Fingers crumble the cookie.

I read the future writ large

and race to place my money.

For sure the lotto is mine.

My sister and her husband came to visit us a couple of months back.  They’re pretty devout Methodists.  My religious beliefs have been the subject of their interest for quite some time.  So maybe it was the seven Buddha figurines or the many Chinese paintings scattered around the house that led them to conclude I was now a Buddhist. 

But they failed to notice the feng shui dragon horse holding a Susan B Anthony silver dollar in its mouth and facing the front door.  They also missed the two small Chinese chop stones sitting side by side, the ones with the character, fu (good fortune), engraved across the two front sides.  So I am sure that they missed the fact that as a mostly retired educator living on a pension, I really worship Mammon.  Perhaps that’s a bit too strong.  Let’s say I keep a wary eye on the monthly balance sheet and seek to draw all the good cosmic fortune forces to my side.

That makes me a superstitious person.

I was born in a year of the dragon.  Here’s the dragon fortune for 2007.  “Dragons are trailblazers, and you will get many opportunities to put your maverick ingenuity to good use in 2007. By heading in a new direction, you could net both recognition and financial rewards. The key lies in expressing your true talents and following your heart. Nothing less will get results. Leave behind your fear of not having enough, and cultivate abundance consciousness. Let your enterprising spirit soar.”  So I am praying that St. George remains in Europe this year.  At the very least, I hope he doesn’t notice my dragon horse should the devout saint find his way to my door.

Still, I look askance at superstition. 

When I see a TV evangelist quoting passages from the Bible in answer to people’s questions, I question the questioner and the evangelist.  I wonder which one is more in need of understanding.  Let it be clear here, however, that I am impressed that TV evangelism seems to be such a good paying job.

When I read an op-ed columnist online – pontificating, say, about the merits of a new Attorney General candidate – and read the comments submitted by readers, I realize that a lot of us are looking for reassurance from pundits and experts.  It is a dangerous world out there. 

All of this would fall into the Locus of Control orientation in one’s personality.  Within psychology, Locus of Control is considered to be an important aspect of personality.  Locus of Control refers to an individual's perception about the underlying main causes of events in his/her life.  Or, more simply:  Do you believe that your destiny is controlled by yourself (an internal locus of control) or by external forces such as fate, god, or powerful others (an external locus of control)?  These beliefs, in turn, guide what kinds of attitudes and behaviors people adopt.  [Online references – James Neill and Wikipedia]

Superstition would fall into the external Locus of Control orientation in as much as it fosters the belief that one can manipulate life by belief in benevolence – or condemnation – from forces in nature such as dragon horses.

One would think meditators would fall into the internal locus of control group.  Meditation, by its very nature, involves observing one’s mental, physical, and emotional processes or absorbing oneself in the use of a mantra or the like.  So it would seem that meditation leads to an internal orientation, an action of observing and becoming honestly aware of one’s personality at many levels and over time. 

Still meditators do get caught up in the external trappings of meditation.  Must one sit in a specific posture?  Does one eat no meat?  What are the minimum/ maximum amounts of time to meditate?  So in a way doing meditation the “right way” can be a sort of superstition.  And, in the meditation society to which I belong, I have often heard people speak about “the guru” having something to do with the trials and tribulations they are enduring.  Mind you, our guru has been dead since 1988.  That would seem to be putting the burden of one’s life on the shoulders of an external Locus of Control.

Yet I do think that meditation leads more naturally toward an internal Locus of Control orientation.  Specifically, that part of the meditation process in which one dispassionately observes what one is thinking, feeling, or sensing.  Dispassionate observation lends itself toward honestly and objectively viewing life and one’s interactions in life, of being the owner of one’s own actions and reactions.  Likewise, dispassionate observation leads to an attitude of nonattachment, of recognizing that there is a flow of events and interactions in one’s life, and of accepting that “this too is passing”.

Still, if we go back to teach in China next semester, I plan to add a one yuan coin to the Susan B Anthony in my lucky dragon horse’s mouth.  I am consciously choosing to play all the angles.

“I read the news today oh, boy”

Day in the Life? Was that song

before The Fool on the Hill?

Last chord fades beyond my ears.

Could have been a TV show.  Was it an accidental death?  Was it a murder-suicide?  Were they both killed by government agents?  Unfortunately, this all took place in 1886 in upper Bavaria so there was no CSI Munich to send out a crack team of detectives to gather up all the evidence and solve the case.  It remains an unsolved mystery.

King Ludwig II comes to the throne of Bavaria when his father dies in 1864.  He is eighteen years old and has grown up secluded from court life in a castle in the lovely countryside of upper Bavaria.  The castle, set apart high above the surrounding countryside, is full of wall paintings of medieval knights and quotes from famous poems and sagas about honor, duty, and beauty.  Between 1864 and 1886 Ludwig spends the family’s entire accumulated fortune building lavish castles.  In 1886 he asks his government to use the kingdom’s funds to complete work on two of the castles and build an additional two.  His government hires a psychologist to determine Ludwig’s sanity.  The professor declares Ludwig insane.  He is placed in confinement.  The psychologist goes to check on him in order to send the court a status report.  Ludwig and the psychologist go for a walk around the grounds where Ludwig is being held.  That evening, their bodies are discovered floating in a lake on the property. 

You can buy the story in the gift shop at each of Ludwig’s castles.  You can get it in German, English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and, coming soon, in Chinese.  You can hear the story as a part of the guided tour at each castle.  The story, the unsolved mystery at the core of the story, is what actually sells the castles.  Was he really mad?

I find an interesting personal parallel in the story.  I had a similar question about my guru, Gururaj Ananda Yogi.  Was he crazy or for real?  

