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.

I’ve been burnt out on dhamma books for a number of years, feeling – justifiably – that after a certain point, reading about dhamma has diminishing returns, and what’s truly important is putting what you’ve learned into practice. But circumstances ensured that these five titles made my reading list. Here’s some capsule reviews of my dhamma reading from earlier this year.

Richard Shankman’s “The Experience of Samadhi”

The jhanas — esoteric states of heightened concentration – have perplexed me since my 2007 reading of the Buddha’s Middle Length Discourses. Although they are emphasized in a huge number of Buddhist suttas, there’s lots of disagreement about what they are, how to achieve them in meditation practice, and how important they are. Shankman’s book was recommended to me by Mariposa Sangha teacher Carolyn Kelley. The first half summarizes what the original Pali texts say about jhana, contrasting that with the radically different reformulations that derive from the Visuddhimagga, a commentary written 900 years later.

The latter half of the book contains statements — also frequently at odds with one another – from well-respected modern teachers, both lay and monastic, including Jack Kornfield, Bhante G, and Ajahn Brahm.

My takeaway is that it’s futile to strive to find a “real answer” to those questions about the jhanas, because the disagreements have persisted for centuries. The best thing to do is to concentrate (pun intended) on your own practice, ignoring all the furor over what the jhanas are, whether they actually exist, how important they are, and how to achieve them. From Shankman’s introduction:

“Dharma practice is not a matter of finding the one ‘true and correct’ interpretation of the doctrine and practice that is out there waiting for us to discover, if only we could find it, but instead, it’s the ability to examine ourselves honestly, recognizing our strengths and limitations so that we may apply our efforts in the most fruitful directions.”

Robert Pantano’s “The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence”

I’m a sucker for these kinds of brutally honest titles: this one by the creator of the philosophical “Pursuit of Wonder” YouTube video series. This book is basically an encapsulation of the author’s version of the quest I undertook 25 years ago: to revisit the philosophical and ethical alternatives to religion, as well as my own personal beliefs. Then – given those beliefs – how to find the best way I can to live in accordance with my values.

Pantano pulls from all the major Western superstars, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jung, Emerson, Bukowski, as well as my biggest influences: Sartre, Camus, and Alan Watts. He doesn’t spend much time evaluating Buddhism, but — like many kids these days – gets positively juicy about Seneca and Stoicism.

Ironically, when alphabetized by author, this book sits on my shelf directly adjacent to the “Philosophy For Dummies” book that I kicked off my inquiry with back in 2002 (blogpo)! I found it enjoyable going back over some of the intellectual paths I trod over two decades ago and hearing what someone in a similar situation made of it. From his summary of Ernest Becker’s work:

“What’s worse than living a life knowing that one will die is living a life knowing that one will die without having lived as many moments as one can properly relishing in the fact that they have not yet died.”

CIMC’s “Teachings to Live By”

I received this privately self-published book as a benefit for being a longtime member and supporter of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. It is a compilation of reflections that were sent out by email during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, authored by several CIMC teachers, including Larry Rosenberg, Narayan Liebenson, the late Ron Denhardt, Madeline Klyne, and longtime dhamma friends Zeenat Potia and Matthew Hepburn.

This book reminded me of so many things about CIMC that I hold precious, even a decade after last setting foot in that building. One of those treasures is the center’s unwavering dedication to ensuring that practice isn’t an esoteric, intellectual exercise, but visibly transforms our mundane, everyday lives.

I think that’s summed up best in the following citation from one of Narayan’s sections, entitled “Begin Again”. I’ve already read this in one of my dhamma talks, and will no doubt continue to share it with other practitioners.

Remember that meditation is not sitting. Sitting is a form and meditation is the love of awareness (whatever posture the body may be in). And sitting is an invaluable form in which to cultivate the love of awareness and the capacity to bring our practice to the entirety of our lives, not just to the cushion.

Larry Rosenberg’s “Three Steps to Awakening”

Cambridge Insight’s eminently practical view of meditation practice derives largely from CIMC’s founder, Larry Rosenberg. I studied with Larry for twelve years, and nowhere is his understanding of the dhamma more compellingly articulated than in this book, plainly subtitled “A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life”. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in meditation’s value in learning how to live.

Larry has distilled a lifetime of dhamma practice into three steps that anyone can perform. In my own words, those are: finding calm by maintaining awareness of the sensations throughout the body that arise with breathing (shamatha); using awareness of the breath to identify less with habitual discursive thought (vipassana); and transitioning awareness from the breath to the silence that underlies all the happenings in our daily lives (choiceless awareness).

That sounds pretty esoteric, but Larry is always practical, down-to-earth, and immediate.

Don’t put your faith in a “future you” who will evolve over a number of retreats and sittings. Of course you will reap byproducts down the road. But you do not have to wait, because meditation is a never-ending process of learning how to skillfully relate to everything daily life presents. Confirmation and verification occur right here and now!

Actually, this seeming passive activity sets in motion a dynamic energy that does move you in a wonderful direction. But don’t divide your attention with a preoccupation to improve. In our approach, you’re not attaining specific stages of wakefulness, or life goals, but rather taking care of each moment, whether on the cushion or at home or in school. This is why you are encouraged to not separate practice and daily life.

The Buddha is considered a fully awakened human being. He is offering you help to join him. Each moment of awareness is a small moment of Buddha mind. As the wakefulness matures by applying it to every occurrence in life, off and on the cushion, you will see the by-products of the learning that comes from this enhanced awareness. You are learning how to live skillfully in every moment, whether on retreat or at home with your family, at work with colleagues, or with strangers on the bus.

Narayan Liebenson’s “The Magnanimous Heart”

Narayan is a co-founder of Cambridge Insight and Larry’s longtime partner in teaching at CIMC. I also received her new (well, 2018) book as a thank-you gift for my support of the center. Amusingly, it was the first work selected by the new book club at Mariposa Sangha, my new meditation center in Austin.

The book is her very personal response following a period of tremendous loss, grief, and trauma in her life, and she confronts these topics head-on, without denial, distraction, or avoidance. It’s an unvarnished sharing of how an experienced meditator met some of life’s most painful challenges, which may be of value to others going through similar difficulties.

Fortunately, my life has been largely free of trauma, so for me the book was more like an evocative, frank, heart-opening account from a dear friend.

Is there any moment other than now that is more worth being awake in? We would have to answer no to the question, given that now is the only moment in which life can be lived. There is nothing to be gained by looking forward to future events that seem better than this boring moment right now. This boring moment right now is our life, and everything else is just thought. When we make contact with the sparkling nature of right now, the specific content we encounter in this moment matters less. Ultimately, being present for whatever is going on is more important than whatever is going on.

