Saturday, September 2, 2017

Facebook Diaries

I've been spending some time in the Soto Zen FB group and occasionally inspired to contribute a few things, well, I like. I am capturing some here to have them under one roof with my other ramblings. In the order FB chose .

Zen is a method, similar to the scientific method, a tool kit for coming to understand what is (dharma), and how my interaction with what is informs my sense of suffering as a human. Shikantaza, the precepts, and a few other items are very useful tools in the tool kit. That is basically it. Any other 'stuff'; ordination, sects, enlightenment, etc... has nothing, fundamentally, to do with 'it'.
I just read a story about the ex cop in Japan who is acknowledged to have the largest collection of Hello Kitty stuff. Spends a huge part of his income on the collection. His wife says it's okay "everyone has to make their mark on the world." This is certainly a concept I struggle with. I find an urge to make a mark, to be recognized socially, lurking in many parts of my week. Usually it's a worry that I have not, rather than the satisfaction that in some small action I have.
As a partial antidote for this 'self' centered ennui, I contemplate the millions of people who live each day completely out of any spot light other than, perhaps, their family circle. All the people who have gone before that are unknown to me. And in 5 billion years when the expanding, dying sun engulfs the Earth, the millions upon millions of unknown lives, with mine, for which any trace at all will disappear except for the bits of atom that constituted them, cast across this patch of an infinite universe. But such grand poesy also falls short.
In the end the better solution may be to side step all that. Just reach out at night and adjust the pillow....step off the 100 foot pole... get on with it...give someone a smile and let them wonder what's up...かな....
I self identify as Soto Zen, mainly because that is the lineage in which I took jukai. However I often see posts in the group where some says "we in Soto Zen XYZ" and I think it very much misses the mark as I understand it, or their statements sure don't include the way I think. Perhaps this is just the impact of the unskillful "we" rather than the more honest "I", but it makes me wonder how could one identify a Soto zen practitioner by characteristics? Is it a mater of the particular way someone practices, or what they claim to believe, or simply an issue of functional lineage? What are the 'unmistakable marks' of Soto?
A la "The Hunting of the Snark"
... "Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again
The five unmistakable marks
By which you may know, wheresoever you go,
The warranted genuine Snarks.
Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,
Which is meager and hollow, but crisp:
Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,
With a flavor of Will-o-the-wisp.
Its habit of getting up late you'll agree
That it carries too far, when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea,
And dines on the following day.
The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.
The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes--
A sentiment open to doubt.
The fifth is ambition. It next will be right
To describe each particular batch:
Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,
And those that have whiskers, and scratch."

There are two types of people in this world: Those who have gotten past dualistic thinking, and ...
I don't want to look at Zen as a guide for how I should *appear*. I want to be honest, and sometimes I am honestly angry, or rude, or snarky, or sad....or supportive or self sacrificing. My hope is that my Zen practice might change who I am, so that I honestly become someone less angry, or rude, or snarky, or sad. Zen as my marrow rather than Zen as my clothing.
I seem to have a choice in zazen. Look with purpose at a fixed point so that my vision field is normal, but this feels like I'm doing more than just sitting; or let my eyes relax, which results in a cross eyed image, which seems to give rise more quickly to day dreaming. Does anyone else experience this choice? What do you recommend?
"Zazen is a kind of habit, and it is necessary for us to establish the daily habit without fail. It is not necessary for us to get the so-called enlightenment. Because the so-called enlightenment is just a Romantic story, which many children love. But Buddhism is never a Romantic story, but it is just Action. It is just sitting. It is just Practice. It is just Reality." Gudo Nishijima
Would it be useful if Zen centers tried an "experiment in thus-ness" by declaring, for example, "because we are not free from picking and choosing, the zendo leader sits on a specially designated cushion", "because we are tied to ideas of hierarchy we ask you only to wear rakusu of the approved style and color", "because we are afraid of our passions, please don't wear bright clothing in the Zendo"?
Can Zen survive if the institutionalized contradictions of basic principles is not acknowledged?
Is there doubt that institutionalized contradictions exist?
We've been discussing precepts a lot lately. Today I was struck with a more fundamental question... regardless of what a precept means, what does it imply if I find I haven't kept one, or several (regardless of what I understand them to be)? I'm quite certain that I have failed in some precept or another. Am I in trouble? A poor Buddhist? No big deal? Try again tomorrow? What is the meaning of vowing to abide by the precepts?
Every day bodies are turned to ash or laid in boxes in the ground.
Everyday babies emerge from wombs and draw first breath.
And yet some Zen "masters" say that birth and death can be "overcome" or "escaped from" and spread platitudes like "ultimate reality is free from birth and dying." Can anyone explain the skill/truth in such apparent lies?
I can see cultivating an attitude that has no interest or clinging to such events, but that is far different, and just a semantic trick, from denying the events occur.
"There once was a temple with long hallways and new students from many different places. Everyone walked down the halls differently, some on the left, some on the right, some down the middle. It was hard to get anything done because of the many collisions and near misses. There was lots of grumbling and excited conversation of who was right and wrong for how they walked in the halls.
The abbot of the temple called everyone together and asked everyone to walk on the left. Some folks wanted to walk on the right, but he said 'please', and they said okay. After a week or so getting used to the new method, things got much easier in the temple. Few crashes, less excitement.
When new students came to the temple, as part of their introduction, the Abbot would mention people walk on the left in the hallways, and could they please also do this, telling them about the history of the temple's decision over a comfortable tea. Some new students would forget and walk on the right, but eventually got into the habit of walking on the left. Students did well, and the temple was successful.
A few years later, the abbot died. A senior student took over the job of introducing new students to the temple. He would tell them it is a rule of the temple that everyone must walk on the left. The temple soon withered and died. No one cared to practice there."
-from the wet goose chronicles-

