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 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.

American Buddhists really like Rumi, the prolific Sufi (Islamic) poet and inspiration for the proverbial dervish dancers.

I can’t count the number of times he’s been cited in the dharma talks I’ve heard and publications I’ve read. So while my reading list was at an ebb, I picked up and read one of Coleman Barks’ Rumi collections, entitled “The Soul of Rumi”.

Now, I’m a prose guy. Despite the fact that words are my preferred medium of artistic expression, poetry rarely connects with me. So it should come as no surprise that I wasn’t particularly whelmed.

The elements of Rumi that appeal so much to Buddhists—his praise of silence and the meditative state, and his immersion in the present moment—aren’t the primary themes of his work. He is much more fixated on the mysteries of faith and the ecstatic experience of God, which make for kind of flat reading for someone as skeptical and practically-minded as myself.

But having said that, there are three bits that I thought I would pull out for contemplation.

The first two actually come from the same passage, where Rumi is, in typically non-linear fashion, addressing himself to hidden truths. Among the rambling, disconnected thoughts is the following sentence:

Look for the answer inside your question.

For me, this gets at one of the first premises of Buddhism, one of the ones westerners never seem to examine. When we are suffering the angst that comes from an unfulfilled desire or unanswered questions, we typically do not consider the quality of the motive behind our desire or question. Is it a wise question? Is it the right question to ask? What does that question tell us about ourselves and our spiritual maturity?

The Buddhist suttas include stories that describe times when the Buddha was asked metaphysical questions about the meaning of life, or the existence of God(s). When asked such theoretical questions, the Awakened One refused to answer, explaining that such unanswerable questions are not useful. They have no practical influence on how one should live one’s life, and thus are distractions from the cultivation of wisdom.

There will be times when you find yourself with philosophical questions like why justice and fairness do not prevail, or how a man can do harm to another, or why there is suffering. Before you look for the answer, look first at your question: what is motivating you to ask it, and is it a useful question to ask? You may find more wisdom in understanding the reasons behind your question than you will by letting the question lead you around in a fruitless quest for an answer.

A few sentences later, still addressing the source of answers to our spiritual questions, Rumi goes on:

The answer lies in that which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this. They make you clear. When they’re gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where to go.

The longer I live, the more I see how pivotal our understanding of death is to our happiness. As humans, it is our nature to take all our gifts for granted until they are taken away from us. A cell phone or a car or a television is just another everyday appliance until we have to live without it. But we take just as casual an attitude about our comfortable homes, our eyesight, and even our ability to string coherent thoughts together. We only properly appreciate these things when there is a real and imminent possibility that we shall lose them.

The ultimate possession we’ll lose is our experience of sentient life. Ironically, we spend most of our lives taking it for granted, assuming that we and everyone around us will live to a ripe old age just because it’s statistically more likely than not.

As Rumi says, you gain incredible clarity of purpose when you accept your own very real mortality. Every moment is to be savored; every experience—even every tribulation—is relished simply because it is the experience of life. You don’t need to ask yourself the meaning of life, because experiencing life provides meaning. You needn’t worry about what to do or where to go, because whether you are here or there, whether you are eating or playing racquetball, the fact that you are living outshines all other pleasures and pains.

But the person who doesn’t foresee their own death, who wrongly thinks they have all the time in the world, squanders their most precious commodities: life and time. They wander around aimlessly, without happiness, and without any sense of urgency other than an anxious feeling that their purposeless life has no meaning.

It’s an aphorism for a reason: life is short. It might sound ironic, but if you view life that way and value it like a precious commodity, you will enjoy it and find it more than fulfilling. Whereas if you view it as a given and value it like any unending resource, you are guaranteed to enjoy it less and find it empty and lacking in purpose.

Finally, Rumi has this to say about religious practice:

Hypocrites give attention to form, the right and wrong ways of professing belief.

I find this just as prevalent in Buddhism as any other religion. There are people who effuse about the retreats they’ve been on, the teachers they’ve studied with, the books they’ve read, and the objects of faith they’ve collected. It’s commonly referred to by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's term “spiritual materialism”, and is usually not highly regarded among American Vipassana practitioners.