As it spread across Asia and the rest of the globe, Buddhism changed and adapted to the local cultures it encountered; however, Buddhism’s core goal—freedom from suffering—and its core method—contemplative meditation—have perforce remained constant… until recently.

Thus it’s understandable that the 20th Century Westerners who went to Asia would come back with a unique version of Buddhist practice that ought to work better for those of us brought up in the West than the original article. The hybrid Buddhism that we inherited from them had been distilled down to the essentials that would most appeal to educated middle class White people like themselves.

That meant discarding inconvenient concepts and practices such as reincarnation, myths & deities, miracles & supernatural powers, ritual & chanting, merit-making, the more esoteric states of concentration practice, karma, renunciation, non-duality, and non-self. That’s how American Buddhism became divorced from Asian, and enabled a diminished “secular meditation” with all the uncomfortable bits filed off.

That decision made some sense, as several parts of devotional Buddhism are at odds with our Christian heritage or directly contradict universally-accepted scientific laws. But the stylized meditation techniques that have gained such popularity in the American mainstream have also lost sight of the actual purpose and point of meditation practice.

The most facile example of the trendy “Mindfulness Movement” is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Obviously, learning tools to cope with stress is a Good Thing, but I can’t help but be saddened by how much got lost when the goal of meditation was reduced from the “eradication of the root cause of human suffering” to “just help me get through my day”.

It’s as if everyone in Asia had been inoculated with a one-time permanent cure for diabetes, but we Americans have shortsightedly continued carrying blood testing kits and syringes filled with insulin, only treating the symptoms of the chronic disease as they arise day after day.

Another painful example is how big business and professional sports have co-opted meditation as a cheap tactic for “guaranteed career success” and “enhancing peak performance”, promoted by well-heeled management consultants and wealthy athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Derek Jeter.

I’ve participated in several sittings and talks run by prominent performance-oriented meditation gurus, and always felt deeply uncomfortable. Because at their core, these programs and prescriptions are diametrically opposed to what Buddhist meditation is all about. Whether it’s vanquishing your business or athletic rivals, these techniques are designed to promote selfish desires and goals which reinforce the ego.

In contrast, Buddhism guides the meditator toward the understanding that no worldly attainments can ever provide deep or lasting satisfaction; toward relinquishment of personal desires; and toward freedom from our unexamined enslavement to the insecure demands of the ego.

All too frequently, I hear proclamations from people publicly known as meditation experts that completely set my nerves on edge. In their own literal words, meditation can: lower stress levels, help you drop all distractions that may interfere with winning, enhance peak performance, aid in the reduction of how chronic pain affects the mind, help you cope with the aftermath of a disappointing performance, strengthen your drive, boost your belief in yourself and your ability, build your athletic identity, improve sleep patterns, speed recovery time, enhance endurance, aid in proper fueling, and help control oxygen.

I’m sorry George, but the Buddha had a far more important and fulfilling goal than “speeding recovery time”, “building his athletic identity”, and “controlling oxygen”.

Through tireless self-aggrandizement and promotion, many of these business and sports meditation gurus have grown rich and famous as a result of dispensing their advice. I’m going to leave that contradiction aside however, as it’s too obviously hypocritical to waste time discussing.

Attending these completely secularized meditative self-gratification programs is kind of like taking classes at a prestigious cooking school, but disregarding everything except how to microwave a frozen burrito. It’s such a waste! Buddhism has a larger mission and so much more to offer than empty self-affirmations and greed-reinforcing self-talk.

I’ve also observed that when teachers introduce meditation practices to naïve Westerners, most of the reported short-term benefit is due to peer pressure or the placebo effect. For the practitioners I’ve known, their initial months of meditation were uncomfortable and challenging before things settled down and the practice started producing its slow, gentle results. But Americans have been sold a persistent fable that meditation will produce immediate and noticeable relief; so that’s what people report, after just a few minutes alone with their unruly internal dialogue.

For all these reasons, the majority of Americans think of—and relate to—meditation as if it were just another self-improvement project: a way to be a far more powerful, unshakeable, invincible you.

While there are undeniable positive side effects of long-term meditation practice, it’s not about building up, improving, or perfecting the self; it’s about letting go of the self, and liberation from the tyranny of the ego.

And the ultimate goal of Buddhist meditation—which the Western mindfulness movement has completely forgotten—is the freedom and well-being that results from the eradication of suffering in our lives: something many self-proclaimed “meditation experts” have a vested interest in perpetuating and profiting from.

Over the solstice, I attended an 8-day silent meditation retreat with Bhante Gunaratana at his Bhavana Society retreat center in West Virginia.

Buddha in Bhavana's main hall

Bhavana Buddies

Is this a dhamma talk?

My Kuti

What Eighth Precept?

Bhante G. is a well-known Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, the author of the widely-read manual “Mindfulness in Plain English”. To be honest, I didn’t know he was located so close. When I learned that Bhavana is a three and a half hour drive from Pittsburgh, I was immediately motivated to go do a retreat, especially since I wouldn’t be inconveniencing Inna, who has been out of town for months on business. And at 90 years old, Bhante G.’s advancing age gave me an added sense of urgency.

Last spring, when I looked at the Bhavana Society’s schedule, one event immediately stood out: a jhana retreat planned for the end of June.

What’s “jhana”? Jhana is an intensive concentration meditation practice which predated the Buddha, which presumably leads to four increasingly subtle and esoteric mental states.

The jhanas comprise Right Concentration: the eighth component of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path leading toward the ultimate goal of practice: the cessation of suffering. Once you have developed a high degree of equanimity through the jhanic concentration practice, you can use it (and the impermanence of those states) as a tool in Vipassana practice: the development of insight/wisdom through the internalization of the Three Characteristics of Existence (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self).

That sequence—practice concentration, then use it to develop wisdom—is one of two ways that people approach Buddhist practice. The other approach, called “dry” or “pure” Vipassana practice, does it the other way around: meditators work directly to realize the Three Characteristics, and let their concentration skills develop as needed. Meditating on the Three Characteristics through Vipassana meditation comprises the seventh element of the Noble Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness.

Virtually all modern western Insight Meditation centers go the latter route, teaching Vipassana meditation exclusively. They rarely talk about the jhanas, and often discourage jhana practice, believing that the preoccupation with mental attainments is an unnecessary diversion from the development of wisdom… if those presumed attainments even exist at all! Having “grown up” in that Insight tradition, I dismissed jhana practice for years as little more than legacy Asian mysticism.

