Monday 20070326

Book wisdom ain’t street smarts.

You say so.  Maybe it’s not.

“Handsome is as handsome does.”

Turn the Eight Ball another time.

I had a key fob I was really fond of.  I got it in Goslar, Germany, in 1973.  It was a gold colored souvenir coin.  On the back was an etched drawing of the Dukattenscheisser (the ducats shitter).  The Dukattenscheisser was a small grotesque carving on one corner of the Gold Minters’ Guild Hall.  The figure is hunched down having just shit out a pile of golden coins, ducats.  There was a saying in low German around the edge of my souvenir coin, “He druecket und shitt und bringet Dek Glueck.”  He stoops and shits and brings you luck.

I lost and found that gold colored coin key chain fob many, many times over the last thirty plus years.  Every time I got a better key ring, I took off the attached fob and fastened on my ducat.  Of course, all the key rings weakened with time, and the coin would become detached.  Sometimes I would find it in a coat lining or on the floor in the house or next to the accelerator in the car.  Once I raced back to find it still lying in a parking lot.  Hugh sigh of relief.

A couple of years ago I retired, sort of, and sold my work car.  Babs and I left for a year in China.  Other people lived in our house and shifted things around.  We’ve been back in our house six months now, and only recently did I realize that the coin was not on the car key chain.  It’s gone again.  I am wondering where I might have put it for safe keeping when I sold the other car.

I have had that experience with my own meditation recently.  For many months I have been wondering where I put my meditation.  While in China I got into the habit of meditating more as a form of medication than meditation.  That is to say, coping with things Chinese and coping without fluency in Chinese made the year pretty stressful for me.  So often when I sat down to meditate, it was really just to vent the emotions and background anxiety caused by being a stranger in a strange land.  Not meditating for the sake of meditation.

I am beginning to find meditation again.  Like the old gold ducat I have had to attach my meditation to a new key chain.  This one happens to be a Buddhist meditation group at a local church.  They do mindfulness meditation.  I do mantra meditation.  Still it seems to work for all of us.  We are all quiet.  When talking about spiritual growth we offer our nuggets of wisdom and are respectful of each other’s sincerity. 

Here’s something else I have valued for many, many years:

“As far as the lineage of teachers is concerned, knowledge is not handed down like an antique.  Rather, one teacher experiences the truth of the teachings, and he hands it down as inspiration to his student.  That inspiration awakens the student, as his teacher was awakened before him.  Then the student hands down the teachings to another student and so the process goes.  The teachings are always up to date.  They are not ‘ancient wisdom,’ an old legend.  The teachings are not passed along as information, handed down as a grandfather tells traditional folk tales to his grandchildren.  It does not work that way.  It is a real experience.

“There is a saying in the Tibetan scriptures: ‘Knowledge must be burned, hammered and beaten like pure gold.  Then one can wear it as an ornament.’  So when you receive spiritual instruction from the hands of another, you do not take it uncritically, but you burn it, you hammer it, you beat it, until the bright, dignified color of gold appears.  Then you craft it into an ornament, whatever design you like, and you put it on.  Therefore, dharma is applicable to every age, to every person; it has living quality.  It is not enough to imitate your master or guru; you are not trying to become a replica of your teacher.  The teachings are an individual personal experience…”  Chogyam Trungpa: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Shambhala Press, 1973.  Page 17.

I’m still hammering, still beating a way after all these years.

Monday 20070312

Japanese anime light.

Cartoon character conjures

magic to make strife come right.

Th... Th… Th… Th…  That’s all, Folks.

Babs and I have had an ongoing discussion.  I say that The Secret caters to those people who want to manipulate life around them.  You know, like when you want a flat-panel HDTV and surround sound but you don't have the money free right now to do that.  Babs sees it more like an affirmation.  Just setting a goal and working to achieve it.  She says "manipulative" is somehow too sinister.

We took care of our grandson, Conrad, a couple of days last week.  He has several Japanese anime films from Studio Ghibli.  I really enjoy these films.  The Studio Ghibli films have a marvelous fairy tale quality.  They have the innocence of a child trying to figure out how to make life work out OK when there are so many bigger and more powerful people all around.  What are the rules to the game?  Still, by the end of the movie, life is always restored to its proper balance. 

