to get through life without experiencing some form of pain and discomfort and dissatisfaction. A really smart guy once expounded a theory along those lines; he called it the First Noble Truth.

There is, however, one obvious way to avoid pain. Most discomfort (like all pleasure) comes through our sense doors: the familiar five senses plus the mental sense that encompasses thought and emotion. So one could theoretically escape pain by permanently closing all one’s sense doors, so that one never again receives any unpleasant (or pleasant) sensory input. The only catch is that you can only reach that state if you’re clinically dead. That seems like a suboptimal strategy for renouncing suffering.

Okay, so we can’t eliminate all pain, because it’s unavoidable in this lifetime. What if we accept that fact and limit the definition of “suffering” to only refer to the second arrow: that additional angsty proliferation that we cause ourselves? That sounds like something we might actually be able to control. That would be a much more achievable goal, right?

The question hinges entirely on whether you believe that we can truly eliminate all forms of self-loathing, anger, and greed. Sad to say, but so far human history doesn’t provide many practical examples. How many people do you know who never get angry, upset, or down, even under the most unfair or difficult circumstances? Any?

That same smart dude (above) said that the suffering we create for ourselves is the product of just three things: our compulsive desires, our consuming dislikes, and our confusion and delusion about how the world (and particularly our hearts and minds) work. He called that Noble Truth Number Two (this guy was really into making lists).

If you’re like me, getting rid of desire, aversion, and delusion sounds like a gargantuan task. How do you get rid of something that appears just as inherent to life as breathing or digestion? The only obvious alternative is acceptance; learn to live with it. But giving in to our ignorant emotional impulses is totally contrary to the idea of renouncing suffering.

There’s only one option left. We’ve already agreed that we can’t get rid of the pain inherent in living, and our only hope is to eliminate the angst that we make for ourselves in how we respond to that pain.

We can’t do anything about the first arrow, but as for that second arrow… That smart dude had something to say about that. Yeah, it’s his big Third Noble Truth, which states that it is absolutely possible to uproot and remove the causes and manifestations of suffering. That is, after all, the base philosophy that the whole Buddhist project derives from.

So for a Buddhist, there’s no question: of course you can eliminate those self-destructive negative mind states! Your whole life is built around both the premise and the practice of renouncing suffering. There is no more vital task for a Buddhist than abandoning all that unnecessary, self-generated angst.

So when asked “What would it mean to me to renounce suffering?”, my answer is immediate, unambiguous, and obvious. It means having an active practice, as expounded in the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth: the eight-step path (another of his lists) that describes how it’s done in detail.

Whatever my teacher intended with this question, for me there’s no need for a lot of intense inquiry about it. As a Buddhist, I have already renounced suffering, and while I have hardly defeated it, I have a pretty good idea what renunciation of suffering looks like.

QED, done, case closed. Next question please.

I recently completed my sixth “sandwich” retreat at CIMC: a nine-day non-residential meditation retreat that starts with all-day sittings on Saturday and Sunday, then evening sittings all week long, followed by another weekend of all-day sittings. All told, it adds up to about 50 hours on the cushion and a lot of sleep deprivation.

First let me relate some of the odd circumstances of the retreat.

Four days before the retreat, I had just begun my regular Tuesday night sitting at CIMC when we felt an earthquake shake the building. That was interesting.

Then, two days into the retreat we began feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy, which caused them to cancel Monday night’s sitting. It also canceled my planned trip to Foxwoods, and delayed the delivery of my new laptop for two days.

And then on Saturday, one of the cooks came in early that morning and fired up the stove and filled the building with natural gas, such that once everyone arrived at the center, the teachers chose to evacuate the building until the gas company gave an “all clear”.

So it was an interesting week. Combine all that with the usual sleep deprivation, a birthday, a doctor’s appointment, and my mother’s shoulder replacement surgery, it was pretty stressful.

Another interesting bit happened when I was outside, doing walking meditation in a local park. I looked down and saw the shackle of a padlock on the ground. Someone had used bolt cutters and cut the lock. When I’m on retreat, I’m always on the lookout for stuff like this; the obvious symbolism being unlocking one’s heart. It was only later that I read the word stamped onto the shackle: HARDENED… A very nice addition to the symbolism.

I really wasn’t expecting any major revelations. After all, this was my sixth sandwich retreat, and I knew what to expect: a whole lot of sitting and walking. But I actually came back with four major insights, which I’ll share in abbreviated fashion here.

One thing I’d been kicking around before the retreat was how much of our suffering is purely a fabrication of the mind. For the most part, when we’re suffering it’s because of an image of what things were like in the past, or how they are going to be in the future. If you stop and look at your real, present-moment experience, we’re almost never actually experiencing painful circumstances. It’s all just our minds telling us how bad things will be once we get to some future time. It’s like being afraid of shadows on a scrim.

Another item. I have a longstanding story that I’m different because when I meditate, no big emotional traumas come up. But this time I suddenly remembered something that does come up for me that doesn’t bother most people: physical discomfort! But how to work with it? It didn’t seem to me like there was much wisdom to be gained in just watching your own pain…

Well, I asked Michael in my teacher interview, and he had some great observations. He agreed that relaxing into the pain was a pretty useless pursuit. He also said that one could watch one’s relationship to pain, but that too wasn’t all that fruitful.

Instead, he recommended whole-body awareness as something that he’d found useful from his Chan practice, and that was later reinforced when I talked to Narayan. So I guess I’ll be trying a little of that, although I find it a challenge not to narrow the field of attention down to a specific part of the body.

Another thing that came up during a group discussion with Michael was the idea of continuity of mindfulness. He was of the opinion that it would be freeing and effortless, while I challenged him by asserting that it would be tiring and require continuous mental effort not to get distracted.