But ten years ago I decided to read some of the original Buddhist suttas, specifically the Majjhima Nikaya: the Middle-Length Discourses (my 2007 blogpost). There I discovered that there’s a passage describing how a skilled meditator enters the jhanas as a preliminary part of practice. Moreover, that standardized passage is repeated in a lot of suttas: about 30 percent of them, IIRC. Appearing so frequently, it was clearly something the Buddha considered extremely important. From then on, I knew I couldn’t simply dismiss jhana practice; I needed to give it a fair and openminded trial.

I bought books and did online research, but couldn’t get past my confusion. On one hand, the “jhana factors” that arise are familiar to me: applied thought, sustained thought, single-pointedness, happiness, bliss, and equanimity. But on the other hand, the four jhanic states are subtle and difficult to judge, and I certainly hadn’t experienced any of the mental imagery (nimitta) or magical powers that supposedly precede them. Were they merely metaphorical? As an avowed empiricist, I had difficulty reconciling the presumed importance of these concentration practices with the mystical bullshit that accompanied them.

As a followup to his best seller, Bhante G. also wrote a book about the jhanas called “Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English: An Introductory Guide to Deeper States of Meditation”, which I also read. So when I learned his center was nearby and that he’d be leading a jhana retreat, I figured the time was right to go and try to resolve my longstanding confusion. That’s why—due to an unfortunate scheduling coincidence—I decided to stay home at our Tuscan villa on the day the Giro d’Italia bike race came by: so that I could guarantee my spot in Bhante G.’s jhana retreat as soon as they opened online registration.

To conserve Bhante G.’s strength, activities like dhamma talks, Q&A, and teacher interviews were shared, with three different monks taking responsibility for two days each. As a result, my understanding of the jhanas changed and evolved over the course of the week.

The first two days we were in the care of Bhante Jayasara, a young American novice. He addressed the groundwork for jhana practice: specifically, suppressing the negative mental states called the Five Hindrances: a straightforward and familiar practice.

During his Q&A, he shared his personal experience of a nimitta: a sign of deep concentration that’s often perceived as a bright light. I found his sharing informative and inspiring, especially his confirmation that the nimitta is not a visual perception, but a purely mental one.

Interestingly, he could only share this with us because he’s not yet a fully-ordained monk, since the Vinaya—the Buddhist monastic rules—forbids monks from contradicting the canon or discussing their own personal experiences and attainments. So if you’re looking for practical advice based on personal experience, don’t bother asking a monastic!

During his Q&A, I asked which of the Five Hindrances compulsive planning fell under and how to practice with it. Of course, the answer was somewhat nuanced. Planning is often useful, but could also be an expression of anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty. In the moment when the compulsion comes up, one should consider three things: what is the appeal of planning, how it might be problematic, and how to reframe one’s habits of mind to avoid following that pattern out of compulsion. As Bhante Jay summarized: “The gratification, the danger, and the escape.”

After that, the middle two days were handled by Bhante Seelananda, a middle-aged monk who was born in Sri Lanka and became a monk at age eleven. As a lifelong academic scholar, he has exceptional knowledge of the Pali canon (the Buddhist scriptures).

His talks covered Buddhist academic theory relating to the jhanas in unrestrained detail, reciting a litany of passages in Pali and lists of theoretical esoteric mental states. Less of a dhamma talk and more of a collegiate lecture, it was the first dhamma talk I’ve ever attended that included a slide deck presented with an overhead projector and laser pointer!

With a straight face, he reported the magical powers the canon associates with the jhanas: the abilities to fly, read minds, recall past lives, and clairaudience.

At no time did he share any personal reflections or practical advice, limiting himself to reporting the content of the Pali canon as if it were literal truth. I’m not sure whether that was because the monastic rules prohibited him from contradicting the Buddhist writings, or whether his childhood upbringing within the monastic community rendered him an indoctrinated faith believer incapable of critical thought.

In either case, he had zero practical advice to share that would have benefited his audience of lay practitioners. As you might imagine, his circular reasoning and arguments from false authority didn’t sit well with an objective materialist like me.

After coming into the retreat with an open mind and specifically looking for practical help, I was getting discouraged and felt that I was wasting my time. I was ready to conclude that the jhanas are simply not a useful concept. Sure, concentration practice is important in habituating oneself to meta-thinking; the Five Hindrances are things we can all relate to; even the “jhana factors” I listed earlier make sense in the context of quiescing the discursive mind. But the four jhana states themselves sound like abstract, magical mumbo-jumbo.

And even if they are real, someone has got to find a better way to teach them. One doesn’t learn how to whistle by being told “Just blow long enough, and it’ll happen”; and one doesn’t learn how to swim by being told “Keep splashing around on your own and one day you’ll magically become a master swimmer”. You need someone to directly show you the techniques of how to whistle, how to swim… and how to meditate, achieve, and recognize these abstract, theoretical mental states.

For me, no matter how much of the official doctrine Bhante Seela cited, the jhanas simply don’t pass the Kalama test. In the Pali canon’s Kalama Sutta, the Buddha tells the Kalama tribe to accept as true only those teachings that one has personally verified are skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness; and to expressly reject teachings that derive from blind faith, dogmatism, and belief spawned from specious reasoning. And the jhanas demand a whole lot of the latter.

After Bhante Seela’s academic theorizing, the final two days’ talks were given by Bhante G., and I was eager to hear how he would follow up. Thankfully, as a non-academic, Bhante G. is more personable and more encouraging than Bhante Seela, which was reassuring in itself.

In the meditations he led, he ended each sitting by reciting verse 372 of the Dhammapada, one of the earliest Buddhist texts:

There is no concentration without wisdom,
Nor wisdom without concentration.
One who has both wisdom and concentration
Is close to peace and emancipation.

This is the central theme of his teaching. Here “concentration” is a reference to jhana practice, and “wisdom” is shorthand for Insight or Vipassana practice. While the two are often considered completely separate practices, Bhante G. says they are parallel roads, different but complementary ways of reaching the same destination. After all, Vipassana constitutes Right Mindfulness, the seventh element of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, while Right Concentration (the jhanas) comprises the eighth. That helped me put concentration practice into a better perspective.

But where I most benefited from Bhante G.’s wisdom was in the group interview I attended, where I was able to ask “How can you tell you’ve reached a jhana state if you don’t experience something as unmistakable as those bright-light nimittas?” His answer was packed with insightful nuggets.

First, one should look at those factors that co-arise with jhana: applied thought, sustained thought, single-pointedness, happiness, bliss, and equanimity. Those are a lot more concrete than the four abstract jhana levels. He said that entering the first jhana isn’t that hard to do for an experienced practitioner, but it’s a subtle and difficult thing to see. He said I might have achieved it many times, but who can say? You just have to judge for yourself. The important thing is to just practice. Concern yourself with your own mind, not the esoteric theories about signs and levels.