OK, I admit it.  Cartoon magic is just another analogy for my view of The Secret and how to use it to get what you want.  Life is big and sometimes dangerous, and sometimes it seems to operate in mysterious ways.  For example, you are a U. S. attorney who gets a good job performance rating early in the year 2006.  On December 6^th you are fired, and when pressed for a reason, the U. S. Attorney General says it is for poor job performance.

Here’s a different story.

A couple of years ago I had a part-time job.  My boss called me into her office after about six months on the job.  She wanted to talk to me about my position.  She began by telling me of the college’s policy on administrators, that was, have as few as possible.  I thought for sure she gently building up to tell me that I was being fired.  But no, she actually wanted to shift the position to a full-time position for the following school year and wanted me to take it.  I remember saying thanks and requesting time to talk with Babs about it.

I got no more than twenty yards out of her office before I was clear in my own mind that I did not want to work full-time.  I got no more than fifty yards out of her office before I had decided that I would “retire” at the end of the school year thereby clearing the way for my boss to create and staff the full-time position.  It was a snap decision made in the blink of an eye.  Babs and I did talk quite a bit about the full-time position over the next couple of days.  Three days later I sat down with my boss and told her as best I could that I would not be taking on the new position, would submit my resignation effective at the end of the school year, and hoped she would have adequate time to find a new person.

What’s the point of this story?  Just that life presents us all with the unexpected, and that we have the wherewithal to handle the unexpected.  For more on such snap judgments, Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, gives an excellent argument for trusting one’s own intuition.

So how does one handle the magical vagaries of life?  Is it a matter of using The Secret or of trusting one’s own intuition to make necessary decisions?  I’d say both.  Some of life’s opportunities lend themselves well to planning, visualizing, and expectation of a desired outcome.  Some of life’s opportunities lend themselves to an intuitive decision that sets in action a workable response.  What do you think?

Here’s a follow up to the decision to retire.  Three weeks after I submitted my resignation, I saw an email about a teaching position in China for the following year.  Babs had the bags packed when I got home that evening. 

Sunday, 20070304

So. One night. One moon. Two views.

Make morning coffee. Pancakes.

Moon reflected on coffee.

Steam chopsticks germ free. Store them.

Which reminds me that we humans have used nature to talk about life for ever.  The moon is one of those objects that has come to exist in so many realms: nature, thought, conceptual symbols, sex, religion.  One of my favorites is that while a hundred tea cups may show the moon in them, there is only one moon.

Lots of people will have watched the lunar eclipse last night.  It was the spectacle of gravity revealed to the naked eye.  It was a spectacle that doesn’t happen often and was worth focusing on.

Wikipedia described it, “The most recent total lunar eclipse was on 3-4 March 2007. It was L=3 to L=4 on the Danjon scale. It was fully visible over Europe and Africa and at least partly visible over the eastern Americas, Asia, and western Australia.^[1] The moon entered the penumbral shadow at 20:18 UTC, and the umbral shadow at 21:30 UTC. The total phase lasted between 22:44 UTC and 23:58 UTC. The moon left the umbra shadow at 01:11 UTC and left the penumbra shadow at 02:24 UTC 4 March 2007.”

I missed it.  I was watching a science fiction show, Firefly, on DVD.

There was a full moon this morning.  I watched it as the earth rolled from night into day.  First, tree limbs occluded the moon’s disk and it seemed that the moon slid down through black lace.  The atmosphere turned imperceptibly lighter to slate grey.  Gradually the moon seemed to dim, almost to vanish, and I realized that there must be low lying clouds in the sky.  The light evolved to dark federal blue although still not bright enough to see any such clouds.  Now the moon reappeared as brightly as ever and just as quickly began to disappear behind another band of clouds, the general light in the air still too dim to show the shape or mass of the cloud banks.  Without conscious attention my eyes tracked downward to keep the moon’s disk in view.  Intervening clouds became grey veils sliding past the bright disk.  Then the clouds became slightly lighter pink areas in the brightening sky and slowly resolved into visible cirrus cloud banks.  So when the moon really did become eclipsed by the rolling earth’s horizon, it was just at the time when I could see the whole scene clearly enough.

It is so much fun to talk about things.  To share thoughts.  To hear your thoughts.