My first encounter with him in 1982 came when I went to the house of a dear friend.  My friend was already very involved with the American Meditation Society founded by Gururaj.  And, Gururaj was in the Midwest prior to a week long American Meditation Society course.  He was doing an introductory talk at my friend’s home.  I was intrigued to see a Hindu guru at first hand.  As the evening wore on I became convinced he was just a spiritual snake oil salesman. 

Still, in 1986 I took the Society’s meditation classes myself, and I was interested in hearing Gururaj speak again.  I went to the next American Meditation Society course.  Gururaj was teaching each day at the course.  I was dumb struck.  He was so spontaneous and so without concern for social acceptability and his lectures seemed to be such rambling, off-the-cuff musings that I couldn’t follow them.  So I still came away wondering if he were for real.  The next time Gururaj was in the Midwest, I went to that course.  And to the next one.  And the next.  Each time I left one of his meditation courses, it was with a deep heart-level connection to Gururaj and the same burning question.  Was he for real?  It proved to be the perfect unsolved mystery that drew me onto his spiritual path. 

Gururaj died in 1988.  That ended the problem of his lack of social etiquette.  It still left the problem of his lectures. 

Fortunately I was asked to transcribe several of the lectures.  Finally there was the opportunity I wanted to slow down his incoherent ramblings, to listen as he spoke on a topic, and to understand that he actually addressed the topic at multiple levels.  What seemed like aimless ramblings became a series of spiritual explorations probing one aspect of the topic after the other.  I had but to set aside my expectations of what he should say in order to listen to what he did say.

At one of Ludwig’s castles I heard a lady explaining to friends that Ludwig was a spiritually anointed person.  He had, she claimed, selected each of the locations because the castle would be at the vortex of spiritual forces.  Anyone who visited one of his castles and who was spiritually attuned would experience those forces for themselves.  I did not feel it.  Perhaps I was simply so caught up in the lavishness of the palace’s rooms and grounds that I was insensitive to the amplified spirituality of the site.

Yet that’s not important.  I hope that the lady who seemed quite prepared for the spiritual beneficence she would experience actually did get the experience she wanted.  Belief that something is so goes a long way toward making it real in the believer’s mind and consequently in their experiences.

My own belief that I had a heart-level connection with Gururaj made it a fact in my life.  That the man was, at the same time, too spontaneous and unpredictable for me to feel comfortable around him did not diminish my sense of connection with him.

Another aspect of the Ludwig legend.  What did Bavaria do with the castles?  In 1918 when Bavaria ceased to be a kingdom, the government inherited one completed Ludwig castle, Schloss Linderhof, and two incomplete castles, Schloss Neuschwanstein and Schloss Herrenchiemsee.  The Bavarian government made lemonade of Ludwig’s lemons.  It carefully nurtured the great mystery story, built a highly effective marketing campaign around Ludwig and the castles, and turned the castles into a tourism goldmine. 

Me?  With Gururaj’s lessons?  I continue to mine them for wisdom.

Sunlight soft between her thighs.

Three moles like Orion’s Belt there.

How far distant then as now?

Snow flakes and I float down hill.

There was this lady in the airplane sitting in the window seat.  She had her knee up against the wall just when I looked out the window as the plane descended into the Munich airport.  But that’s not what I’m writing about today.  I’m writing about the Tao.

One of the most famous Tao masters is Zhuge Liang, 181-223 AD.  This was the time period in Chinese history of the Three Kingdoms, a time when one dynasty ended and wars were being fought as three contenders tried to establish the next dynasty.  One contender was Liu Bei whose chief political and military strategist was Zhuge Liang.  Zhuge Liang was supposed to be so adept in the ways of the Tao that he could read the stars, the winds, and the water and could understand their portent for the future.  Added to that was the fact that he was a brilliant tactician.  Little wonder that the conflicts in this time period became the stuff of story tellers in market places all over China.  Almost a thousand years later the stories were gathered together in the novel, the Three Kingdoms, and became a Chinese classic.  From the novel one might think that the Tao is more about fortune telling than anything else.

However, the Tao that I want to write about today is the Tao as harmonious flow in life.  You can picture me, a flat-lander from Illinois, slowly walking up the side of a mountain in the Alps.  I am trying to become one with the harmonious flow of breath into my lungs and the physical exertion of climbing.  One of our party, a nurse named Monika, has suggested to me that I should focus on the exhalation.  If I exhale fully, then that will rid my system of the toxins the exertions are building up.  Our guide, Friederich, sets a steady pace for these climbs.  Short steps in an unhurried meter.  But he is like a metronome and only stops when he discovers that virtually everyone else is lagging way behind.  So catching the Tao, catching the harmonious flow for me today is catching the rhythm of breathing and climbing up the incline behind our guide.  I am focused on the Tao.  Gradually I discover that although Friederich’s pace is steady, mine is not the same steady drum beat.  As the ground becomes steeper, my pace changes and the breathing shifts.  Thoughts arise.  I discover the intense desire to pause, to be done with incessant climb.  A blog entry begins to form – a distraction my mind seeks as my body rebels to the uphill walk.

Here’s a good distraction.  Zhuge Liang was so feared as a general that he scared an entire army away.  The story goes that Zhuge Liang was in a walled city but had few troops with him.  An enemy general arrived with his army and laid siege to the city.  The general had marshalled his troops to attack the main gate of the city.  Quickly Zhuge Liang ordered that his carriage be moved to that gate.  He got into the carriage and ordered the gates to be opened.  The enemy general saw the gates open, saw few defenders, but recognized the famous carriage and Zhuge Liang sitting quietly in his carriage.  The general was so convinced that it was a trick designed to pull him into a trap that he immediately ordered his troops to withdraw.  It makes for a great story, but one notices that for some reason, Zhuge Liang had missed reading the stars or the winds or the waters sufficiently well to know that he would be under attack.

