Boundless Ignorance

By being truthful but skill-less I have become, I think, the cause of another train wreck in my family. There is some lesson lurking in this I can barely see. Some aspect of considering how others will react to what I say rather than just focusing on allowing I was honest. Seems so obvious in retrospect, but the real trick is how to address the "honest" reaction before it can cause harm.

With people you are close to, you communicate your honesty in the set of your face or the posture in your body. It's more than just controlling your words. It's what you communicate with your being. I suppose the only way to make your full being-reaction skillful is to practice sitting and doing careful audits on where you are in relation to the eightfold path. All aspects of the path actually do, I guess, inform your being, give rise to the set of your face or the posture of your body when confronted with adversity (or anything).

I can't just focus on words, or deeds. Its the full life, fully integrated, that does harm or not. I've got to look at it all. I've got to strive for the right action with every step but yet remain fluid.

My ignorance is indeed boundless.

Mara Attacks

I had two days of very focused practice. Yesterday Mara stopped by and attacked. Now I feel shame, self-disgust, paranoia and anger. Picking up. Brushing off. Another step. Am I close to real change, or just creating drama to kid myself?

Reading about the dark night of the soul convinces me I may be near real change.

Thinking I may be near real change convinces me I'm fooling myself.

This is where a teacher/guide would be handy. Gotta find me one of those.

Bows to all you good people.

Suffering Over What is Not. Who Is Responsible.

WARNING: A bit of a ramble.

A friend of mine has trouble relating to her father. To her he seems quite lonely and shut down, focused only on a news channel all day long, and engaging in very paranoid and depressing conversations about the state of the world when she calls.

She is reluctant to freely respond to this person he is. She is in so much pain about the the father he is not.

It is so much easier to see the outlines of someone else situation than my own. In her I see she must differentiate the pain over what he is not from how she might like to be with what he is. Her fretting over what he is not, gets in the way of enjoying who he is (perhaps not "enjoying" but at least reacting honestly in the moment to who he is).

What he is not is all hers - is all her. No one can actually be *not* something. How can I blame someone for not being kind? How does one actively not be kind - not be xyz? Everyone is always not being everything and so, has no responsibility for not being any particular thing.

Sure, maybe this is just clever semantics, but I think there's a nut of importance in it.

If I think "he was mean." That's fine. Maybe I've got unrealistic perceptions, or maybe he was indeed mean. There is a chance "he" has some responsibility in that. But he has no responsibility for "he was not kind." He was also not green, not flying 20,000 miles an hour, not a woman, not singing a song. There a million things he was not. He can not actively not do something. So all my suffering over what he is not, is all my responsibility. If I was really aware of myself, I would say "I wish he were kinder." Now it is clearly all mine to deal with.

This leads to another idea. You could say "well, kindness is the opposite of meanness, so you are saying the same thing." That, I feel these days, is a huge fallacy I have been operating under all my life. There are no true opposites in these things. Opposite are a semantic and organizational convenience, not a fact. The universe is not in balance because there are equal amounts of love and hate in existence. That ying yang circle thing is not true. The biological processes and brain pathways that get exited by sensory input that bring us to feel hatred or anger are not one side of a processes that also bring us to feel love or peace. Each emotion, each judgment is its own absolute "thing." There is no collection of dipoles balancing.

What does this mean to me practically? Perhaps don't try to balance, strive to respond. When something or someone annoys, differentiate my disappointment/suffering over my unfulfilled wishes of what they are not (that is my shit) from my spontaneously arising response to what they really are. Was my shit is out of the way, I might be surprised at how appropriate that response is.

Compassion & Anger

Jordan asks in his last blog [here] "Is my intention kindness, love, compassion like that which one might have for a small child?"

I wonder if it useful to be clear that there is a difference from feeling and action. And, given that clarity (if it is there) where does "intention" fall? Is an action "compassionate" because of some intrinsic nature of the action, or is it "compassionate" because of the feeling in the person undertaking the action? This may be some tricky ground. I think one can judge an action, but perhaps not along strict moralistic lines. Something like, did the action help in the moment? Did the action move the situation along so that all benefited as much as was understandable in the moment?

Therefore, I guess I don' believe in compassionate actions. Compassion is far too complicated an idea. It is not immediate. It is thought out and pondered over. What may have been an action taken for a whole variety of emotional impetus, including anger, can be judged as compassionate even if there was no such forethought in the actor.

