Primate Brow Flash

Biking home in the wind, I decided to be more mindful and concentrate on details. The wind pushing against my face was the overbearing sensation, but I concentrated on what I could notice about the wind and besides the wind. What was the wind and what wasn’t the wind. I determined that most things were NOT the wind. This helped. I noticed the refuse I passed in the streets. A trail of crushed batteries that perhaps fell out of another bikers light. A demolished CD by the group Everclear. The ten of hearts. An old shoe. I noticed that the streets around the capitol building are extra clean. Como is extra dirty. I want there to be more to the garbage, but garbage is by definition not worthy of notice.

The wind was whipping shitty bits this morning. I hated it for a while. While pedaling along, I remembered something that was said at the meditation lecture last night: “Try forcing yourself to think the thought that you are suffering for reason x and then notice that the thought ends eventually and leaves emptiness”. I couldn’t get to the emptiness at the end of that sentence. The wind was too persistent.

What is it like to be the entity that experiences wind? I don’t know. I do know that I’m glad I wasn’t rained on.

I’ve been fixing a severely disabled bicycle. It needed several parts including a seat, chain, brake cables, bottom bracket, and repacked hubs. I inherited a seat from a friend (thanks Mark!) and splurged on a new sealed cartridge bottom bracket after trying in vain to find parts. I stripped the threads taking off a crank arm so I took a hacksaw to it. I got a donated replacement (Thanks Rob!).
The other parts, I found in the “salvage” section at the Hub. They have file cabinets full of used parts. A plastic piece that broke off the cantilever brakes made them stop working. at the Hub, there were about 50 different versions of this part rattling around loose in their drawers. I felt pretty good about that.

The brake cables were frayed and so I replaced those. The thing that bugs me now is the handlebars. I must have been used to them at some point because I used to ride this bike all the time, but now, having got used to the much wider bars on the 29er, they seem absurdly narrow.

I used it to go on several errands this weekend. One of the errands was biking over to the Meditation Center for their weekly group meditation and lecture. The lecturer was on fire. He said, “We are fixated upon WHAT is known”. The challenge of meditation is to be aware of the act of knowing. This has been my focus for the past 24 hours.

The meditation center has moved into its new building and it is fabulous. Now that there is more space, a lot more people are coming and I think that they have a real chance to grow.

My new hero:

Ellis started out as a psychoanalyst, in 1947, but soon decided that exploring his patients’ childhood traumas had “nothing to do with the price of spinach.” By the mid-fifties, he had devised his own method, based on the premise, set forth by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, that people are disturbed not by what happens to them but by their view of what happens to them, and also on his personal observation that, as he said the other day, “all humans are out of their fucking minds—every single one of them.”

“people are disturbed not by what happens to them but by their view of what happens to them” That sums up Buddhism quite succinctly.

Link To New Yorker article

this might be the most important thing I’ve ever read:

It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present, but this is a mirage. Only seldom do we become aware of the present in the precise way required by the practice of mindfulness. In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it. Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum. The cognitive process is generally interpretative. The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly. Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions. To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs — sets of mutually corroborative concepts — then weaves the constructs together into complex interpretative schemes. In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds.

link

This describes me every minute of every day. I can’t just eat a carrot. If I eat a fresh carrot, I barely experience the carrot. Instead, I instantly become “Carrot Man” raising and eating his own carrots and spreading the doctrine of home grown food and eventually solving the world’s energy crisis through victory gardens. It would be quite a feat, I think, to eat a carrot and do nothing else.
Right Mindfulness, one of the tenets of Buddhism, is practicing seeing the present. Probably it has the most to do with meditation.

I wrote last week about helpful tools for getting rid of unwholesome mind states. The tools require some practice, of course, but they work… except when they don’t.

When I wrote those down last week, I didn’t fully understand the idea. This week’s Common Ground lecture helped me realize the profound change one might bring with those tools. You struggle with the mental states because they never just stay as mental states; they eventually get born into speech and actions. They eventually have effects on your health and surroundings. Your mind creates the world you live in. Apparently this is central to Buddhist thought, but its the first time I really considered it.