My mind returns to the Tao of walking uphill.  Let the breath find itself. Let my foot steps adjust to the terrain – steeper or gentler rise, rocks in the mud to make the footing tricky, wind and snow in my face, road changing direction.  Let the body seek distracting thoughts about Zhuge Liang, the flow of the Tao, and being in harmony with the flow.  It is the natural cycle of a meditation: focus on the walk and breathing, become distracted, refocus, become distracted, refocus.

China, just like Europe, makes saints of its honoured historical figures.  Zhuge Liang has a temple dedicated to him in Chengdu.  Chengdu was the capitol city of Liu Bei’s kingdom.  So in the Wuhou Gardens there is a nested set of temples to Liu Bei, his brothers in arms, and at the back of the compound in a place of great honor, the temple to Zhuge Liang.  I have paid my respects there.  And do so again today.

The Tao that can be described is not the real Tao.  The observations recorded mentally while walking uphill are not the walking uphill itself. 

Dazzling silver in sunlight

Chicago’s Cloud Gate blazes.

Between me and my reflection

handprints ring reality.

The devil is in the details – the ones that I habitually filter out when coming to grips with a situation.

Most mornings I spend a lot of time reading the washingtonpost.com online.  I read the political news and the op-ed pieces by the more liberal (er, I guess the current buzz word is “progressive”) writers.  But, I read the conservative writers as well – even though their viewpoint is seldom one I share.

I also click on the Read All Comments link to read what the non-pundits have to say.  That is one of the really interesting parts of the online newspaper for me.  A neocon columnist, William Kristol, recently had a piece touting the belief that President Bush’s administration will be seen by future historians as a successful presidency.  There were more than 240 screens of responses from online readers, mostly expressing disbelief and outrage.  I added one myself.  At between five and eight reader comments per screen, that is a large volume of comments.  Taken together the news article or op-ed piece and reader comments the piece generates make for a great barometer of overall opinion regarding the story or viewpoint being discussed.  Taken together, the Bush administration does not fare well.  

I am often struck by the degree of corrupt use of power, greed, and secrecy displayed by so many people at various levels of Bush’s administration.  It is an ethically corrupt administration in my book.

Which brings me to a book that I am reading, Professor Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.  I find it a frightening book.  Here is a short description from the book’s fly leaf: “…Dr. Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib.  He replaces the long-held notion of the ‘bad apple’ with that of the ‘bad barrel’ – the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.”

In my undergraduate college years I had a Philosophy of Religion course.  The term paper I wrote was in answer to a question about good and evil in human nature.  I recall thinking through what I had learned about human nature in my previous twenty years.  I couldn’t really think of and had never read anything scientifically convincing to indicate that human beings were in-built to do more good than bad.  I do remember searching long and hard to support the notion that humans are basically good.  I suppose in those days I fell on the “nurture” side of the nature vs. nurture debate.  But, I hedged my bet by means of the good old “Deus ex machine” dodge, made in the image of God.  The professor gave the paper a decent grade.  I kept it for years, ran across it every so often, and have continued to ponder the question.

Currently my view of the ego is not so much the conception that there is a mini-me directing the walking, talking robot me.  Rather I see the ego more as a really great butler.  That is, in my subconscious and conscious mind there are a lot of habitual response patterns, patterns which filter through the input of the event of the moment, filter out the seemingly irrelevant details, and pick out the best guess response.  So in a way that “ego” is like the butler who looks at the day’s agenda and lays out the best attire for the occasion.

Professor Zimbardo talks about the steps of a mental process he calls “moral disengagement” to describe how normal persons manage to put on the mental clothing of a bully or an executioner.  “First, we can redefine our harmful behavior as honorable.  Creating moral justification for the action, by adopting moral imperatives that sanctify violence, does this.” (page 310)  “Second, we can minimize our sense of a direct link between our actions and its harmful outcomes by diffusing or displacing personal responsibility.  We spare ourselves self-condemnation if we do not perceive ourselves as the agents of crimes against humanity.”  “Third, we can change the way we think about the actual harm done by our actions.  We can ignore, distort, minimize, or disbelieve any negative consequences of our conduct.”  Finally, we can reconstruct our perception of victims as deserving their punishment, by blaming them for the consequences, and of fcourse, by dehumanizing them, perceiving them to be beneath the righteous concerns we reserve for fellow human beings.” (page 311)

In essence, Professor Zimbardo is saying that we can find ways to rationalize our behaviors so that we can commit horrendous acts against other people but still go home to our families and sleep well at night.

The devil is in the details – the ones that one habitually filters out when coming to grips with a situation.

Yet one of the great lessons in meditation – whether it is mindfulness meditation or absorptive meditation – is the moment that one becomes aware.  As often happens, the mind can become caught up in, oh, let’s admit it, can become hijacked by a train of thought.  But, at some moment one becomes aware of that hijacking.  One becomes aware that the subconscious and conscious mind are working together to create a good story.  “Did you hear the one about…?”

Did you hear the one about Al Qaeda in Iraq being the same thing as Al Qaeda?  Did you hear the one about the new military/CIA interrogation manual that excludes torture – in most cases?  Did you hear the one about Alberto Gonzales doing a good job as Attorney General?

At some point one becomes aware that actions and words do not match.  Could be on the larger scale of national politics.  Could be on the scale of one’s personal actions.  At that point of awareness comes the choice to reassess, to look at all the details, and to change one’s response.  Or the choice to continue playing one’s part in the good story.