His advice was personal, immediate, practical, and encouraging… way more useful than any of the infographics Bhante Seela had presented. I’m so glad that I got into this retreat and had the opportunity to have an exchange with him, while he is still well enough to teach. It was touching when, on the last day of the retreat, I ran into him on his daily walk and we exchanged smiles.

So where did I wind up as far as jhana practice? While I didn’t get confirmation that jhanas exist or not, I did get a degree of practical clarity. Taking Bhante G.’s words to heart, I’m not going to pay a lot of attention to the jhanas. I’ll continue to practice meditation of various flavors (Vipassana/Insight, concentration, and samatha/calmness), with the main focus on evolving my relationship to desire, aversion, impermanence, ethics, and renunciation.

With that, let’s dump all this philosophy. “How was it?” I hear you asking. Well, lemme tellya…

Long retreats hurt. Despite their obvious benefit, I dread them. Even though I use a meditation bench, long periods of sitting hurt both my knees and back, and my knee pain turned severe this time. On top of that, my yogi job was washing dishes, and their sinks are definitely not at a height for normal-sized humans.

There’s also an odd kind of discomfort associated with heightened mindfulness. I would spend all day building up my mindfulness, only to find it difficult to relax and fall asleep at night, because I was so busy noticing and observing everything. Once you’re in that mental state, you can’t simply shut it off, which in my experience leads to a particular kind of retreat fatigue. I find that far more uncomfortable than the more-frequently reported discomfort returning to mainstream society following a long retreat.

Rather than being put up in a dormatory, for the first time ever I got my very own kuti, a tiny one-person cabin off on its own, used as a living space by monastics. It was little more than an uninsulated wooden shed, with a twin mattress and just enough space to squeeze around it on three sides. No electricity, but two windows. I guess it fit the modern idea of a “tiny house”. Thankfully, there weren’t too many insects inside, though I was still glad to have brought bug repellent. I was assigned the cabin named “Panna”, which is Pali for “wisdom”.

The weather. The first three days were hot and sunny, which I enjoyed, despite the lack of aircon. Although the heat was supposed to hold all week, the weather turned very rainy and cold from Wednesday through Sunday. Several times so much rain fell that the short, grassy downhill path to my kuti spontaneously turned into a rushing brook!

Flora and fauna everywhere. Poison ivy. Fireflies. A deer outside my kuti one morning. Termites or something loudly trying to bore into the kuti all day and night long until the rains came and drove them off. Ridiculously loud and annoying tree frogs that trilled back and forth to one another from 8pm to 11pm, sounding for all the world like dueling car alarms. Great for practicing equanimity, but not so great for actually sleeping.

And Buddy. We were told that we’d see Buddy, their tabby cat, who might come and sit in your lap. Monday evening, during a ten-minute break between sittings, I ran into him outside the main building, introduced myself, and made friends. I sat cross-legged in the driveway, and he climbed into my lap and promptly fell asleep. I saw him a couple more times, but he too disappeared once the rain started. I mused that although I hadn’t experienced the Buddhist concept of “no-self”, I did understand “no-Buddy” (nobody).

Other oddities, for your amusement…

Bhavana’s retreat FAQ suggests bringing earplugs, and those were key! I’ve already mentioned the nightly amphibian car alarm chorus and the termites or whatever was chewing its way into my shack. On top of that, the kuti came with a battery-powered clock whose second hand ticked louder than its built-in alarm; I yanked its batteries on the second day. Then the pounding rain on the kuti’s roof topped it all off. Without my earplugs I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep at all.

There’s always one… Normally people claim a spot in the meditation hall and have one zabuton (mat) and one zafu (a tall cushion) or meditation bench. One guy sitting a couple rows in front of me built and sat atop a ziggurat composed of no less than three zabutons, a square cushion, two zafus, and another square cushion, with a bench nearby, just in case. He was perched more than two feet off the floor! Which I think is a violation of the vow we took on the first day to uphold the Eight Precepts, specifically the vow to refrain from using high or luxurious beds and seats. Ridiculous!

The food. Normal people always crow about how great retreat food is; I’m too finicky for that, but I found everything surprisingly palatable. Plus there were a couple treats, such as Nutella, Gatorade, and one day we got orange juice. They also provided Sriracha sauce, which I found helped many dishes, except loading up on it wasn’t always the best idea, since I usually didn’t fetch anything to drink with my meal! Still, when the retreat ended, I made a quick stop at Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar, then grabbed a cola and potato chips to enjoy on the drive home.

My yogi job washing dishes provided some entertainment. I’m used to turning dishwashing gloves inside-out to dry, which is difficult to do unless you know this secret: blow into them like a balloon to reverse the fingers. But somehow I managed to explode two gloves by blowing too hard into them! They blew up with impressively loud bangs during an otherwise silent retreat!

At one point (for some unknown reason) the cook pulled me aside to tell me he thought I looked like Frank Zappa. “Maybe it’s the ponytail?” That’s a new one on me. In the past I’ve drawn comparisons to David Beckham, Steven Seagal, Fabio Lanzoni, and (in a swipe from the ex-wife) Star Trek’s emotionless Mr. Spock.

Even with all this zaniness, it was a good and productive retreat, although three weeks later my knees are still recovering. I was able to meet and practice with Bhante Gunaratana, a cherished teacher whose career is nearing its conclusion; and I gained some clarity about how to practice with and relate to the jhanas (or not). It gave me what my practice needed, and was quite a memorable experience.

Upon coming home, I felt a huge sense of relief. Not because of the retreat, but because I had concluded four months of frequent travel: two weeks gallivanting around Asia in March, a week in Italy in May, and another week on retreat in West Virginia in June. It’s nice to visit new places, but home will always be home, and I was eager to hole up for a while in a familiar place. I wouldn’t mind if there were a few less-eventful weeks in store for me now!

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!

First, two operative assumptions:

Every human being experiences some degree of suffering during their lives.

Every human being wants their suffering to be heard and met with compassion.

Given those two truths, the logical inference is that all compassion comes from beings who are experiencing suffering of their own.

Think about that for a moment. The beauty of compassion isn’t just that one person cares about the wellbeing of another; rather, it’s that one person cares about it so much that they are willing to set aside their own suffering and (completely justified) need for compassion in order to provide it for someone else.

This is the built-in irony of compassion: you cannot express compassion to others without first overcoming your own immediate desire to receive compassion for your own suffering.

In our modern society, many individuals, when presented with another person’s suffering, cannot see past their own problems. Their response to a plea for help might be: “I know what you mean because I hurt too, and since my suffering is so much greater than yours, I deserve compassion more than you do.” These people treat compassion as if it were a zero-sum game based around moral debt. They are so encased in self-concern that they are blinded to others, going through life unknowingly causing great harm to the people around them.