I think this goes beyond the pop psychology notion that attitude is everything because Buddhism actually provides these tools to make it happen. In my experience our culture generally expects us to just make it work via slogans and exhortations, without any tools. Press those nails into wood with your fingertips. Tools help. Meditation is the first and most useful tool. More follow.

The lecture last night at common ground was about Right Effort.
Buddhist teaching comes suspiciously well suited for bulleted lists in a blog. It was passed on orally for many generations and lists were easier to remember. They didn’t write down his stuff until hundreds of years later.

The Four Exertions that make up Right Effort are:

• Prevent unwholesome mind states from arising
• Get rid of unwholesome mind states
• Encourage wholesome mind states
• Maintain wholesome mind states

“Mind states” just means what is dominating your thoughts. Perhaps you are dwelling on positive things and want a strategy for maintaining them. Perhaps you are caught up in some destructive or circular things, like lust, jealousy, anger, lust or greed … or lust. I think depression, as I have experienced it, can be labeled as an unwholesome mind state.

The Buddha was from a military caste and spoke in military terms sometimes. As a major strategy for the first Exertion, he used the phrase “guarding the sense gates” This includes using good judgment about what you expose your senses to, but you can’t always control what comes at you. Someone might resolve to become a non-sensitive instrument, train their mind to disregard sensory input. The Buddha encountered people who had come up with this very solution and told them they were wrong. The right approach is instead to develop the art of bare attention. This means tuning into the raw sensory data coming in while avoiding attaching meaning to it. This means looking at incoming sensory data as a series of ones and zeros. And instead of thinking “Oh how I hate this sound, or this smell, or this back pain, you think instead, “There’s a One and it is followed by several Zeros” and then you might even start to say, “and Lo! there is a mind right here having reactions to that sound.” This skill develops with meditation.

When the unwholesome mind state already exists, then you are at the second Exertion.
The strategies for getting rid of unwholesome mind states are:

1. Mindfulness. This is really the most powerful and long lasting of the strategies. Mindfulness allows you to see the mind states as temporary. It lets you watch them impassively. Just like the first Exertion, where the direction was to observe raw sensory data, the direction here is to observe the data output by the mind at anger or the mind at depression. But, our powers of mindfulness are not always at hand, so we have a series of blunter instruments that follow.
2. Substitution: Consciously call up another mind state by associating with a person or place or thing that will call up that mind state.
3. Interrogation. This is where psychology might take us. Examine the underlying causes of the unwholesome mind states.
4. Distraction. Go see a movie. take a cold shower. get yourself out of the environment for a time. The Simpsons have saved my ass several times.
5. Pure force of will. Mind Crushes Mind. I’m normally against mind-on-mind violence, but this one, this last resort appeals to me because of the Crushing part. Besides, it is the only one of these I am certified in via cultural tradition.

I stopped by for the weekly talk/sit at Common Ground for the first time in about a year. It was well worth it. A good meditation session followed by a great lecture. There were about 80 people crammed into that little space.

Looking back at why I haven’t meditated in so long, I really had to blow up my old practice because of two influences. One was an embryonic book that warned people not to get so interested in meditating and staying calm and detatched that they missed the whole heart-pounding show. At almost the same time, the talk at the Common Ground warned that meditation should be intense, that your mind should be active and not working to shut itself down during meditation.

Not really consciously, I abandoned meditation practice because these two directives were almost too big for me to accommodate. The floaty hallucinatory calm was good for what it was, an escape, a calming influence, insight into some inner workings of an ordinary human male, but here were these twin calls for something a little more and they made me roll off the ball backwards.