I think Professor Zimbardo would have questioned my old college term paper and its use of God.  He would have told me to go back, take a harder look at things, and get real.

Draw card.  Check it.  No help here.

Ones I can use; not queens.

Possible new runs?  Nada.

“OK,” I say.  “Any ones?”   

When I was a kid, even an adolescent, I really believed it when the minister said he talked with God every day.  I knew I didn’t hear any words when I talked to It, but ministers were somehow specially spiritual beings in my book of knowledge.  So if the minister said he talked to God, I figured he wouldn’t lie to the whole congregation, surely not on Sunday. 

As a young adult I had decided that two-way conversations with God were something that one could pull off if one became a truly seasoned mystic.  So often when I went into my darkened bedroom to meditate, I was actually putting out a question to God.  Then following the dictum, “Be Still, and know that I am God”, I would listen patiently for It’s voice.   Nothing.  Silence.  Oh, occasionally some half formed thought would float up into my conscious mind.  But, on close examination those thoughts seemed very familiar – mostly variations of values I wanted to believe were true.  So they sounded reassuringly good when they floated up from the vast unknown.  But they also sounded a lot like something I would tell myself anyway.

I was pretty excited when I ran across Neale Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God.  I was envious as well.  God was having Walsh write down really great stuff.  And God dictated a lot of stuff to Walsh.  Enough for three books of the dialogs, one especially for teens – an idea my minister could have profited from – and a few dialog guidebooks.  So it must be true that God helps those who help themselves.  For what it is worth, I really liked Walsh’s God a lot.  I thought He was a pretty reasonable old guy.  He came across to me as someone who had been around a long time, seen just about ever human trick there was to see, and had successfully managed not to become jaded nor cynical about human life.  I think you can see his portrait on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Walsh was a lucky guy.

Not so me.  Over the years I have discovered God does not whisper in my ear.  It will sometimes provide an interesting passage when I randomly open a book with a dilemma in mind.  Of course, finding the connection between the interesting passage and some path forward through my dilemma is pretty much my responsibility.  But I am genuinely grateful when It does enliven and enrich the opportunities presented within my dilemma.

Sometimes I imagine that God and I are playing a two-handed game of high card draw.  It’s an interesting deck of cards – events in synchronous relationship to each other.  What?!!  Well, it’s not the regular deck of cards with an ace of hearts.  This is more like a deck of holographic events.  You look at a card from one angle and you see the event.  You look at it from a different angle and you can feel the emotions, the subconscious values and attitudes.  For example, you take the car into the shop and worry about some rattling noise and how much that is going to cost.  But when you go back to get the car, it was just a loose bolt, easily tightened, and the bill is just for the oil change.

OK, here’s my most recent example.  In January I discovered that almost by chance I had become “mostly retired”.  Now the card that I drew and showed to God was my desire to stay active in life, to make some continuing contribution.  Viewed from one angle it looked kind of noble.  “Share whatever skills and experience I have gained to make a contribution to the community in some capacity.”  Viewed from a different angle the card showed a bit of anxiety and confusion.  “Don’t stay home and become a vegetable.” 

Now, I have been flashing that card in front of God’s eyes for a few months.  Finally God got around to drawing It’s card and showing it to me.  “Go back to China and teach for a semester.”  So I would have to say that God won that round.

Maybe the next time I win the game, I’ll suggest we play Hearts instead.

She selects the puce sheet; writes --

“He didn’t see me.  So close

talking into Tallie’s ear.” --

lights the page.  Smoke curls away.

I often wonder why I write blog entries.  True writing them is interesting to me.  But I am not a writer by profession.  So why a blog?  Not because I haven’t written a blog before.  Not because I haven’t written for a small meditation newsletter.  But I knew the audience in both cases.

In a way it is like journaling.  But why post the entries on a blog?  Who is the audience?

Some years ago I edited a monthly newsletter for the American Meditation Society.  That was a bit like journaling.  Some experience in my life would raise a question, and I found that I learned a lot by exploring the society’s files of lectures by Gururaj Ananda Yogi.  They always yielded a worthwhile insight into the event, the question.  Building a newsletter issue around such a question and insight was helpful to me in learning and understanding my own life experiences. 

And of course, I knew most of the recipients of the newsletter personally.  I knew the audience and could trust that the question of the month would speak to some other of my friends as well as myself.

I still use that technique in writing this blog.  An event in my life leading to a question leading to some research and an insight into some dimensions of the event.  Words to capture the ephemeral ideas and concepts and force it all into a coherent exposition.

Two years ago when Babs and I knew for certain that we would be traveling to China to teach for a year, a lot of my friends and colleagues were interested in following the adventure.  The solution was to set up a blog.  Those truly interested could read it at their pleasure.  It was great fun.  Different from writing and editing a meditation society newsletter.  The China blog was still a form of journaling.  Find an interesting experience, attempt to describe Chinese culture from an American perspective, and post it.  I was fairly certain I knew the readership -- mostly friends and former work colleagues.  However, when I found a trackback to a hair salon in Singapore attached to one blog entry, I realized the blog entries were going out to an audience well beyond the expected audience.  How interesting and fun!

Writing for that blog added another aspect.  I started those entries with a four line, Chinese style poem.  The form is called Jue Ju.  Four lines of five or seven syllables; that is, the poem is either twenty syllables or twenty-eight syllables in length.