I’m not saying that we should neglect our own suffering. There are, of course, times when our need for compassion is acute, and we need to know how to skillfully balance letting our friends and family meet our emotional needs without imposing on them unduly.

Bottom line? When you are able to see beyond your own suffering and offer compassion to others, that is a moment to be celebrated and a true state of grace. And when you need help to deal with the suffering in your own life, gracefully accept compassion when it is offered, because it comes from people who have willingly chosen put their own problems aside to care for and empathize with you.

I really enjoyed reading “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” by neuroscientist David Eagleman, so much so that I’ll probably return to it again and again as time goes by.

It is an interesting overview of the current state of our knowledge about the brain, and Eagleman’s views on the implications both for society as well as for the individual.

One of his premises is that most of the things that make us who we are occur below the level of conscious thought. We already knew that vast swaths of the brain control autonomic behavior, but Eagleman asserts that more of the things we consider “us”—including our behavior, beliefs, motivations, and what we are allowed to think—are learned and burned into the brain’s circuitry at a level that is simply inaccessible to conscious inspection, modification, or control.

To paraphrase the popular philosopher Hamlet, “There are more things in your speech and behavior, Horatio, than are thought up in your consciousness.”

I find this dovetails nicely with the Buddhist belief that the unexamined life is ruled by long-established habit patterns from our past, and that most of our behavior is a straightforward, linear result of the coming together of conditions: specifically the intersection of those established personality patterns with the external conditions we find ourselves in.

Amusingly, this echoes something I theorized a good 30 years ago. In a document I titled “Orny’s Hypotheses”, entry number one reads as follows:

No organized religion can never reflect the true beliefs of its nominal adherents, for each such individual must learn the tenets of the religion from an external source and accept them without any possible reservation. In truth, individuals cannot consciously modify or mold their beliefs; faith comes from within the individual, and what is in his heart is his true faith, no matter what his professed faith. This faith may be discovered through introspection and be consciously acknowledged or it may remain hidden in the subconscious of the individual. One cannot decide what one believes, merely discover it, although this does not prohibit change in beliefs over time.

Getting back to Eagleman, his view of the human mind differs greatly from the popular conception of a single conscious entity. He regards the brain as what he terms “a team of rivals”. In his mind, the brain has different factions, each of which wants to influence the mind’s single output channel: our behavior. Even the language is familiar to us: we’re “of two minds” because part of us wants to eat that bowl of ice cream, but part of us says we shouldn’t. Rather than a unified single computing machine, the brain is more like a parliament or a family. But your conscious mind is only made aware of this when there’s an unresolvable conflict between factions that requires an arbiter, when a decision needs to be made.

All this sounds like Eagleman has a dim view of our vaunted concept of free will. We think we’re in control of our body and our mind and our personality, but that is largely false. Freedom—choosing to think and act in ways that are not influenced (if not determined) by our biological, chemical, and material makeup—is an illusion.

Eagleman diverges briefly into a discussion of the implications this has for criminal justice, based as it is on guilt, blameworthiness, and personal responsibility. For most people, there is an ethical difference between a responsible person committing a premeditated crime and someone whose brain chemistry causes them to perform socially proscribed actions. As we understand the brain better, our justice system should drop such outdated concepts as blame, responsibility, and punishment in favor of altering the criminal’s conditioning and mental habits such that in the future they will act in accordance with the law.

The thread that most interests me in Eagleman’s book is his demonstration that who you are and what you think is extremely closely tied to the chemical and biological state of your brain. He illustrates how easily the brain can be changed by various means: narcotics, viruses, genetics, neurotransmitters, hormones. We tend to think that we all share the same basic brain function and capacity, but that’s very much not true. We aren’t even guaranteed that our own brain performs consistently from day to day. And those changes can have dramatic effects upon our personality, outlook, opinions, speech, and behavior.

At the same time, Eagleman isn’t a strict material reductionist. While we are inseparable from our physical componentry, he views consciousness as a kind of emergent property that might indeed be something greater than the sum of its parts. But the parts are a whole lot more important than we’ve been led to believe.

For me, the book prompted a lot of soul-searching (or mind-searching). It brings up the idea that the ego—the self—is ultimately nothing more than a very convincing illusion. In that respect, I must admit that it’s a much more accessible introduction to that concept than all the esoteric writings and talks I’ve seen regarding the Buddhist concept of not-self.

Most people have a visceral reaction against the idea that who we are is wholly determined by this three-pound bag of neurons. After all, their sense of self is real and immediate, and giving up that view comes with a very powerful sense of loss. Perhaps future humans will equate those emotions with what people felt back in the 17th century when Galileo’s observations disproved the Ptolomaic view that Earth was the center of the universe.

Over time, that earlier fall from primacy opened our eyes to the incomprehensible scale and majesty of the solar system, our galaxy, and the known universe. If neuroscience winds up evicting our conscious minds from the central seat of our internal world, it will simultaneously reveal the brain’s truly incomprehensible complexity and renew our sense of wonder at the unbelievable natural achievement that is the human mind.

I’d like to know “what you think”.

This year’s birthday wasn’t the greatest piece of work I’ve ever experienced. Woke up with a sore throat that presaged the cold I’d deal with for the following weeks. Made the usual pilgrimage to Foxwoods (where I lost for the first time in three years) and visit to Purgatory Chasm, which was cold and grey but pleasant enough, then a big grocery run, since I had free time and a rental car. Got myself Thai takeout from Montien, which was nice, but it outta be, at $21 for an app and one entree. Then watched some anime on Hulu. Woo-hoo.

The following morning I was in full-on head cold, and off at 8am for the first day of my annual “Sandwich Retreat” at CIMC. The “sandwich” means 12-hour meditation sessions on both Saturday and Sunday of two consecutive weekends, with 3-hour evening sessions on the five weekdays “sandwiched” in-between.

Sudafed FTW, baby. That’s the only way I got through those nine days of head cold hell. I was a coughing, drooling, snotting, sneezing, gagging, nose-blowing, mouth-breathing ball of unhappy. Highly recommended way to spend a long meditation retreat.

In the middle of the week I somehow managed to convince myself that it’d be a good idea if I biked 20 miles out to the Pan-Mass Challenge office to pick up the sneakers that were this year’s premium for people who reached the $6,300 Heavy Hitter fundraising level. The next day (Thursday) I had such a massive relapse of sinus pressure and headache that I skipped that evening’s retreat session, which was actually okay, since there were no group discussions that night, only sittings.