So I finally went back last night, with these ideas steeping for a year while I lived my life whole-assedly. Someone in the audience asked the perfect question: ” I’m like, distracted by my wish not to be distracted or something.” Well, maybe the question wasn’t perfect. The English language really gets horrifically abused at that place when people try to explain their mental states before a large group of strangers. But the answer was perfect! To summarize the answer, there are two extremes in the type of meditation we are practicing. One extreme is intense adherence. Strangle the distraction as soon as you become aware of it and go back to the breath. Discipline. Concentration. The other extreme is to go and live in the distraction for a while until it goes away or you stop realizing it is a distraction and have to pull out by returning to the breath. It is really an art form to balance between the two extremes and know when to exercise discipline and when to look more closely at the distractions. Very helpful.

Their website, by the way, has hundreds of recorded dharma talks. Among those are three recorded “guided sits” that are mostly silence with the instructor giving direction every so often. I’m not sure how I like recorded guided sits. The disembodied voice after 15 solid minutes of quiet sometimes makes me jump out of my skin.

This is an introductory one with a question and answer period at the end:
http://commonground.dreamhosters.com/aud/IN_12-03-06_Intro_Wkshp_2__Guided_Practice_and_Q_and_A.mp3

This is from a retreat:
http://commonground.dreamhosters.com/aud/RD_04-12-08_Santikaro_Guided_Sit.mp3
This is from a guest speaker.
http://commonground.dreamhosters.com/aud/GD_07-12-07_Guided_Meditation_Ajahn_Chandako.mp3

Revelation from the New York Times:

Left-brain injuries don’t necessarily lead to blissful enlightenment;

That is from a fascinating article about Jill Taylor, a woman who had a stroke that blew away her ego. and left her, after a long recovery, reasonably healthy. She is already an internet sensation, apparently, because her lecture at the TED conference is online.

I’m glad that we have her brain to look at and I truly do think it is a miracle, but her route to awareness kind of misses the point. She didn’t have to overcome her ego through thousands of hours of practice, facing down the delusions built in by evolution and society, it just got obliterated. Without it to contend with, she isn’t burdened with the human condition and so hasn’t really developed awareness.

I don’t know enough about monks, but I’m tempted to say the same thing about them. Yes, they have practiced for thousands of hours and have made unconditionally amazing achievements in awareness, but they did so in a controlled environment that removed many of the impediments that keep the rest of us from gaining “awareness”.

The Buddha’s followers resented his inclusion of “householders” into his inner circle. I contend that householders, those with positions to defend and in-laws to impress, have real attachments and benefit the most from Buddhist teachings, even if they don’t get as far towards enlightenment as the monks do. Jesus knew this too: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

It is inspiring, as one commenter says, to know that enlightenment waits inside all of us.

If I concentrate really hard, I can travel back to some pivotal time in the past when a different word or action would have changed history. If it is dark and if I am half asleep, I can establish two well-detailed reference points and draw a brush stroke between them, pin up an interactive membrane that immediately starts to deteriorate. I can crawl inside that crude lean-two of the past for long enough to experience that time again and try to fix things.

The sun cannot follow me back, so it is a shadow world lit from reflected light, missing the heat and full color of this world. Big pieces of wall and floor are missing, leaving me hopping between support beams, clutching to the details that have been rendered properly.

When I come back, I have this horrible, costly longing for the sea air or mountain view or the hand of the person I just left behind.

That is the price I pay for time travel.

What I call time travel, other people might call “memories” I correctly call it time travel, though, because I don’t just remember, I actively try and manipulate things, change the past and supply information to my past self.

This habit sucks the life force out of me. I think the movie that most captures this feeling is “Minority Report”, when John Anderton uses drugs and video images to vaguely hallucinate that he is seeing his son and wife again.

Buddhist teachings would call this a rejection of the present. Why give up the full-on modality of the present for some partial shadow world? It is like giving up a dual-core graphics processor to play ascii star trek on a 1982 WANG computer. Why leave this sunlit world for even a moment to spend time in that dark, incomplete world? This goes for you, too futureman.

I could take or leave the greater part of Stranger than Fiction. I enjoyed him playing the guitar for Maggie G. I always enjoy Emma Thompson. One scene really stands out in my memory, though. It is the central scene in that movie and it gets amazingly close to what it feels like to meditate.

