One stone thrown in rills

Ripples widen and shake hills

Hiroshima blooms

I will have missed it.  Starlight.  I have no idea how many photon wave/particle fronts have been expanding outward for thousands of years before I was born.  Wave fronts that won’t intersect Earth until long after my death.  I will miss that starlight.

Watching starlight has been one of those practices that has brought me a lot of solace over the years.  

I very distinctly remember a time in the summer after I had graduated from college.  I was working at a feed mill.  The job I had found paid well enough to put food on the table for the family and to save for graduate school.  But I had barely survived the first week.  I worked on the dock grabbing 50 pound feed bags off the conveyor belt and thumping them into place in semi-truck trailers bound for various feed stores.  I had the 4PM to midnight shift, and at the end of the shift on Friday night that first week, the foreman had sent me to take some cardboard boxes out and burn them.  I remember standing, watching the boxes burning, watching sparks rising up into the night, and above all of that, seeing millions of stars.  The stars put my exhaustion and the sudden change from academic scholar to night laborer into stark relief.  I and the new job were ephemeral.  Sure stars are as well.  But not at the same blindingly fast pace as human life is.  It was a gut emotional experience of the old refrigerator saying, “This too shall pass.”

Forty-five years later, I still enjoy seeing the stars.  Of course to me it’s like someone flips on the switch in the bedroom every night, and the same set of pinpoints light up.  I seldom consider how long the photons have taken to get to my retina.  And the starlight still lights up my emotional life with the experience of solace.

The poem above came from that period in my life.  Early twenties.  Reading Alan Watts and having just learned the haiku form.  Living in the ‘50’s in the midst of the cold war and the threat of mutually assured self destruction in a nuclear war.  (I remember the grade school drill for a nuclear attack.  Get under your desk, and cover your eyes so that the blinding light and the flying glass didn’t kill you.)  Being a German major in college, so I knew that Albert Einstein’s last name could be made as a language pun to say one stone.  

Life as a college graduate was complex, intricate, and could be won if one played the game astutely.  Kinda like a good game of bridge.

Breakfast.  Cereal?  Egg, toast?

Lunch. Yesterday’s leftovers?

Dinner?  Too distant to plan.

And God rested from his work.

I was out walking this morning.  I observed that I was timing my steps so as to step over cracks in the asphalt walk.  It’s something that goes back to my childhood.  Maybe you played the game as well.  “Step on a crack, you break your mother’s back.”  As a kid I stepped over the cracks and saved Mom’s back.  Even sixty years later, I hold to the habit.  I know I don’t have to play that game anymore, but I still do.

Now this story has something to do with the three Republican presidential candidates I mentioned in the last blog entry, the ones who raised there hand to indicate that they did not believe in evolution.  I wondered how they passed over the tons of bones mounted in museums around the world and the libraries of scientific research on the growth, development, and adaptation of living systems in favor of some alternate explanation of life on planet Earth.  I was so intrigued by that viewpoint that I wanted to find out what they did believe in.   All three had given the Washington Post more background for their non-evolution stance.  Here are the Washington Post quotes:

“Brownback later told The Washington Post that ‘it's obvious from observation there's a microevolution within species, but I do think there's a role for the divine in the incredible nature of the mind and the complexity of the cell.’

“Huckabee told The Post: ‘I believe that there is a God and that he put the creative process in motion. I don't know how he did it. He may have used some sort of evolutionary process. I tend to believe that he did it as Scripture says, but I know that a lot of people believe differently, and of course I respect their beliefs.’”  "I said, in general -- and I would say this tonight to any of us -- when a person says, 'My faith doesn't affect my decision- making,' I would say that the person is saying their faith is not significant to impact their decision process. I tell people up front, 'My faith does affect my decision process.' It explains me. No apology for that."

“Tancredo later issued a statement saying that ‘evolution explains changes in life. Creationism explains its origin.’"

(Well, thank heavens I’m not the only one relying on old habit patterns and adjusting my progress to skim over the cracks in reality.)

I refer to this kind of thinking as the Turtles-All-the-Way-Down hypothesis of origin (hereafter referred to as the TAWD hypothesis).  You may know that story too.  Here’s a version from U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, in a footnote to Rapanos v. United States:  “In our favored version, an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies ‘Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.’"

In other words, when one is confronted by a crack in reality (a situation too complex to have an immediately apparent response), one simply reverts to the tried and true, to what is “just plain, good old-fashioned common sense.”  One might be forgiven for using common sense, old habit patterns, tried and true mental sets to handle the vagaries of life, but then one runs the risk of narrow-minded obstinacy in the face of reality.  Witness President Bush and his entry into and on-going conduct of the war with Iraq. 