After talking it over with Narayan, I think the difference is between concentration practice and wisdom practice. In concentration practice (samatha), one must exert effort to continually bring the mind back from any distractions to the object of concentration (usually the breath); whereas wisdom practice (vipassana) is more relaxed, focusing on accepting present-moment life as it is. The only mental effort involved in wisdom practice is in staying in the present moment by steering clear of thoughts of the past or projections and planning about the future.

So in that sense, I’ve been spending a lot of time on concentration practice, and not so much on wisdom.

One final revelation actually related to the “homework” that usually accompanies the sandwich retreat. This year we were to observe when resistance arose and how we could detect it. I was pretty interested, because I tend to be a resistant type, and that resistance manifests as frustration, which then can sometimes escalate into anger.

For me, it was pretty easy to spot, because in most instances I started swearing to myself. Once was when I learned that a package I was expecting (my new laptop) hadn’t been delivered; another was when a magnetic card reader failed to read my card on the first swipe.

The connection between the triggers I observed was immediately apparent to me. In each case, I had an expectation that something would transpire in a way that was beneficial to me, and that expectation hadn’t been met. Even though they were minor things, they were upsetting because they impacted me. In other words, it was clear that the problem was that I was living from a place where my ego was dominant.

From there, I started playing with the idea of living from a place where ego wasn’t so central, relaxing my grip on my “self” (or its grip on me). I found that really interesting. Narayan cautioned me not to take the ego as a concrete thing; by viewing it as just a passing sense of self, I could avoid setting up a futile battle royal between my “self” and myself. Good advice.

So although I didn’t expect it, I came away with a number of things to work with, so it was a surprisingly productive retreat.

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.

There have been innumerable joys in my life. The awe-inspiring places I’ve seen, the events I’ve experienced, and most importantly the truly amazing people who have touched me and shared my journey. These things I remember.

In the quiet of the night, when I look back at my life I’m astounded by the intensity of that joy. It’s like a summer sun that reveals the wonders of the world and warms you to the core, endlessly giving the gift of life to all. But it’s also intense: the heat and light sometimes becoming too much to bear. It seems impossible for one man’s heart to encompass so much joy. And yet I’ll carry the flaming memory of those joys for the rest of my life.

The sorrows… I’ve been lucky; it doesn’t seem like I’ve had as many sorrows. Mostly they’re about loss: places that I’ll never see again, experiences that cannot be repeated, and the realization that my remaining time on Earth is limited.

But like my joys, my deepest and most intense pains are for the loss of the people whom I have loved, whether that loss comes from death, estrangement, or merely the inevitable changes that come with the passage of time. The only analogy that comes to mind for such pain is of a white-hot bar of steel, burning deep inside. These, too, I remember, and will bear every day that I live.

Lying awake at 4am, thinking about the people I’ve known, I find myself incapable of containing so much joy and sorrow. It leaks out, uncontrolled and raw.

I am the heart of a flame, raging with the heat of innumerable joys and the searing intensity of my sorrows.

For a man who since childhood has been accused of not having any emotions—and I often question it myself—I can’t even begin to conceive of what it would be like for someone to feel these things more intensely than I do, when I allow myself to open my heart to them.

Maybe I’m just particularly good at hiding those feelings, even from myself. It’s something I’m working to overcome.

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!

Puggle is dying.

I brought the little guy in to the vet because for the past few weeks he seemed to be having gradually more and more difficulty breathing. No apparent pain or even much discomfort, which is good. But despite that, the vet’s diagnosis is dire: congestive heart failure.

There aren’t many options to consider. Untreated, he will die within weeks. We could drain the fluid from his chest and put him on a diuretic, which would give him short-term relief, but which isn’t a viable long-term treatment. We could undertake a lengthy, uncomfortable, and expensive sequence of aggressive treatment, with a lot of risk and little guarantee of results. Or we could euthanize him.

What seemed to me to be the most compassionate thing to do was to give him the short-term treatment, see how he responds to it, spend some quality time together, get used to the idea, and let him go when his symptoms return. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to nurse him through to the beginning of January, so that the holidays aren’t an eternal reminder of his passing.

Puggle is my first and only pet, which makes this really hard, and he’s been my constant companion for the past fourteen years. I’ve always known that this day would come, and dreaded it, because the little infestation is a very, very important part of my life. So today has without question been one of the most painful days of my life.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m pretty good at resorting to cold logic to subdue my emotions. I have been telling myself that everyone dies sooner or later, and he’s just a cat, after all. But the heart doesn’t agree with that, and my heart and mind seem to be taking turns speaking from the pulpit in a very heated debate taking place inside my skull.

In a way, this is a good ending, though. The diagnosis leaves little room for me to second-guess my decisions. It’s not one of those situations where he’ll need daily shots or an extensive treatment regimen for a long duration. And the Puggle doesn’t appear to be in any pain or much discomfort. So in that sense, it makes saying goodbye a lot easier.

But at the same time, he’s not in respiratory arrest, so I do get some time to say goodbye. The vet said I can feed him “anything he’ll eat”, so I’ll be picking him up some cheese curls, ice cream, bacon, and grass for his enjoyment. And because my company takes the week between Christmas and New Years off, I’ll have that whole week to spend with him, if his health permits.

That might be bad news for you, though, because I expect I’ll be posting a lot about this over the next month. The point isn’t to solicit sympathy, but just to record the things I’m going through. And to hopefully remind you that we all—cats, dogs, and humans—have a very brief time on this earth, and we should express our affection and appreciation of one another while we can, because all too soon, it will be too late.

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