The main character is instructed to sit still in a desperate move to keep the plot from going forward. The phone rings. His hand wants to react and pick up the phone. He sits on his hands. I felt his visceral pull to answer that phone. His renunciation of all action, just to see what happens, that’s Buddhism in a nutshell. The plot does eventually impose itself and crash his little experiment in a manner that made me shriek and made Kate laugh at me. I don’t usually shriek when I meditate, but if I get quiet enough, thoughts can be as loud as earth moving equipment coming through the walls.

I wanted to ride on some trails this weekend. On Saturday morning I biked over to Roseville’s Reservoir Woods. That park is criss-crossed with foot trails of hard packed snow. There were some great thrills on the downhills. My bike was surprisingly good at going up the hills even though it isn’t even a knobby tire on the back. There was only one hill I had to walk my bike up.

I had a revelation about pleasure and attachment during this ride. Riding down a narrow trail in the snow without really knowing if you can stop, that roots you firmly in the present. Suffering ceases. The trouble came when I stopped and looked around. The woods were beautiful. Almost instantly, I had this problem of needing to consume that moment and that scene. I say almost. I had a fraction of a second before clinging caught up to me, and I was fully aware of the clinging taking over. The desire arose in me to somehow capture that scene. The joy was kind of smothered by the desire that that moment would last, the desire to write some of it to memory. For the first time, I experienced attachment as a direct burning sensation that could be observed. Up until now, I had mostly looked at meditation as a way to deal with the bad and the unpleasant. I’d heard lectures about how attachment to pleasure is an equal problem on flip side of this and I’ve always said to myself, “screw that. I’ve got no problems with pleasure”. Even when I did approach that side of it, It was more in a cave-man voice: “ICE CREAM BAD. NO EAT” but now I’ve noticed that most of the time there is instant attachment and suffering accompanying pleasure. The two things, pleasure and attachment come almost at the same instant, but they don’t have to. Meditation practice can, I think, lengthen the instants between experiencing pleasure and becoming attached.

So, bicycling seems to make it difficult for my attachments to keep up with me. I imagine an invisible flying jellyfish thing struggling in the cold woods, swearing under its breath while zipping along behind me. And when I finally stop, I have maybe a split second of raw being before “SPLAT” the thing catches up, reminding me that this moment will soon be over, better get down on all fours and try to eat the scenery.

On the other side of things, I’ve made great strides in suffering. I’m serious. I’m much better at it now. I was doing it all wrong all this time. The thing about suffering is, it happens. Meditation can’t squash it. Meditation gives you a chance to observe it.

morning meditation.

I woke up super-early and meditated. It went well, for the first time in about a month. I think it was because I stopped trying to apply “rules” to everything and instead just sat there and watched. Too often, I decide my brain should be handling thoughts correctly and even not having certain thoughts. More specifically, I think that I shouldn’t be suffering. The trick I’ve been forgetting is to allow the suffering to take place and observe it. The vacation from suffering, when it happens, is not something that can be enforced through careful screening of the thoughts. That just leads to more suffering. Instead, the vacation comes from practice. Or so I’ve heard. I also took a break from trying to have a better posture. I think that helped too. I’d been trying to sit on a cushion without leaning against something and while I did OK, the work of doing that distracts me.

morning commute.

I enjoyed my private little icy road again (also known as field road). Then, for some reason I tried riding across one of the corn fields on the cow campus. The snow was too deep and I huffed and puffed a great deal just to make 1/4 mile. At one point, I felt I was begining to suffocate in all my head gear and scraped it all off my face with my big mittens so I could breathe. I struggled to stay on top of a little dirt edge that rose above the snow, but I kept plunging off and stopping. I did enjoy a small hill that had been packed down by cross country skiers, but came to a sudden stop at the bottom. Even on a road, I felt like I was dragging a large boulder. It was about 5 degrees F. I was wearing a balaclava and ski goggles.