This was my fourth Sandwich Retreat, but it was the first time I stayed at CIMC the whole time. In previous years, I spent periods of walking meditation roaming the streets near the center, whereas this year I stayed indoors and stuck with the formal walking practice. I also spent this year’s 90-minute lunch breaks napping in CIMC’s lower meditation hall, rather than going out and sitting on the steps of Cambridge City Hall.

In fact, the only time I went outside I just sat on a bench in the yard, captivated by the bizarre moire patterns made by passing cars’ hubcaps, viewed through the gaps in CIMC’s slatted wooden fence.

And unlike prior years, when I’d pick up food from outside, this year I actually stayed and ate the vegetarian meals CIMC provided. Depressingly, all four lunches were some form of vegetarian stew, but they were paired with brown rice and bread, which I was able to fill up on. And please, people: raw green beans aren’t tasty or elegant; for chrissake cook those suckers!

The biggest challenge I had was with my “yogi job”. This year I was again assigned to end of day cleanup. It’s a two-person job, and my good buddy Mark signed up to be my parter. Except on the first day, he didn’t show up for it. And the second day, he left early. Then he didn’t even show up for the second Saturday and Sunday. I was kind of stunned that he’d stiff me like that, but some of it was misunderstandings that were later clarified, and thankfully other yogis stepped up and helped me out.

One of the things that makes the Sandwich Retreat unique is the “homework” we are given: something to practice with throughout our regular weekdays, which we can then share with others during the evening sessions. This year we were asked to notice when we were feeling resistance to life as it is, note what conditions caused it, what emotions and mind states it manifested as, and how it evolved and changed once we noticed it.

What almost no one (including me) realized was that this was the exact same homework as last year’s Sandwich Retreat! Ironically, I think a lot of what I observed during the week this year was nearly the same as things I’d observed last year!

Being unemployed and living alone, I wasn’t interacting with a lot of other people, which limited the number of opportunities I had for resistance to come up. The ones I did notice were subtle and ephemeral, like the briefest irritation when I had to wait for a line of cars to pass before I could walk across the street. Such irritations arose and disappeared so fast that I couldn’t really examine them. In the end, I decided that the source of my irritation was some kind of unmet expectation, followed by an immediate reset of my expectations. “Oh! There’s a line of cars. I guess I have to wait.” As soon as I adjusted my expectations, the resistance passed and I was much more patient with the situations.

Naturally, my cold provided me with an opportunity to practice with resistance. On Monday, when I described how acknowledging my irritation lessened its power over me, Larry commented that stopping those problematic mental proliferations actually leaves more energy for the body to fight off infection (or other maladies). Sadly, that didn’t help me during Thursday’s relapse, when mindfulness of my irritation did absolutely nothing to alleviate my physical symptoms and the misery that came with them.

During our sitting meditation periods, I spent most of my time doing karuna practice: the compassion work that I began last month and plan to continue for a full year, similar to the metta practice I did last year. I feel like it is both more meaningful to me and a more productive practice than metta, so I’m really enjoying it so far.

As if exploring resistance and developing compassion weren’t enough to work with, I spent my two teacher interviews grilling Narayan and Michael about my felt sense of anatta (non-self), free will, and the nature of the observer.

I think a lot of it revolves around whether the act of observing life as it plays out is something undertaken by some independent entity within, or whether it’s just another thought process. Because that determines who is in control.

Basically, if everything (including my feelings, thoughts, and actions) is purely conditioned, then I don’t see myself as having the western idea of free will. And that, in turn, causes the Buddhist concept of “non-self” to make more sense to me. If there’s no free will, there’s no independent actor making choices, and if there’s no independent actor making choices, how can there be such a thing as free will?

That was my basic thought process, and I wanted to run it by our guiding teachers to see if they thought it was (a) a useful line of inquiry, and (b) a reasonable understanding of the Buddhist view of reality. However, as is typical in these situations, their responses left me with many more questions than answers.

I first talked with Narayan, who said it was a meaningful line of inquiry, because it relates directly to Wise View: the first and foundational element of the Noble Eightfold Path. She also agreed that all thoughts and feelings are conditioned, but disagreed with the idea that the observer is just another thought.

She asserted that there is something within us that allows us to influence our actions, to alter the conditions that are the input to our decisionmaking process, but she described it in terms of a process, an action, a “mystery”, and a way of “be-ing”. She even described it as our innate “Buddha nature”, that seed of the unconditioned within us all.

She also didn’t think that “free will” was necessarily the best way of thinking about it, since there’s no way of definitively knowing whether we have free will or whether it’s just an illusion. Thus, the question of the degree to which we are able to make free and conscious choices is similar to the questions the Buddha described as “not useful” in the Cula-Malunkya Sutta.

Narayan acknowledged that there was a seeming contradiction in the idea that all thought, feeling, and actions are conditioned, while man still has the freedom to influence his thought patterns, make decisions, and take independent action. After the interview, I felt that contradiction was something I would have to sit with and examine at length.

I also felt it might be useful to spend some time trying out the idea that everything is conditioned and there is no such thing as free will, just to see how it differs from our default and predominant world view that we are independent actors.

After that, I really wanted to talk to Michael about it, since Narayan seemed to have directly contradicted something I’d heard from him, that the observer really was just another (conditioned) thought process. So a week later, I talked to him.

Rather than answer my question directly, Michael came back with an alternate question. For him, it isn’t the question that’s important, but what is driving the question. Why does the question need to be answered? Does it tell us something about the person asking the question? As a parting shot, Michael suggested that universal questions like this can tell us a lot about the individual’s relationship with the unknown. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was definitely more food for thought.

So when the time came for the final day’s feedback session, I talked a little bit about the scattered nature of examining three things at once: the karuna/compassion practice I was doing during the sitting periods; the homework, which concerned itself with resistance and aversion; and my teacher interviews, where I grilled them about non-self, the nature of awareness, and my relationship to it. I didn’t even mention our homework from the Long-Term Yogi group, which has to deal with interpersonal connection and Wise Speech. Still, I felt like I made progress on all those fronts.

Despite being sick, I wasn’t as mentally fatigued this year as in previous years, when I was absolutely exhausted. Part of that is attributable to being unemployed, but I also made a conscious effort to be more relaxed in my practice during the sittings, which I’m sure helped. The only day I felt truly wrung out was the final day, which was okay with me.

Last Saturday our dharma book club discussed a book I recommended. This post captures some of that discussion, and why I chose the book I did.

When I was first asked to pick our next book, it was pretty obvious to me what my selection would be: Alan Watts’ “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Written in 1951 by a British scholar in comparative religions, it was one of the first books in English that brought Buddhism to an American audience, including the Beat Generation. More recently, it also played a pivotal role in my own movement toward Buddhism.