“…another important emphasis in Chinese poetic art which may be said to be just the antithesis of word painting. That is the technique of suggesting a mood with delicate touches.  It is to create a mood, not to tell a story. The jue ju or curtailed verse is the most adequate means to that end.”  “According to Chinese standards a jue ju has to carry the mood with grace, not by storm and stress. It sweeps on in a gentle curve that envelops the reader with joy or sorrow. It may come to a sudden stop, there being only so many syllables, but one must then be left with the feeling of something beyond. One is not just overcome with a gust of emotion.” Example: “The monks from the mountain temple sit playing go. // On the board the bamboo shadows stand in bold relief, // While the reflecting leaves prevent others from seeing. // Occasionally is heard the sound of a stone being played.”

This was the first Jue Ju poem from the first China blog entry, one about the trip to Chongqing.  “Unpack yet another pound. // Check windows; click all locks closed. // Fly ahead to tomorrow. // Mantra chants in my stomach.”  Here is the last China poem: “Finger opens my email -- // empty today too of you // save your smile in memory -- // and hovers above delete.” 

Still this begs the question.  Why would you be interested in the structure of jue-ju poems?  Why would you find it interesting to start these blog entries with a poem?  Why would you bother to read the rest of my meditation?  Who are you?

How interesting and fun.

OK.  Time to put a cork on this one and toss it into the cyberocean.

Pen to ink.  Strokes to paper.

Conditions to incantations.

Ritual to canon law.

Flower to seed to flower.

Carl, the Chan Buddhist monk showing us the temple in Chicago’s China Town, asks our tour group, “Are you familiar with Buddhism?  What do you know about it?”  One woman raises her hand and answers, “It’s about when you cut down a tree in the forest, then you pray for the spirit of the tree.  Something like that.”

“Or not.”  Says Carl.

On a related mind trip, I watched the movie Eregon yesterday.  It was somehow refreshing to know in advance what the plot would be.  I hadn’t seen it before, but Joseph Campbell had laid out the plot years ago in his series of lectures and books about mythic heroes.   George Lukas and Peter Jackson have done great jobs converting “hero’s journey” theory to visual imagery.

So here’s the recipe.  You take one naïve boy or girl with unsuspected mental and physical powers.  Add a magic object.  Mix in an overabundance of evil, especially in the form of an all-powerful, beastly creature which could at one time have been human.   Heat the mixture into a threatening situation.  Add in an old wise man/woman – preferably with skills both in swordsmanship and sorcery.   (The wise guy is critical as he/she crystallizes the hero’s or heroine’s powers and adds zest and depth to the recipe!)  Bring to a rolling boil.  Continue boiling until boy or girl congeals into a powerful, accomplished, and shiny hero or heroine.  Pour the mixture through a sieve of climactic struggle – preferably with lots and lots of flying objects and bright colored explosions.  Serving tip: New heroes or heroines look best when served with a mixture of pride and appropriate humility in a loud and triumphal soundtrack.  The evil concoction can be returned to the stewpot, simmered until reduced in toxicity, and served as a zesty sauce during the finale and film credits.  Alternatively, pour the leftover evil concoction into a container and freeze full strength for future sequels.

I know the lady who answered Carl’s question about the nature of Buddhism.  She used to come to my monthly meditation evenings.  Most of the people who came to those evenings had no experience with meditation and consequently had lots of how-to questions.  The lady was always glad to give her expertise.  Meditation gave you powers to direct your mind to its higher level.  Meditation gave you powers to make other people happy and healthy.  Then she would give us all a those-in-the-know,-know-this smile and ask, “Isn’t that so?”

I was never as good at responding to her as Carl was.

Many of the people in our tour group to China Town are devout Christians who know of Buddhism but who know very little about it.  And they asked Carl a lot of really good questions and sometimes tried to put him on the spot with hypothetical questions.  “Can a religion without a god have ethics?”  “If there is no god, why do you have all these statues and flowers and offerings in the temple?”  “You don’t have heaven or hell, so what about reincarnation?”  “What would you say to a sixteen year old girl who was starting to have sex with boys?”

Carl did an incredible job of making simple, direct answers.  No long winded essays like some meditation blog writers I know.  He explained the Chan Buddhist basics: living in this moment, making choices not based on an external authority (God), interacting with others with compassion and selflessness.  The simplicity of mindfulness meditation.

So yesterday as I was watching Eregon and thinking about my neighbor lady who is convinced of spiritual knowledge, I saw a lot of similarity.  And I saw a lot of myself in there as well.  It is seductively soothing to believe that there are spiritual powers that can make us safe or that can at least give us a magic weapon in the day to day battle of life.

Now one of the things I found most convincing about my own guru, Gururaj Ananda Yogi, was that he downplayed things like “spiritual” or psychic powers.  This is what he said during a radio interview.  ANNE KEEFE:  “When you get, Gururaj, beyond the subconscious‑‑the conscious and the subconscious‑‑are there psychic possibilities in that realm?”  GURURAJ:  “There are psychic possibilities, but I discourage them. Any true master -- any true, spiritual master -- would discourage the development of psychic abilities because they inevitably prove to be a block within...to the path to Divinity.  Because you would get so wrapped up.  For example, if you leave your home, your front door to go to the gate in the front to get into your car and you have a lovely garden with flowers and rockeries and lawns. Now, you're not going to get stuck at the flowers and the rockeries and the lawns.  You admire them, but you pass by.  Your goal is to reach the gate.  So, I do not encourage the development of psychic powers.  But what I do encourage very much is how to find yourself.  People make it so difficult for themselves.  And yet there is such a simple formula.  It is so simple to be happy, but so difficult to be simple.” (KMOX/CBS Radio Interview.  "At Your Service with Anne Keefe”. July 13, 1982.)