'Licchavi Vimalakirti came to the foot of that tree and said to me, ’Reverend Sariputra, this is not the way to absorb yourself in contemplation. You should absorb yourself in contemplation so that neither body nor mind appear anywhere in the triple world. You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you can manifest all ordinary behavior without forsaking cessation. You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you can manifest the nature of an ordinary person without abandoning your cultivated spiritual nature.'
Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra
I might do well not to think of impermanence as a sad, or lofty, or centering, or revealing idea. It's just a convenient fact, useful to keep in mind.
I might regret stating this, but....
Zazen doesn't cause anything, per se. There is no "zen charge up" battery charging while I sit. It is a practice. It is the practicing of something.
Do not see it as subtleties or magic. Do not see it as special robes or piercing insights. Zen is putting on a shoe.
Of course there is a goal. Perhaps one way to express it is the goal of sitting to practice not chasing any particular thought. Which somewhat paradoxically includes not chasing the goal of not chasing.
"All truth is available to you.
It's nothing special."

Posted by Lauren 0 comments at 4:03 PM

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Material Dharma






A talk by Gudo Nishijima randomly came up on my play list the other day and provoked some thoughts I find interesting.

He said, Buddha insisted there was one reality.

I completely enjoy this idea. There is only one truth going on and each person has a different view of it. In expressing those views it appears that truth is a matter of belief. Rather it is a matter of observation. This may be a difference between, roughly speaking, religion and science.

I once had the idea that becoming enlightened is rather like turning on the porch light at night for the first time. It's not that there's anything new to see when the light comes on, it was all there prior, but now one can see it. And it is mundane.

I do not think there is a soul. There is nothing extra-corporeal that lingers after death. Rather like one proposal I saw in science mags recently, consciousness is a 4th state of matter. Matter in the universe has characteristics that cause it to assemble into conscious things under certain conditions. We happen to be the outcome of a series of those conditions.

But neither is it as elegant as 'natural selection' makes it sound. I don't like that phrase. It anthropomorphizes what is inherent possibility. There is no 'grand design' coming into its own. Things that survive do, and those that can't don't. Given a slightly different set of conditions, those things that are not now, might well be. There is no 'selecting' going on.

So there is one truth. The dharma.

Nishijima talks a lot about idealism and materialism. Roughly speaking, I think materialism is this one truth. But materialism is also an idea (part of idealism), so this is where things get a little tricky.

Setting aside (or rather allowing) for a moment the fact that discussion of concepts is by its very nature idealistic, reality is materialistic. As I understand the word, the truth of reality is the truth of materials. We and our consciousness are one of those materials. Our thinking is material. There is not one thought conscious or subconscious that occurs that is not the result of some material chemical action in our bodies (in our brains). But, from this material truth, idealism arises.

I think humans are uniquely idealistic. It is very hard to test, I think, whether other animals have 'ideas' per se. There is such a tendency in us to anthropomorphize things (thus attributing emotions to things like 'angry' weather and 'calm' seas), it is difficult to judge if a dog has 'ideas'. A very sophisticated neural network could look like it is 'thinking' about ideas, but quite simply be responding robotically to stimuli. Indeed some thinkers suppose that perhaps even humans don't have free will at all, and are only responding to stimuli in a predictable way that could be copied with the right computer set up with the right pre-conditions.

Regardless of whether it is truly free thought or not I think one can characterize ideas as those things which are self experienced as free, and go on further to say that there is a marked difference in this activity in humans verses other animals.

I think that there may be some 'idealism' going on in other higher mammals such as gorillas and dolphins. If so they may, to some extent fall into the same bucket as we humans which I am attempting to describe here.