More to the story.  As I continued my walk this morning, I came to the concrete sidewalk segment of the walk.  Unfortunately, I was using too long a stride length to step over every crack in the sidewalk.  What a dilemma!  Slow down, or risk breaking Mom’s back.  I opted for the more aggressive workout.

Last Sunday, the Dalai Lama gave an address in Chicago.  Here is a quote that speaks to the interconnection of all things.  “We can say the theory of interdependence is an understanding of reality. We understand that our future depends on global well-being. Having this viewpoint reduces narrow-mindedness. With narrow mind, one is more likely to develop attachment, hatred. I think this is the best thing about the theory of interdependence--it is an explanation of the law of nature. It affects profoundly, for example, the environment.” --from The Wisdom of Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys.  Dalai Lama.  May 7, 2007. Snow Lion Publications

His comment reminds me such interdependence requires that one not rely on over simplification and habitual responses.  It requires that one confront each new situation with fresh analysis and a clear regard for probable outcomes.  That is a healthy counterbalance to good old, TAWD common sense.

On the other hand, I’m glad to have more information on the Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo positions.  It didn’t change my vote.  I would still prefer someone who can take a look at the sidewalk ahead and make a fresh decision whether to step over the cracks or step on the cracks.

Well, that was fun.  Not a blog entry full of tranquility and bliss, the “real topics” for meditation blogs.  Still what does tranquility and bliss look like in the midst of political discussion?  No apology for that.

Fingers slide from bead to bead.

Voice chants as thought drifts to thought.

Fingers slide from bead to bead.

This bead is big; the next not.

What are some people thinking?!!!

This isn’t really a rant.  I’ve been getting emails from some of my Chinese students and looking back with great fondness at the photographs I have of them.  That got me looking back – with great fondness as well – at family photographs from different times in the last six months.  I have uploaded a few into the photo album currently running on this blog.  Like the photos of the Chinese students, these are memories of individuals, each person as unique as blossoms in a garden.

This isn’t the rant either.  I had occasion to revisit the low ground of decision making this past week.  OK, let me get the confession out of the way right off the bat.  I decided how to present a sticky issue regarding a summer trip with family via email.  Well, I referred to it in my mind as presenting some considerations before hard and fast decisions got made.  Sounded good to me at the time.  Except that when Babs read the email she was convinced that it was wrong, had not presented what we had talked about, and had sent the wrong message.  I was instantly caught up in the emotional state of defensiveness.

This is also not the rant.  The Universalist -Unitarian Sunday Morning Book Discussion Group finished reading and discussing Father Anthony De Mello’s book Awareness last Sunday.  UU’s are great at intellectual discussions.  More than once in my life I have been grateful to UU discussion groups for intellectually challenging all the comfortable “spiritual” thinking I tend to fall into.

This is the rant.  First, let me admit I’m not a Republican voter, and, I did not watch the ten current Republican candidates for the presidency debate last week.  (To be fair, I didn’t watch the Democratic contenders debate the week before, but that was just pure negligence on my part.)  So I did not see three of the Republican candidates raise their hands when asked who did not believe in evolution.  From what I read, there were no follow-up questions that might have allowed them to make that conviction understandable.  But, still!!!  What a thoroughly anti-science view those three raised hands seem to indicate.  It evinces a view of reality so widely different to mine that I fail to understand it at all.

I had to step back several paces from emotional reaction to the newspaper account of those three raised hands.  I had to get to a more philosophical standpoint, one of acceptance that “it takes all kinds of people to make a world.”  For good measure I added in a generous three-fingers of “God don’t make no junk” on the rocks.  After chilling out the emotional reaction, I turned my attention to something more positive and pleasant.  It was actually one of the reasons that I was looking at family and student photos.  Just to remind myself that we all have our individual realities.  Nothing in life requires that people share the same set of views.  It’s just that sometimes an event reminds me forcefully of that intellectual principle.

Of course, when Babs told me that my email was a total disaster and was just confusing the issue, I wondered what planet she was living on as well.  Then to add to my misery, the other family members – at least from their emails—appeared to be as confused as Babs had predicted.  It took a couple of days and a healing, medicinal contemplation to get a handle on my thoroughly unpleasant defensive reactions.  The short lesson here for me is that it is one thing to have insight and another thing to live by it.  It is one thing to think of decision making as neither right nor wrong.  It is another thing for me to deal with the emotional response when one of my decisions is seen as right or wrong.  What a thoroughly irrational response I demonstrated.