Big Red Buddha made me laugh… several times. It’s kinda like the Onion, except devoted to making fun of Buddhism. I get the impression they are Buddhists themselves.

The idea of a Filipino Dalai Lama is exciting to Magdalena Ruíz, and 8 year-old schoolgirl from the province of Cavite.

“I want to be the Dalai Lama’s mommy!” blurted Ruíz. “I would love him and care for him and everything. Well, at least until the monks take him away.”

Before deciding on the diner pictured below, the Common Ground Meditation Center also tried to buy a church in the neighborhood that was being vacated by an evangelical Vietnamese Christian church. The pastor said that under no circumstances would he allow a Buddhist group to buy the building. That building remains empty.

I worked for a time with a Korean war “Atomic Veteran”. He is a big time Christian conservative now, but when he was in the service, he and many other servicemen attended Buddhist lectures that included meditation training. I think it was in Japan, but I’m not sure. The military eventually issued an order against attending these. In my friend’s opinion, that was a very good thing.

When the Dalai Lama came to town and addressed our state legislature, the fellow on the left, Arlon Lindner, called for a boycott on the grounds that the Lama was a cult leader and that “As a Christian, I am offended that we would have the Dalai Lama come and speak…These beliefs are incompatible with Christian principles, and those Christian principles are or have been the governing principles in American society…They don’t believe that there is one God. They don’t believe Christ is God. They believe in evolution and reincarnation. That is not Christian.”

These stories bring up the question:
Is Buddhism a religion?

For the most part Buddhism has arrived in the west as a science, kind of a branch of psychology. Perhaps because it happens to be a science invented in a time and place with no tradition of science, it got sold as a religion. From what I know of the words attributed to the Buddha, Buddhism is missing many things that I associate with a religion. There is no creation story, there are no false gods to worship. There is nothing to worship. In fact, there are clear instructions not to worship the very things that we might be inclined to worship. There is no comfort offered in a higher power. There are the three refuges, but they are not supernatural and they are up to the individual to learn how to get refuge there. What he left looks more like instructions for installing software than the word of God.

Even if Buddhism is not a religion, is it evangelical? Is there a Buddhist mission to spread their beliefs? I had to work to get any spread on me. I’ve disappeared and reappeared from these groups many times and never left a ripple. (no, I didn’t physically disappear).

Talking about becoming a Buddhist is about like me talking about becoming Japanese. Actually going through a ceremony or something would be kind of ridiculous, and would only serve to lather up my identity. As a commentor on this blog said, I could get a big foam “Buddhism is #1″ hand to wear. It is more of a practice than an identity.

On the other hand, I know meditators often think they have a valuable tool that could help others. The writers and speakers I’ve paid attention to all admonish potential teachers to tend their own fields first. I see no conversion mill set up to lure

Addressing the “They don’t believe in one God” statement. The Buddha didn’t say anything about any God. Just like a home electricity manual doesn’t venture into speculations about God. It isn’t pertinent to the discussion.

After writing this and reading it over, I think it focuses on a few negative statements inside a larger culture of acceptance of Buddhist ideas. I published the post anyway because I see a pattern in these stories it helped define my thinking.

What if someone told you that this was the new home of a Buddhist Meditation Center:

Well, it is a fact. The Common Ground Meditation center is moving into a hamburger joint.
There is reported to be a great deal of grease to clean up.

I found the following quote interesting:

Follese had hoped that The Diner would remain a restaurant and carry on that tradition. As a Christian, she struggles with the idea of a meditation center there, but wishes Common Ground well.

I’ll break on that thought and work on my next post: ” Is Buddhism a religion?” (hint: no!)

I went to the common ground meditation center on Sunday. I learned tonight that they started the Sunday night talks 5 years ago when the war began and it has become so popular that it is now a regular feature of the center. Normally there are 30 or 40 people there on a Sunday evening.