So there is one truth based on facts of materialism and this is the dharma.

Because of the specific nature of our material reality (i.e. how our brains are structured), humans are idealistic, and this brings suffering. This is a bit of a recast of the first nobel truth. And, I think it is an important difference.

The less a living organism is 'thinking' (lets use the proxy sentient, for this) the less it suffers. Even sentients might not be the right word here. I think dogs are very sentient, but I think most of their behavior is materialistic. They are just responding to stimuli and don't have a strong conscious experience of situations. At least not anywhere near as strong as humans. They do not sit around pondering, for example, what the semantic difference might be between 'idealism' and 'materialism'.  When they get an itch, they scratch, and they don't think 'my, I've got an itch, I should scratch it. Could this be a Zika mosquito bite?' while they do so.

So I with GB has formed his first noble truth as 'For humans, life is suffering'. And in this I embrace the more general meaning of suffering, which is a type of discontent. This discontent comes from idealism. Thinking (of the type I am trying to express here - not just any brain activity) is idealism.

Therefore, contemplating materialism is idealism.

Our idealism gives rise to suffering. The various ideas we get about what's going on bring us to be discontent.

We cannot escape idealism. It is our nature.

And this is where my current concepts appear t diverge from Nishijima-roshi's. I think the 'purpose' of zazen, or perhaps better said as its fundamental benefit, is a balance of our idealistic nature verses our materialism.

In zazen we express our materialism concretely by simply sitting and letting it be. The sounds the temperature on our skin, the comfort (or not) in our muscles, the smells, the sights, are all our materialistic nature 'manifesting'. Usually in life our idealism dominates our awareness. We operate as all ideals with a few headlines now and then from the real material worlds. In zazen we can 'see' our idealism manifest with our materialism. They both can sit there manifesting without us chasing one or the other with more ideas.....sometimes and for short periods. Then ideas arise. But we can practice not chasing them.

In this, is the one reality accessible? All I can say at this point is I think so. The reality is we are idealistic. Ideas are not truth, not the dharma, but the dharma includes us as idealists. Ideas can express the truth. That is there original purpose I think. We humans, came to the ability of forming stories about the world around us, which afforded us survival. The more correct the stories are the more useful they might be to our continued survival. But we are also in a place in many societies where survival is so inherently built into to fabric we live in that off-ideas (errors) do not bring quick death, and so can be perpetuated.

We cannot directly see the truth beyond seeing our materialism and knowing it is colored with idealism. We can see the power of our idealism to color our experience of the world, and strive to 'dial down' the weight we give it in our lives.

Posted by Lauren 0 comments at 7:52 AM

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Grundabwesendenangst and Alpha bits.

I just saw a post from a friend that included an interesting graphic related to the impact an early, clained to be flawed, medical 'study' had on the anti-vaxer movement.

I've blogged before about how there seems to be a instintual drive in humans to come up with a story to explain things. When we get it right it's very helpful to our existance.

The anti-vaxers may not as a whole be 'wanting to believe' in a medical conspiracy, or if they are, it may be driven by a more primative fear of not being able to come up with a more believable story.

I've decided a name for this basic fear of there not being a reason. To riff off of classic, cliche, Freudian terms it's cobbled roughly in German as Grundabwesendenangst.

This primal urge to explain in a way we can accept and relate to drives the anti-vax movement, the government-did-it theories of 9/11, and belief in gods. It is so much easier to think of an agency, whether it be a god or a kabal of evit pharmacutical companies that cause badness, than to comtemplate a more complex, apparently random, chain of cause and effect that brings disaster.

When fears point to some large agent, it is an echoe, a proxy, of our need for the alpha leader in a tribe. When we characterize the alpha we have hopes of relating to it. Overlay the US legal penchant and we can call it evil an hope to erradicate it, but this still causes the theory of agency to arise.

We can't think of how a small group halfway around the world could decided to drive planes into our buildings. We can't hope to relate to them as alphas. We don't understand how to lay on our backs and submissively show our bellies so they will not hurt us. We don't know how to engage them in an alpha challenge..... so it can't be them. It must have been our own government with whom we have a much more definable, comprehendable agency relationship.

Tribal instinct allows us to accept evil as long as it is alpha evil we can relate to in agency.

I'm not saying this is an absolute, but it is a strong influence on how we, how I, might tend to behave. I assume some primative parts of me are always on the lookout for the comfort of alpha agency. That's why even in Zen, the sangha wants "the master", and why contemplating "just don't know" can be liberating (and extremely nerve racking). When there is an agent boss, there is reason and our Grundabwesendenagnst is calmed.

Posted by Lauren 0 comments at 9:01 AM
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