I feel this somewhat acutely, since I’m not particularly attached to the ritualized forms of practice. In fact, I’m naturally skeptical of any practice until I can be shown and convinced of its value. A good example would be metta practice, which I only took to recently, after realizing the specific manner in which it would contribute to my spiritual growth.

The Buddha would agree. As stated in the suttas, particularly the Kalama Sutta, all his teachings were offered with the attitude of, “Try this and see if it is of value to you. If not, then disregard it.” So far, I have chosen to focus on Buddhism’s meditative and ethical practices, and disregard the more ritualistic, mystical, and dogmatic elements of contemporary Buddhism, since I do not see how they would be of value to me in my situation.

Naturally, I try to keep that skepticism reined in when others describe their own practices. The point isn’t to judge others, but to confirm my own belief in what’s right for me, free of the judgments and expectations of others. But I still find it discouraging when I see someone who is enthusiastically engaged in the outward forms of Buddhism (or any spiritual practice) without regard for the vital inner work that it points to.

Perhaps this post on Siddhartha and communicating wisdom should have been called

You can lead a human to wisdom...
    but you can't make him think!

It may be ironic, but one of the biggest things I’m dealing with right now are issues of faith.

Faith? You mean, like, “Do yew bEEEElEEEEive? Praise JEEEEzus! Yew arr hEEEEled!” faith?

Definitely not, since skepticism is actually a core tenet of Buddhism. In the earliest suttas, the Buddha tells followers of his path to not take anything on faith, unquestioningly, but to test everything—including the Buddha’s own words—against one’s own experience of whether it leads to less suffering or not. The Buddha specifically argued against any “blind faith” based simply on human or scriptural authority, tradition, personal preference, or specious reasoning.

Faith in Buddhism is almost always linked with the concept of “discernment”: the need for the individual to judiciously weigh the value of everything he or she is told. Ironically, it is exactly this analysis of the value of any teaching that helps a practitioner understand and develop one’s true inner wisdom, rather than just mindlessly parroting someone else’s insights.

That means the practice of Buddhism is much closer to the scientific method than it is to any religion. While the world’s religions offer many theories about overcoming life’s obstacles and living ethically, in Buddhism you are always encouraged to test every teaching to see if it is true for you.

But there’s no impetus for you to do all that analysis and experimentation unless you have some degree of basic faith in the value of the Buddha’s teachings. You need to believe that that kind of analysis will help you. Whether you’re practicing Buddhism or cognitive-behavioral therapy, unless you have some confidence that the path you’re on is a beneficial one, you won’t develop the self-discipline necessary to follow it, right?

So there is a place for “faith” in Buddhism, but it’s not the baseless faith required by many religions. Instead, the Buddhist idea of faith—known by the Pali term “saddha”—is closer to our concept of confidence and trust in the efficacy of the path.

Saddha also includes the idea of perseverance and steady effort along the path leading to freedom. It’s not passive; it’s your motivator. Your belief that Buddhism will help you in your daily life is what provides your impetus to practice.

In that sense, I have to say that I have “found faith”. The teachings I’ve internalized have proved very useful to me, and I am confident that continuing to practice will greatly benefit me, and—through me—the people I come into contact with.

It’s still a strange thing to admit, being someone who views religion as a purely social phenomenon, and to whom “faith” is a very dirty word, but it means something very different in a contemplative Buddhist context, where I have been encouraged to find out what actually works for me, and allowed to set aside the practices which have not worked.

Though I must admit that there are many, many Buddhist sects, and not all of them are so contemplative. There are sects which are rigidly structured, rely on ritual and dogma, and believe all kinds of mystical stuff that has no pertinence to healing suffering or our everyday lives on Earth. In fact, the majority of the world’s Buddhists practice in this manner. That’s not a path I would follow, and I have friends who turned away from Buddhism as a result of such practices.

Contemplative Buddhism seems both much more open—less dogmatic—as well as more attuned to a reflective but skeptical, scientific mind like mine. Therefore, I am confident (i.e. I have faith) that it is of philosophical, ethical, and spiritual value to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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