We can, I think, also speak of true compassion. True compassion, it is said, is like a hand reaching back in the night for a pillow. I still haven't gotten to the bottom of that explanation, but it seems to me it is saying compassion has no thought. It does what is needed for "the good" in the moment, and it is never quite clear.

I think I as a Buddhist cannot, and should not encourage people to have any particular type of feeling. I should not care what emotion a person may be under when they take action. My focus should be on the effect of the action. I should learn to practice seeing how what I do, including what I speak, or write, impacts the world, did things improve or did things go wrong? Did the wheel turn?

If I can learn to see what I am doing, I can help the world along even in a fit of anger.

Two Camps in my Brain

Harry got my wheels turning with his post on vow and intent

For my own sanity I've been starting to look at the origin of emotion, and its links to the "sub conscious" (or to put it in less Freudian terms, the activities of our minds/brains not available to our awareness). What I have found so far is that these two camps he speaks of are co-resident and struggling(?) in our minds.

Both camps are skills that have given us evolutionary bumps (advantage)and engendered survival. One (grossly simplified) is the cortex by which we do complex "what if" pondering and detailed analysis in attempting to predict the future. The other is a "lower", or more evolutionarily aged brain system that tends to function outside of awareness, but whose decisions, (or, acknowledging a less conscious driver, "outputs") get thrown "up" to the cortex. Those decisions, I think, tend to feel like direct knowledge or intuition.

The cortex activity tends, I think, to get in our way. It takes real input, mixes in a fountain of imagining, and yields unhappiness, or euphoria, or other "false" state.

What interests me (and what I seem to currently understand the lesson of Buddhism, or at least zazen) is that it seems to take a cortex to quiet a cortex. We are hooked by logical arguments to us, or within us, about the value of zazen, and strive to learn how to drop such value decisions, to stop picking and choosing.

The low brain knows to reach back for the pillow at night, and the cortex is troubled to know what rules or values make that the right thing to do.

But the high brain (cortex) also has some value added tricks up its sleeve in addition to the intellectual curiosity that gets most people hooked in zazen to start with. Things like compassion are very high brain constructs, and very beneficial.

We often like to simply think of the brain as one organ with a uniform purpose. It seems that it really is a complexly evolved layering of systems, some which have a long history in other animals and mammals, and some which are rarely seen in other species.

Perhaps enlightenment will be revealed as the suddenly developed ability to see the action of the cortex in our lives and not be pulled along in its tide of anticipation, worry, and picking and choosing. Perhaps it is the ability to have an identity that is a more holistic composite of all the brain systems and events rather that just the hyper analytical cortex. Perhaps it is like the story of Helen Keller who suddenly one day just "got" what all that input was indicating.

Early ideas, but exciting for me.

What Good is this Sit?

I currently believe that zazen does nothing in itself. It is not the "vehicle of change."

I think the point of zen is to live without picking and choosing. To live without clinging to ideas and ideals. To take what is here now in your face, and at your feet, and all the other metaphors of immediacy, and grasp that this is all "it" is. The wood is wood until it is ash. Then it is ash, it is not "was-wood."

Zazen is a great barometer of how well that's going for you, it ain't necessarily what gets you there.

I find I have tons of trouble these days just sitting for 30 minutes. Seems almost laughable when written. "What, you can't just sit for 30 minutes? What's your problem? You call yourself a Buddhist?" Fair engout, but what does it *mean* that I can't sit for 30? It means that my "self" has not accepted "now" as reality. It's churning so hard on things that are not real and are not here and are not now that it can't abide "just sitting."

The intellect is important to we humans because it is with the intellect that we must tee up this shot. We must conceive of the 100 foot pole. We must frame the idea of climbing through the window. But then we must abandon intellect. We must swing with our entire life. We must jump into the nothing around the pole. We must pull our tail through the window without a concept of tail and window to work with.

At least that's how I suppose it should be. That is all intellectual pondering, of course. I won't know what it's like until I stop the pondering, and step fully onto the path of no-hinderance. I think my ego has been partnering with Mara to keep me from this. Secretly giving me "goals" and "embarrassment" about zazen to trip me up. They are conspiring to bind me up in endless strings of thoughts, excuses and pondering.

Who can give me one true word to cut through to the gate-less gate? Come take this seat.

Nothing to Attain.

A light on in the house does not change the landscape of the surrounding fields. No matter how bright it shines, or what newly is revealed. The fields are unchanged.There is no shift. Nothing is achieved or attained by the clearer vision. The sun rises the next day, and bugs crawl. All is as it was whether the windows are clear or dirty, or the light is bright or dim.