In his book, Awareness, De Mello describes becoming truly “aware” as an act that frees one from response based on knowledge.  De Mello uses alcoholics as an example, recounting stories of people who knew they were alcoholics and what the long-term effects of alcoholism were but remained mired in the habit anyway.  Mired in the habit until– in at least one example – the first true experience of the alcoholic that his body was dying due to his drinking.  At which point the alcoholic lost all desire for alcohol. 

As the UU group parsed its way through De Mello’s description, I was reminded that such “Ah ha” moments really have two possible outcomes.  That is, the alcoholic recognizing that his body was indeed suffering could use that experience to shift to a different life style, could give up all the psychological habituation for alcohol in that moment of recognition.  But, the alcoholic could just as well be pulled by his habituation right back into the on-going lifestyle of alcoholism.  De Mello makes the case that reaching an aware state of mind supersedes habituation.

That is the promise that spiritual masters have made since long before Buddha or Christ.

How fortunate it is that in every generation there are those who do become aware and do provide themselves as tour guides along the path leading to awareness.

So I was looking at photographs of students and family and thinking that any of them could become aware in the course of their lives.  In any case, each one is unique and beautiful.  What a thoroughly joyful picture.

Still I wonder how those three Republicans could have decided that evolution is unbelievable. 

Eyes on her mirrored image,

hand gropes for the diamond,

pulls on the ruby perplexed.

Oh to be a five-claw dragon.

There is a happy ending.  That’s encouraging.

I pretty much stopped meditating.  Lasted about six months.

In China I had perfected a perverse habit of doing lots of contemplation interspersed with a little bit of mantra meditation.  It kept me sane.  Here I was an educated American totally illiterate in China.  Couldn’t read, write, nor speak the language.  What few phrases I had memorized before going were useless because the sidewalk vendors, bus conductors, and taxi drivers only spoke the local Chongqing dialect.  And, try as they might those locals simply could not decipher the “Mandarin” I spoke with such a heavy American accent.  It was gibberish to them.  I did eventually learn to tag along with someone who spoke English and Chongqing-hua.  Likewise, as a Spoken English teacher, I had complete autonomy (read: no direction whatsoever) to develop the curriculum I taught in class.  So my contemplation/meditations were often filled with should-have-said Chinese monologues, and working out next week’s lesson plan.  I remember one meditation in which I regained awareness only to discover that I had been lost for who knew how long trying to figure out how to take a stock Chinese phrase and vary it in order to tell taxi drivers how to get up to our apartment building.  Practical and useful at least, I thought.  The next taxi driver I tried the phrase on was as baffled as his predecessors.

My guru (still) was a guy (deceased in 1988) named Gururaj Ananda Yogi.  Here he is talking about motivations:

“For I always say, ‘If you are a Christian, become a better Christian; if a Buddhist, a better Buddhist; a Hindu, a better Hindu.  But above that all, become a better human being.’  How are we going to do that, to become a better human being?  It is not by the actions that you do that you are a better human being.

“We have many do‑gooders in this world...  They are doing something.  Fine.  Good.  But, what is the motivation?  Is the motivation ego inflation?  Or, is it a surrender … to a greater, higher self within themselves and expressing this in action by serving others?  So, motivation.  What controls motivation?  The patternings of your mind.  We come back to square one.”  (Gururaj Ananda Yogi. US 82044: “Reconciling Karma and Sin.”  Pp 8-9.)

Coming back from China, I found that I just could not bring myself to sit down and meditate.  But it wasn’t until February of this year that I really began to recognize that what I was avoiding was the old, perverse habit of meditation as medication; that is, sitting in contemplation in order to let go of the pressures of the day or the week.  That habit I did not want to return to.  That was my “square one,” as Gururaj put it.

Recently in a Joliet Buddhist Sangha session, we watched a tape on Buddhist concepts.  One topic caught my attention.  It was the idea that this is the perfect Buddha universe (Buddha-verse) for humans to reach awakening.  Of course it is.  One has all one’s fallacies, one’s false assumptions and expectations, one’s unwarranted assumptions mirrored back almost immediately.  If you hit your thumb instead of the nail with a hammer, you know it immediately.  If you try to travel around Chongqing with no language skills, you know it immediately.  If I try to meditate with too much anxiety and emotional investment, I find myself contemplating.

So it is only in the last couple of months that I have found it easier to sit in meditation.  That’s encouraging.  It’s a happy ending to that phase of travel in anxiety, illiteracy, and mental medication.

To everything there is a season, and
a time to every purpose under heaven: …

a time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away…