Carl and Gururaj would differ over the concept of Divinity.  But, I think, they did agree that looking for magic weapons was a waste of time and a fool’s quest.

White knight astride white charger,

Bush saves Iraq from itself.

Gently thumbs knead out my knots.

Shoulders soften. Eyes close. Smile.

Here’s a true story of idiot compassion. 

Several years ago I was a high school counselor.  My school district had a new superintendent.  He was hired to “raise student expectations”.  Raising expectations was hot education jargon in those years; sounded worthwhile and noble; had no clear definition to judge achievement.  In short, the perfect, political slogan.  A year later my building had a new principal.  The following year, the guidance department had a new assistant principal, my boss.  It turned out that raising student expectation meant that virtually all our students should be in the college preparatory track of courses.

I had a senior student that year whose stated post-high school goal was attending college.  He was also in a career program in which he left school early each day to work in a job related to his career interests.  My new boss called me into her office and told me that no college-bound senior should be wasting valuable school time going to work.  I was to call the boy in and have him change his schedule.  I disagreed with her, having had other students in past years who had pursued the same program and who had gone on to college successfully.  My boss informed me that I should never have allowed the student the choice in the first place.  She sent for the student herself and attempted to talk him into a different set of courses.  He refused.  She called his mother and convinced the mother to override her son’s preferred set of courses.  The boy got a new set of courses.  Two months later, the boy’s mother called my boss again and demanded that the boy go back to his original set of courses, including the job program.  I was assigned to contact teachers and re-write his class schedule.  The boy went back to his original schedule.  He applied for college, was accepted, and after graduation went on to college.

I remember that incident because my new boss had a social worker degree.  Yet far from working with empathy and compassion with the student, my boss approached the student with idiot compassion.  That is, her philosophy of working with students was “Here, I’ll fix your life for you.”

I first read the term “idiot compassion” in a book by Chogyam Trungpa.  Here’s his description: “Without intelligence and skillfulness, compassion can degenerate into a bungling sort of charity.  For instance, if we give food to someone who is extremely hungry, he will temporarily recover from his hunger.  But he gets hungry every day.  And if we keep giving food to that person, eventually he will learn that whenever he is hungry he can get food from us.  … Such an approach is, in fact, uncompassionate compassion, or compassion without skillful means.  It is known as idiot compassion.”  Trungpa, Chogyam.  The Heart of the Buddha.  Shambhala Press.  1991.  Page 17.

Here is what Trungpa says about real compassion: “Unlike idiot compassion, real compassion is not based on a simple-minded avoidance of pain.  Real compassion is uncompromising in its allegiance to basic sanity.” (Page 126)  “The state of being awake has two main qualities: the first … is softness, gentleness, which we call ‘compassion’; the other … is called ‘skillful means’.  The compassion aspect is connected with oneself, and the skillful means aspect is connected with how to deal with others.  Compassion and skillful means put together is what is known as egolessness.” (Page 211)

A really good friend told me of an experience she had had.  She was at a conference and had gone to the washroom.  She heard the washroom door open, someone come in, and then the sound of soft crying.  My friend came out of her stall.  With no particular thought in mind, she simply opened her arms and gave the young woman a hug.  My friend told me she just knew it was what she could do.  Words wouldn’t have helped.   There was a sense of being the right person at the right place at the right time. 

I have always treasured that story as a wonderful example of real compassion.

OK.  At this point I have to confess that I have added a new twist to the definition of idiot compassion.  Below you will see a photo of our granddaughter, whom I refer to as the Princess of Mellow Drama.  I am a passionate fool for that girl.

Who wouldn’t be?

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…

I should be quiet as well.

Trigger finger pulled past pause.

Freeze frame of happy face.

Breeze.  Bamboos. Rustle of leaves.

Here’s the beauty of writing a blog.  I get to comment on my own thinking.  To second guess myself, as it were.  To unsimplify the over-simplification.  So this morning I’m commenting on my last blog entry. 

I found it an over simplification and rather preachy.  A near miss – kinda like Dick Cheney shooting at quail. 

Oh, I still find the basic premises accurate.  Fixation on a desired outcome does produce a rigidity in one’s thinking and actions.  And, people free of such rigid expectations are better able to respond confidently (read: effectively) to life’s experiences and events and better able to take action.

But where is the real messiness of life in that formulation?  I mean, life is not really like a large lobby in a public building with people voluntarily walking around with their eyes closed.  Most people use all of the senses they have available to get where they want to go. 

So take a different example.  Dick Cheney and friends out hunting quail.  One friend falls back to search for a quail he has shot.  He chooses to come back up to the group from behind.  Why?  I would guess he figured that no hunter would shoot backwards and that he was, therefore, safe to approach unannounced from behind.  Now the quail takes flight.  (What creature wouldn’t, seeing Dick Cheney sighting them down the barrel of a loaded weapon?)  Unfortunately, the bird flies around and behind Mr. Cheney.  He does what hunters do when fixed on the kill.  He tracks the bird, swivels, and fires before the bird gets out of range.  The rest of the story is legend. 

The point here is not Dick Cheney, who I feel sure was genuinely shocked by the terrible outcome of a hunting decision.  The point is that life situations are inherently messy when it comes to decision making.  So even if one knows that one may be biased toward a rigid response and a habitual decision, even if one tells oneself to be more open to the particulars of this immediate situation, one can still respond/decide in a way that produces a dreadful outcome.