Mark, the teacher there, never fails to offer some helpful direction that lifts me over a hurdle in meditation practice. Tonight it was that while thoughts and feelings arise during the meditation and we are mindful of them, we try not to lose the moment to moment awareness of what is happening now. For some reason, that created some kind of feedback loop that made my brain light up like a Christmas cauliflower.

It is funny writing about this stuff because it seems like the minute I write it down, it is gone. I can’t get back to level 5-3 and get Goomba’s shoe ever again, which is bad in a way, because the feeling is pretty cool, but good in a way because getting attached to mental states, well, that’s bad. So, off it goes.

I had a great nap in my chair at the meditation center the other night. As soon as I sat down, it was lights out.

Even though I slept through the sitting, the visit was made worth while by a quote read from “The Weight Of Mountains“:

Is a mountain heavy?

It may be heavy in and of itself, but as long as we don’t try to lift it up, it won’t be heavy for us.

This is a metaphor that one of my teachers, Ajaan Suwat, often used when explaining how to stop suffering from the problems of life. You don’t deny their existence — the mountains are heavy — and you don’t run away from them. As he would further explain, you deal with problems where you have to and solve them where you can. You simply learn how not to carry them around. That’s where the art of the practice lies: in living with real problems without making their reality burden the heart.

This is a tenuous time in my meditation practice because now that I’ve practiced consistently for 6 weeks and I’m feeling accomplished in it, I’m getting messages that no, I don’t have to practice every day, and that Battlestar Gallactica is more compelling. And the last three meditation practices have been sleepy, unquiet affairs that leave me more crabby and less mindful than before I started.

I went on a half-day meditation retreat yesterday.
It served to drive home the idea that the whole practice of meditation/Buddhism is really about mindfulness. The other parts, such as relaxation, concentration, speaking and acting “rightly” and not killin’ stuff, make mindfulness more likely. What is mindfulness? The study of perception. The study of our own awareness? The study of reality.

We sat still for a long time. Someone near me was making an awful slucking sound every so often, like their saliva glands weren’t working. Drove me f$0cking bananas. Following the instructions of the day, I became more mindful of the slucking. I became more aware of my perception of the slucking and of my response to it. After a time, the slucking sound had broken down to its core components. It got removed from the image of some one’s mouth parts moving around. It got removed from my reactions to it. I still had them, but they became separate things from the sound. I got to concentrate on what the difference was between silence and slucking. It seems to be ridiculous minutiae, I guess, but down to that level makes other mental responses seem like artillery shells screaming in.

A useful direction was “by becoming open to the breath, we become open to the mental formations that arise” It is good to realize that noticing the breath is not the goal of meditation. The breath is a good way to practice becoming mindful, but it doesn’t make you more wise to the goings-on of your mind if you only notice the breath.

One of the best reads about mindfulness is “mindfulness in plain English”

When the meditator perceives any sensory object, he is not to dwell upon it in the ordinary egotistical way. He should rather examine the very process of perception itself. He should watch the feelings that arise and the mental activities that follow. He should note the changes that occur in his own consciousness as a result. In watching all these phenomena, the meditator must be aware of the universality of what he is seeing. That initial perception will spark pleasant, unpleasant or neutral feelings. That is a universal phenomenon. It occurs in the mind of others just as it does in his, and he should see that clearly. Following these feelings various reactions may arise. He may feel greed, lust, or jealousy. He may feel fear, worry, restlessness or boredom. These reactions are universal. He simple notes them and then generalizes. He should realize that these reactions are normal human responses and can arise in anybody.

The last two meditation sessions were mostly ruined by restlessness. To be more specific, I was plagued by zillions of tiny, buzzing half-thoughts.

In a way, it is good to have this challenge. Instead of striving for that triple-fisted mystical experience, my challenge is to sit with the caffeine and candy-driven static. Static is what the mirror happens to be reflecting right now. As it reflects, I can notice if the static has an ebb and flow and notice that the static is unpleasant. I notice that the static is being experienced and that the unpleasantness is being registered. I notice that “this is how things are right now”.
Concentration can still be developed, patience can still lead to improvement. That is what I tell myself, anyway.