welcome, stranger

In the 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s there was a British documentary TV series called The Infinite Search, in which the presenter (forget who he was) visited practitioners and authorities of the various major religions of the world. In one of the episodes he visited a Zen monastery in Japan and interviewed the abbot, who could speak English.

At some point the presenter asked the Zen master what spiritual advice he could give to the Western viewers of the show. The Zen master answered, "I think it is important to know thyself."

In the words of my friend Brad, who first described this interview to me, it was a masterful reply. The dictum "know thyself" was of course the famous motto of the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, so with those two words the Zen master bridged East and West in one go. The deceptive simplicity of the advice makes it like a Zen koan in the sense that the more you reflect on it, the more provocative and bottomless it becomes.

According to Buddhist doctrine, of course, there is no self to "know"--but understanding this is far from easy. For from the Buddhist point of view, even though things are not real, neither do they lack reality.

In East and West, we're enjoined to investigate this unreality called our self and get to know it. The biggest obstacle is the complacency of thinking that we already know. Once you admit that you don't know, you open the door to the greatest mystery we can find. To a greater or lesser extent, we're all strangers to ourselves. And how do we treat strangers?

I feel strongly that my work relates to this quest, but I'm darned if I could tell you how.

happiness and unhappiness

What would a "happy" life look like for me?

I'm not sure but I'm probably living it.

All of life is a tension of opposites, is it not? Happiness exists only in contradistinction to its opposite, unhappiness (or misery or sorrow or suffering). Only when the opposites are in fairly close proximity do we feel the intensity of one or the other. If you've had a biopsy for a suspected cancer, you may be waiting for the result with feelings of anxiety, even dread. When it comes back negative, you feel a rush of relief and joy. For a while, life seems rich and wonderful--a gift. But the intensity of contrast wears off as a function of time, and you return to your previous state of tension along the happiness-unhappiness axis.

Writers, like other people, tend to measure success in terms of social rewards such as prestige and earnings. But if an intelligent, objective person looks at those rewards carefully, there is not much to them. I think about, say, Conrad Black, the once-Canadian tycoon now languishing in hoosegow in Florida. Wealthy, prominent, and successful by just about any social yardstick except his own, he sought, Gatsby-like, to attain to some limit or singularity of social success and glamor, to "suck on the pap of wonder" (I think those were Fitzgerald's words) by becoming a British lord and joining the "real" nobility.

It was not to be. Or rather, it was--but then ended, spectacularly and suddenly, generating a contrast-experience in the downward direction.

The psychologist Victor Frankl says that life does not provide the answers; life asks the questions, and we provide the answers. Our lives, our living situations, are, basically, our answer--so far--to the questions put to us by life. Each problem or dilemma in life is another question, and our response is our answer to that question.

Whatever my feelings about toiling in obscurity, this toil and this obscurity are the result of choices I have made--my answers to the questions set by my life. If I don't like that, then I have a new question to answer. But my Buddhist training tells me to have caution. The restless search for a better deal in life is the hallmark of the human realm, and is itself a manifestation of suffering--of living in samsara.

The best definition of samsara that I've come across is "wanting things to be other than they are". Here's something to try: if you find yourself wishing things were other than they are, take a deliberate break from that way of thinking. For a few moments, just accept the way things are and pay attention to your surroundings. Notice then how your mind feels. To the extent that you can do this, you have had a taste of nirvana.

For me, to be in a state of tension between happiness and unhappiness is the way things are. Well, why not?

pointing-out instructions

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is a particular class of teachings called "pointing-out instructions". These are essentially tips given by a realized teacher to his student so that the student may recognize aspects of his experience for what they are. The student may already be having the experience, but doesn't know he's having it. So the teacher points it out to him. The teacher can't give you the experience, he can only point to it in the hope that you'll recognize it.

In a more mundane sense, I think this is basically what writing does, or is supposed to do.

For why, I wondered, in a world with so much sensual richness and variety, do I spend so much of my time scanning my eyes along a track of ink-marks on paper? As sensory inputs go, this is thin gruel. Imagine how quickly you would grow tired of scanning your eyes along the pages of a book written in a language you don't know. It would get very boring, very quickly. You would become acutely conscious of how little stimulation you're receiving, and seek to increase it, most likely by tossing that book aside and doing something else.