Back in 2002, I decided to review my existing philosophical beliefs. In high school, I’d adopted Existentialism after reading Sartre and Camus and Ionesco in French. It had appealed to me as a typically angst-ridden adolescent, but did it still serve me as I approached 40?

Coincidentally, I had just begun blogging here on LiveJournal, so as I spent the next year plowing through Nietzsche and Sartre, I was able to document many of my thoughts along the way. One of the most important of those thoughts came from the following passage in William Barrett’s 1958 book “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy”, a book I read in January of 2003.

The Self, indeed, is in Sartre’s treatment, as in Buddhism, a bubble, and a bubble has nothing at its center. But neither in Buddhism nor in Sartre is the Self riddled with negations to the end that we should, humanly speaking, collapse into the negative, into a purely passive nihilism. In Buddhism the recognition of the nothingness of ourselves is intended to lead into a striving for holiness and compassion—the recognition that in the end there is nothing that sustains us should lead us to love one another, as survivors on a life raft, at the moment they grasp that the ocean is shoreless and that no rescue ship is coming, can only have compassion on one another.

That one somewhat convoluted reference was the first I’d heard of any commonality between Buddhism and Existentialism. Apparently, although the two philosophies began with similar assumptions—that there is no paternal creator god, that there is no inherent meaning in life, and that man has no permanent essence that survives his corporeal body—Buddhism offered something that I never got from Existentialism: a positive and ethical way of living one’s life based on those assumptions. That was the seed that got me thinking about looking into Buddhism. You can read my original comments on Barrett’s book here.

Just a few days later, I found myself browsing at a local Barnes & Noble. I’d scanned the entire Buddhist section and gotten nearly to the end of the alphabet without seeing anything that called out to me. Then I saw this tiny little paperback with an eye-searing lime green spine and the words “THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY - ALAN W. WATTS”. The cover blurbs seemed to intuit exactly what I’d spent the previous year looking for, so I immediately picked it up and blew through it.

Watts was the first author I’d read who, rather than restating the existential problem and wringing his hands, provided a rational and fulfilling way to respond to those conditions, without resorting to the self-delusion of unproven faith or its opposite extreme of pessimism and despair.

Even today, I’m stunned by the serendipity and good fortune I had to happen upon that exact book, because it was the perfect gateway to all the wisdom, development, and fulfillment that has followed. You can read my original reaction to the book here.

So that’s why I selected that particular book. It has an immense amount of personal meaning for me.

As you might expect, I was a little anxious about sharing something that personal with others, even my fellow meditators. That feeling was compounded by the long wait: three months passed between when I was asked to select a book and our discussion of it!

However, it didn’t take long to get a reaction. As soon as he learned of my selection, one of the attendees emailed back: “AMAZING selection!!!!!!! I will definately [sic] be there. I cannot express how amazing this book is to read.” Okay, that’s one solid vote of confidence!

Another one came a few weeks later. Socializing after a sitting at CIMC, one of the attendees showed me her copy of the book and mentioned that she was enjoying it. That’s two!

But as she flashed the book, its amazingly ugly lime green and purple patterned cover caught the eye of the woman who had officiated at the evening’s meditation. She recognized it immediately and also effused about it, indicating that, like me, it had played a big part in her coming to Buddhism. That really made me much more confident about the selection, since she’s a longtime practitioner who is known for managing CIMC’s “sandwich retreat”.

By the time our book club discussion came around, even the woman who hosts the group made a point of letting me know that she was enjoying the book. So I was able to go into the meeting without too much self-consciousness about it.

That’s not to say that the book received unalloyed praise. Watts’ language was both commended (in his choice of metaphors and images) and critiqued (in his tangential rants and sometimes inaccessibly complex sentence structure).

Eleven people attended the meeting, and about half had read the book, which is a bit better than normal. Let me gloss over a few of the topics that came up during the discussion.

One comment that was repeatedly made was how pertinent Watts’ words are today, even sixty years after he wrote them. He wrote about consumerism and how everyone was chasing the newest, best television. It stunned us that in 2010, we’re still being sold new and supposedly much better televisions, just as was the case back in 1951! He also anticipated our need for ever more rapid and imposing forms of entertainment. He could surely have been talking about last week in this passage:

There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down—traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.

We spent some time talking about how religious faith can be a comfort, but once it has been pierced by skepticism, you can’t ever restore that belief. That harkens back to my own feeling that you cannot simply decide what you believe; belief is not an object to be so simply controlled, and you can do little more than discover and perhaps indirectly influence what you believe. As one attendee put it: the challenge of Watts’ book is how to stay connected with modern reality in the absence of mollifying religious faith, without being scared.

Another big theme that people pulled out was that our feelings of insecurity are the direct result of the fact that we want security. If you want something, by definition it is something that you feel you do not have now, so the more desperately we seek security, the more insecure we feel. This was likened to the concept of the “power of attraction”, where one must be careful to cultivate the vision of having what one wants, not the wanting itself, because focusing your energy on the wanting presumably reinforces your yearning and the absence of the thing you’re after.

Our discussions also circled around the Buddhist concept of conditioned behavior, and the large degree to which our actions can be reduced to a response to the situation we are in, based on patterns of behavior that have been successful for us in the past. Where this got interesting was our realization that as dharma friends, we are each providing conditioning factors for one another, and hopefully influencing one another such that we will all make wiser, compassionate, and more fulfilling decisions in the future.

Another amusing tangent had us discussing the idea that on average, your friends are more popular than you are. This is mathematically true, because we all tend to be friends with outgoing people who are already very popular.

Obviously, the discussion was much broader than those few items, but I wanted to capture those in particular, and they’ll also give you a flavor for where we went with it. Overall, the discussion stayed pretty well on-topic, and people kept returning to the book and reading key passages aloud, since Watts’ prose is eminently quotable.

In preparation for the book club, I re-read “Wisdom of Insecurity” myself last week. After three readings, almost every single page has something highlighted on it. It’s an extremely dense book in terms of the profundity of its concepts, and I feel that although it’s only a thin 150-page paperback, one could easily base a semester’s study around it.

I wanted to highlight a few things that I got from this most recent reading that I didn’t mention in the book club discussion.

Here’s a great passage, where Watts begins by commenting on our impossible and irrational desire for permanence:

For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy. To drink more fully of the fountain of pleasure, it has brought forth capacities which make man more susceptible to pain. It has given us the power to control the future but a little—the price of which is the frustration of knowing that we must at last go down in defeat. If we find this absurd, this is only to say that nature has conceived intelligence in us to berate itself for absurdity. Consciousness seems to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture.