I think that if some guru were charging me $1000 for his/her sage teaching, I would want more than just platitudes about rigid and habitual responses or about freedom from rigidly held expectations being a better frame of mind in which to make effective decisions.  Knowing that sort of truism is one thing.  Responding more effectively in the heat of the moment – say like while you are absorbed in flushing a quail into the air and swiveling to take a shot before the bird is gone that you recognize a friend has quietly slipped up behind you and is now in your line of fire – now that is a totally different thing.  Theory and real time experience.  Theory is clean and simplified, a pattern deduced out of multiple raw experiences.  Action in the moment is messy because no two situations are exactly alike.

I’m thinking that one of the things that makes action heroes in the movies so popular is the speed and accuracy of their decisions and responses.  I’ll take Obi Wan Kenobi as an example.  He really looks great on the screen.  On the other hand, how speedy and confidently accurate is his response to the dilemma he encounters?  Hmm, let’s see.  The script writer takes quite a while to develop the script for the action scene, and that is turned into story boards, reviewed, and rewritten.  The actor spends weeks and months training to learn the martial arts movements and to memorize the specific choreography needed for the scene.  The director and cast spend lots of time getting the scene right during the filming.  The director and editor cut and paste to get the final one minute of action plus another year to sequence all the segments into a finished movie.  On second thought, a movie hero isn’t all that quick even though he seems to be.

Let’s circle back to the original reason for writing this messy, Monday morning quarterback blog entry.  Because we are in a quandary between clean, overly simplified theories about confidence and decision making and the experience that real life situations produce decisions which are rushed and messy and which can sometimes result in really unpleasant outcomes.

Perhaps a way out of that quandary is to reconceptualize it.  What if we were to say that theory can be seen as a preferred set of response guidelines?  What if we said that real time experiences, no matter how rapidly they unfold, can be seen as a set of opportunities from which one chooses a response that one believes will result in a desired outcome?  Well, if we do look at it in this framework, then perhaps theory and experience are not so far apart.  They are related as a constant dialog.  Preferred response guidelines of action/response are mitigated by the particulars of the real time event, and decision of response to the particulars of the real time event is mitigated by preferred guidelines.

One way in practical terms that we actually experience this dialog between preferred guidelines and real time events is in “practice.”  Indulge me in re-phrasing an old adage: Practice makes for more effective decisions.  (Leave it to the movies for practice to make perfect.)  Life gives each of us a lot of chances to dialog with ourselves during decision making situations.  We get to assess the particulars of this real time event.  We get to compare response options both with the particulars of the event and with our deduced set of preferred response guidelines.  We get to modify both when we make a decision and see the results.  Take Mr. Cheney’s dilemma.  Guideline: shooting a quail is OK whereas shooting members of the hunting party is not.  Real life particulars:  the quail is not flying away from the hunter as expected.  Possible decisions: Track and shoot before the bird gets out of range.  Or, abort the shot because the bird’s flight path has taken it into territory with more unknowns. 

I’m no expert on Dick Cheney’s life, but I rather imagine that he has spent a lot of time hunting and learning to handle a loaded weapon with care and safety.  Even so one might suggest an addition to the guidelines for people hunting with Dick Cheney.  If you drop back to search for your quail, stay low when re-approaching Cheney from behind and let him know where you are.

Here are some questions this blog entry seems to raise but does not answer:

Is living -- action and reaction – really this complicated?  Isn’t this blog entry making a mountain out of a mole hill?

For time warp buffs: What does it say about George Lukas’ decision making process that he has the Alec Guiness version of Obi Wan voluntarily pass into the Force when fighting Darth Vader in Episode IV whereas years later when making Episode III he has the Ewan MacGregor version fight Anakin Skywalker to the death?

Is there not a terrible lack of taste in using a hunting tragedy as a key example in a week when a mass shooting actually did take place?  (And, I do apologize to anyone offended by this poor taste on my part.)

Is Babs correct when she tells me that this blog entry is overly convoluted and lacking in humor?

What do you think?  Please add your comments.

Tuesday, 20070417

Breeze. Bamboos. Flutter of leaves.

Eyes closed in her serene face.

Sunlight flickers on clasped hands.

I should be quiet as well.

Imagine a large room.  Say the lobby of a large building.  Lots of people going places.  All of them with eyes closed.  Moving with hope and fear in the direction each thinks he or she wants to go.  Some of them hold hands and work their way together trying not to bump into others and hoping not to be jolted by others.

Imagine someone with his or her eyes open in the same lobby.  Able to see the surroundings, the people wending their way, doors and windows, potted plants.  That person could easily help or hinder.  A whisper “A little to the left.”  A gentle clasp of an outstretched hand and a pull in a different direction.  A firm grasp on someone’s shoulders to redirect the whole body.  A kick in the shin for the guy who didn’t pay attention to the gently whispered direction.  A loud shout, “Hey, you Bozos!  Open your eyes, and look where you’re going!!”  Or maybe “Pay me a thousand dollars, and I’ll get you out of here.”

I was fortunate enough to be on a meditation course the last few days.  One of the topics that came up was confidence.  The speaker read some passages from a couple of books and gave examples from his own experience.  We all chimed in as we puzzled through the concepts of confidence, conditional confidence – you know, when you have done something enough times that you are pretty sure, pretty confident that you can get the desired outcome again – and over-confidence.  We gradually clarified that lack of confidence is based in an individual’s hope for a desired outcome and fear that the outcome will not occur.  It’s a spectrum that runs from no confidence – I suppose that would be complete fear that the desired outcome was unobtainable given this or that person’s lack of skill to produce any outcome.  It runs to conditional confidence. And it runs to full confidence.