But reading in English is something I can do, happily, for hours each day. Indeed, I feel I'm missing out if I don't read in a day.

It's not purely a matter of entertainment. Activities that are "purely" entertainment--such as, say, video games--are things I usually tire of quickly.

No, for me reading is about learning. But it's not simply learning for its own sake. For to sustain a positive interest in learning something, you have to feel that it's relevant to your experience, your life. You need to feel that the new knowledge is, in the widest sense, practical. The knowledge will enrich your experience of life.

When I read nonfiction, like, say, A History of Technology, I'm learning in a straightforward, traditional way. The knowledge is practical for me because I'm writing historical fiction and need to know those things; and also because it enriches my appreciation of the world around me. Instead of looking at, say, a ship in the harbor and simply taking it for granted, my view of it is enriched by having learned a little about the history of ships--about how they evolved ultimately from the dugout canoe, and how for a long time they bore traces of that origin in their design and construction. Instead of merely sweeping my eyes over the ship, en route to looking at something else, I might actually see it, notice it. It becomes a more vibrant detail of my experience. In a certain sense, it has been pointed out to me.

Fiction makes this process (potentially anyway) more intimate and intense. A stream of artistic prose carries your mind along a track of pure noticing. Just as, in a painting, every square millimeter of the canvas had to be worked by the artist, had to be seen and depicted, to create a vibrant work that is purely and everywhere the expression of the artist's vision, so in a work of writing every word is a contribution to a total, unflagging act of attention by the writer, communicated to the reader. Word by word, the writer draws your attention to things: sensations, thoughts, feelings. One by one, point by point, in a meaningful, purposeful structure. The writer is pointing out aspects of your experience to you.

This is what makes a resort to cliches such a sin in writing: it is a failure of attention, shoving something fake into an intimate experience of genuineness.

Yes, I like having valuable things pointed out to me. So I'll keep on with my reading.

musings of a braided stream

I've been staring at the screen here for a few minutes now. What to write about?

One of the books I'm reading right now is The New Larousse Encyclopedia of the Earth. I've finished the chapter on "Running Water" and have started the chapter on "Oceans and Lakes". In his discussion of running water, Bertin describes the different kinds of streams--for there is a great variety of types of river. In Buddhism, the mind is sometimes likened to a river, the stream of which shows many different manifestations, from rushing gorge to placid pool, without changing its essential nature.

Right now I feel that my own mind is like a "braided stream": a river that, having dropped a great deal of sediment on a comparatively flat ground, has broken into multiple intersecting channels, weaving across the landscape. There doesn't seem to be a "mainstream", just lots of parallel channels moving along together. My mind lacks its usual focus; it feels dispersed and unenergetic.

Astrologically this corresponds with a major transit of the planet Neptune, which is running over my natal Venus and square to my natal Mars. Neptune is a boundary-dissolver; it represents the yearning for perfection and bliss, which cannot usually be attained in the limited frame of an individual body and mind. Therefore Neptune symbolizes the desire to merge with something greater, to lose one's burdensome identity, to recover the lost bliss of the womb, before separation was discovered.

The transit of Neptune to Mars is always difficult, since Neptune represents the urge to give up and transcend ego, while Mars represents our selfish side: how we seek to assert our individuality and satisfy our personal wants. A common Neptune theme is sacrifice, giving up something we value without getting any obvious personal benefit in return. Our Mars nature generally finds this idea most unsatisfactory.

To a great extent, life is about giving things up. For one thing, being born means that death inevitably awaits us; we will all have to surrender our lives at some point. But along the way, other things have to be surrendered. Scott Peck talks about this process in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled. What we surrender in the process of maturing are the beliefs and goals of our youth. He provides a list of six or eight typical ones. One is the adolescent belief in omnipotentiality--the idea that I can do or be anything I want. As time goes on, we make decisions and close off avenues. When I was 10 years old, for instance, it may have been possible to aspire to be a professional athlete or a chess champion. Now, even if I wanted those things, I couldn't have them.

Omnipotentiality is not a reality in any case, I don't think. It was probably never an option for me to be either an athlete or a chess champion, not just because of lack of native talent, but even more importantly because of lack of desire. I didn't want those things. Fantasizing about them is like a giraffe fantasizing about being a cheetah. If you're a giraffe, you've got to go with that--there's no choice.