In other words, if we’re intelligent enough to realize the futility of our plight, we must then be nature’s way of mocking itself! When I read this section about the basic absurdity of humanity’s quest for meaning, seeking pleasure, and avoiding pain, I realized that the best way to think about life is as a Zen koan. There is no answer! And any attempt to arrive at one rationally is bound to fail. Life is a paradox; accept it and move on!

Another passage:

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. 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”.

What leaps out at me from this section is the absurdity (again) of feeling that one has to prop up or defend something that we’ve defined as eternal and immutable. How ridiculous! If there is some permanent “I” within us, then what need does it have for defense? If such a thing existed, it would persist irrespective of anything we did or did not do.

Watts spends a great deal of time on the importance of living the present moment fully, and not letting desired future states obscure our ability to enjoy and be fully present with what is. The difference between someone who perpetually looks for fulfillment in the future and someone who lives for the present couldn’t be more poignant than in this passage about death:

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. But to the undivided mind, death is another moment, complete like every moment, and cannot yield its secret unless lived to the full.

This passage shows how the fear of death is mostly rooted in the fact that it signals the end of our ability to expect a better, more pleasant future. It shows that by a simple change of mindset, we can begin to leave this fear behind. Imagine having a relationship with death that wasn’t dominated by fear!

Then there’s this little zinger. Compare the following passages:

If it is true that man is necessarily motivated by the pleasure-pain principle, there is no point whatsoever in discussing human conduct. Motivated conduct is determined conduct; it will be what it will be, no matter what anyone has to say about it. There can be no creative morality unless man has the possibility of freedom.

That citation, which says that ethics and morality make no sense if man doesn’t have the freedom to make choices, is from “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Then:

You are deluded to assume that you are reading this of your own free will. My friend, you had no choice but to read this! Will is not the action of a being; it is the end product of a process. […] Whatever you do is just a result of complex programming.

This counterpoint is from Ajahn Brahm’s book on jhana practice, “Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond”, which I reviewed here. Ajahn Brahm subscribes to the view that free will is an illusion, and that our behavior and apparent choices are indeed fully determined by present conditions and our past conditioning. I’d love to get these two in a room and ask them to debate the topic of choice. Or maybe not…

Finally, consider Watts’ description of hell:

Hell, or “everlasting damnation” is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained.

I might clarify this definition of hell as threefold, comprised of seeking for pleasure but remaining unfulfilled, running from pain but never being able to avoid it, and looking to the future for fulfillment without ever being present at that future. As such, I think this is a perfectly apt description of many people’s lives, and a good way to understand why a lot of people find themselves frustrated, angry, self-absorbed, and suffering from existential angst.

In conclusion, I have to once again say how delighted I am with “Wisdom of Insecurity”, and how heartily I recommend it to others. It’s amusing, quotable, succinct, and very deeply profound. It impresses me as much today, after seven years of Buddhist study and practice, as it did on day one.

I am truly amazed that it was written sixty years ago, by someone who was only 36 years old. It contains an amazing amount of wisdom in a very tidy little package. Well, except for the single ugliest cover ever created by man.

Ironically, one final surprise is that all that wisdom didn’t necessarily help its author. In the ’60s, long after this book was published, Alan Watts experimented with mescaline and LSD, and became something of an advocate of marijuana. He became an alcoholic, went through three marriages, and died of heart failure at 58 years of age.

But then it is the nature of all things to change, isn’t it?

Last night I went to see "Examined Life", film wherein the filmmaker gives a dozen-odd modern philosophers ten minutes each to pontificate.

The 2008 film reminded me far too much of a less skilfully done version of Richard Linklater’s 2001 animated movie "Waking Life". The parallels are too many to ignore: the same loosely-related episodic format of someone discussing philosophy with the protagonist/narrator; the same incorporation of striking background settings and jazzy music to lend an atmospheric air to the monologues; the same toeing the line between genuine hopefulness and sarcastic postmodern cynicism; even the same walking/strolling visual motif. Despite the inarguable validity of the Plato quote, the parallel between the movie titles—Waking Life versus Examined Life—is so close as to imply subconscious (if not conscious) appropriation.

Aside from the facts that the newer film is not animated and the philosophers are real people, the main dissimilarity is the fact that unlike Waking Life, Examined Life has no overarching storyline to bring it all together. In the end, it’s just a bunch of talking heads with separate agendas, one talking about environmentalism, another about disabilities, another about gender, and so on, and neither they nor the director make any attempt to connect the disparate issues and bring them into a coherent whole. It’s a movie with no message, no direction, no conscious intent, which leaves one with the lingering question: is the unexamined movie worth seeing?

Despite that shortcoming, each scene did have value within its own context, and I came away with what, to me, were three interesting thoughts.

The first is the most obvious, and the ultimate reason for philosophy’s existence and importance. Most people look outside themselves for some source to define their ethics, whether that be the Biblical God or a political ideology or whatever. But in an era when most intellectuals have denied the existence of a supreme being, that raises the question of whether we should try to live an ethical life, and where our ethics should come from. The obvious answer is to look within: you are acting ethically when your actions are aligned with your values, and it’s the examination of those values that provides us with direction. And lest anyone think that ethics are outmoded in a largely secular culture, I point out that our ethics and our values are what guide every decision we make. Our ethics may look somewhat different than those of modern or historical Christians, but that does not mean that we do not live by certain ethical precepts.

Another interesting point was made by Cornel West. He said that courage—courage to think for ourselves, the courage to express our love, and the courage to manifest our beliefs in this selfish world—is the most critical attribute for a modern philosopher. I found that very interesting, and very apropos to my Buddhist studies. It’s something I hope to share with my dharma friends in the near future.

My final thought makes a connection between philosophy and superstition, between this movie and a number of upcoming local events. When faced with life or death or natural disasters, humans try to assign meaning to the event: it is God’s will, or the evolutionary imperative, or the material dialectic. Finding meaning and patterns of cause and effect are what human brains are wired to do; even when there is clearly no meaning, we create theories, like the Polynesian islander whose cargo cult tells him that huge silver birds magically bestow chocolate and cigarettes upon his people. Our ideas about the unanswerable, unknowable facts of life, death, and natural disasters are no more than superstitions created by a brain that evolved to find meaning in every event it observes.

I made this connection after reading a bit about a handful of very interesting and related author talks that are coming up. Tomorrow, cognitive neuroscientist Bruce M. Hood will be speaking about his book "SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable", which explores this very topic. A week later, Gary Marcus discusses his book "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind", which asserts that our brains are the result of a random evolutionary process that piled new systems on top of old ones, resulting in an imperfect and inconsistent facility. Finally, a week after that, Alva Noë talks about his "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness".

It’s quite a month for thinkers!