Suppose, for example, that one gives up the fixation on a desired outcome.  Suppose that one recognizes that life is made up of choices but that the choices are neither right nor wrong.  The choice just leads to an outcome and another choice.  Sure one could choose a course of action that one thinks will lead predictably to a desired outcome.  But, it might not.  And even in the latter instance, so what?  It just means that one makes another choice, a course correction if you will.  And, if the flow of choice-and-outcome never produces the desired outcome, then one finds oneself in an adventure and a great opportunity to learn something new. 

It’s the fixation that leads to hope and fear.  It’s not the act of choosing.  It’s when I tell myself that the desired outcome – not having to eat dog food in my old, old age, for example – must occur that I get trapped in the emotion of hope or fear.  Ironically, it is the emotional stickiness of hope and fear that seem to keep one from the freedom to look at the whole range of opportunities in a given situation.  Fastening quickly on the hoped for outcome, one rushes into planning the series of actions necessary to obtain the outcome.

I think this realization that life is made up of choices and outcomes – not “right” choices and “right” outcomes – is what gives the enlightened, the gurus such a great advantage over the rest.  If one knows that any choice one makes will produce an outcome and the opportunity for another choice, then one can act with full confidence.  So a guru is always a step ahead of the crowd.  They are choosing their steps carefully; he or she has made a choice and is already awaiting an outcome.  One can almost imagine it.  The guru, he or she, can whisper in your ear, “A little to the left, Lovie.”  He or she can gently bump you off your cautious course across the lobby.  He or she can kick you in the shin and shout in your ear, “Open your eyes, Bozo!!”  He or she can tell that you are ripe to pay a thousand dollars for a bit of clear-sighted direction.  He or she knows that you could easily be just as clear sighted.  He or she acts with full confidence.

And that full confidence is so appealing to the rest of us.

Sunday 20070401

Our model describes it.  sigh

OK, extrapolate.  sigh

Wait!  So ego means mask?  sigh

Taste of tangerine on tongue.

Full moon again.  As I was watching it in the night sky, a cloud drifted across it.  I immediately imagined a woman drawing a fan across her face.

So why in a blog named the Plain Field Meditation is there nothing about meditation techniques?  Or, is this really just a series of meditations in the sense of philosophical essays?

Wetting the finger and leafing through the pages of the unabridged Wikipedia.com, we come to the definition of the word meditation: “The English word meditation comes from the Latin meditatio, which originally indicated every type of physical or intellectual exercise, then later evolved into the more specific meaning "contemplation." The use of the word meditation in the western Christian tradition has referred generally to a more active practice of reflection on some particular theme such as "meditation on the sufferings of Christ". Similarly in Western philosophy, one finds, for example, Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, a set of six mental exercises which systematically analyze the nature of reality.”

And then there is my home office altar.  It really means a lot to me.  I am attaching a photo of the altar to this blog.  Keep in mind that I am not a Buddhist – any more than I am a something else.  I put the Buddha statue in because it was given to me last year by a Chinese student as a going away present.  I doubt that Huang Jun knew what my spiritual leanings were/are, but he knew I had visited a lot of temples in China and tried to select something that would have meaning for me.  I treasure it.  The glass paperweight is an heirloom from the collection my father had.  I don’t collect paperweights although you will find a few scattered around my part of the home office.  But this one reminds me of my father.  And, I like the swirl of bubbles up through the center.  I have decided that it represents the known universe.  The plate on which the two objects rest is some sort of a plastic tray that has a reptilian scale pattern on it.  So that could be in honor of the fact I was born in the year of the dragon.  But no, it is actually a piece of the skin of the Worm Ouroboros, the mythical “great snake,” the dragon who eats its own tail and thereby forms a circle, the symbol of oneness and cycles.  I mean, it is my altar, and I get to set the meanings, catalyze the symbology, interpret the mysterious into dogma, and otherwise play with the things I want to remember.

Then a small segment of the moon became visible again before another larger cloud hid her lovely face again and she remained cloud hidden.  So like life.  One experience in full view only to become clouded over by other experiences and to end up only as a lovely memory.

Definition, part 2: "Meditation" in its modern sense, however, more generally refers to what in Christian monasticism is called contemplation. Here, awareness is brought to bear on the reality of the present moment without deliberately encouraging conceptual thought or imagination. A meditative state is the state of mind that someone is in during meditation. It is usually a state of relaxation. In the late nineteenth century, Theosophists adopted the word "meditation" to refer to various spiritual practices drawn from Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions. Thus the English word "meditation" does not exclusively translate any single term or concept, and can be used to translate words such as the Sanskrit dhyana, samadhi and bhavana.

“Meditation is usually defined as one of the following:

·         a state of relaxed concentration on the reality of the present moment

·         a state that is experienced when the mind dissolves and is free of all thoughts

·         "concentration in which the attention has been liberated from restlessness and is focused on God."^[6]

·         focusing the mind on a single object (such as a religious statue, or one's breath, or a mantra)

·         a mental "opening up" to the divine, invoking the guidance of a higher power

·         reasoned analysis of religious teachings (such as impermanence, for Buddhists).”

For my money items 3 and 4 above are really the same thing, God being one of the many objects of concentration.  I make that point because it happens to be the definition of meditation that I favor.  So while I am guilty in this blog of writing essays that smack of “reasoned analysis” – well, I would like to think of them as having some logic – as listed last in the above citation, I really favor meditation as a practice and not meditation as a verbal contemplation.

During the practice of meditation one cycles between focus on a single object and other thoughts.  A key point in that cycle is the moment of awareness that one has lost mental focus.  That’s followed by a moment of choice to continue the train of other thoughts or to refocus on the original object of mental attention.  

So biting the tail of this verbal meditation, let’s refocus on the only real thing in it.  Full Moon this morning.  Some clouds.  Coffee.  Observation.

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.