Surrendering such beliefs or fantasies is, I suppose, technically, disillusionment. We use the term in a negative way, usually--but what's so bad about losing your illusions? What do we have against reality? Isn't that just a drug-addict's view of life?

In Buddhism, disillusionment is seen as a good thing. Chogyan Trungpa Rinpoche, in teaching the practice of meditation, never made any promises to his students, except perhaps two: boredom and disappointment. Every student could look forward to those. We generally avoid those experiences like the plague, but Trungpa Rinpoche was enthusiastic about them both. Why? Because they're anti-ego. They're exactly what ego is continually seeking to evade and prevent.

But this is also the message of Neptune. If you identify with your ego and its desires, you're going to suffer anyway. If you can see your ego and its wants as not a big deal, then you suffer much less.

Easier said than done. Like many people, I tend to take my desires and hopes seriously, and feel about surrendering them the way Charlton Heston felt about surrendering his gun: you'll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands...

an elephant and his beliefs

My life these days is largely reading--more than it is writing, that's for sure.

I've always loved reading, and I do more of it now than I ever have before. Our old family friend, the late Dorothy Burt, born in 1908, spent much of every day reading for a large part of her adult life. Her day was broken down into the different things she read: The Observer, The Manchester Guardian, nonfiction book, fiction...

I used to think it was a bit strange to spend all of one's time reading and never doing anything, or at least writing something oneself. I think I still feel that way, although I'm less sure.

In my case, although I enjoy reading, I seldom read purely for "pleasure". For me, all reading is study, and that in fact is why I find it pleasurable. Possibly then it's not really reading I like, but learning, and reading is still the most efficient, accessible, and affordable way to learn. Aristotle said that humans by nature love to learn, and that the appeal of art is exactly that we learn from it.

So I'm learning. But am I really? In one obvious sense I certainly am. I do retain some quantity of what I read (less than I'd like). But the motive that keeps pushing me to read more is a feeling of dissatisfaction: that I have not yet learned what I'm seeking to learn.

What am I seeking? I'm searching for my beliefs. What do I think is true? What are the reasons--the real reasons--behind what I see in the world, in my experience?

According to William James, a belief is by definition a concept that we use as the basis for action. We act on what we believe, and only on what we believe. I reach down to my keyboard right now to press keys because I believe that when I do, the corresponding letters will appear on the monitor before me. (So far, so good.) I'm doing that because I believe that when I press the Publish Post button on the screen, this post will uploaded to my blog and become available for people to read. If I found out that these posts were not being uploaded to the blog, I would quite soon stop writing them. My belief would have changed, and with it my behavior.

I look around me in the world and see, mainly, actions based on erroneous or misguided beliefs. These happen on vast, world-changing scales. If, for example, you believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq, as was stated, in order to root out weapons of mass destruction, then that whole costly invasion and subsequent war was initiated on the basis of an erroneous belief. But even if you believe, as I do, that the invasion was for quite other purposes, such as "future oil security", or even "world domination", these too, in my view, are mistaken, since I am certain that neither one can be achieved in this way. Enormous resources are being consumed and lives lost right now, as I type, all on the basis of mistaken beliefs.

In Buddhism, it is taught that we are all separated from complete great enlightenment by the "two veils": the veil of "conflicting emotions" and the veil of "primitive beliefs about reality". Both of these are very difficult to remove, but the first one, "conflicting emotions", is much easier than the second, "primitive beliefs".

It might seem odd that an Indian monk who lived 2,500 years ago would, if he could look at our modern society with its secular outlook and advanced technology, describe our beliefs as primitive--but he would. He did. Our modernity and technology don't touch the issue of our basic mistakenness about things.

Of course, I'm not going to find Buddhist-style enlightenment in books. But I do want to become informed. Even in this relative and temporal way, I want to find out what the true causal forces are working in the world around me. I don't want to act--I don't feel I can act--until I feel I understand what's going on well enough. That means that instead of going out to achieve things, to crusade in the world, I'm sitting in my soft chair, book and highlighter in hand.

I feel like an elephant. It's said that an elephant will not step onto a bridge that won't hold its weight. An elephant just knows. And yet it's probably not just intuition; the elephant must look at the bridge, examine it, and come to a conclusion on the basis of its observations. It arrives at a belief about the bridge, and acts accordingly. I feel that most actions in the world are like that bridge, and I'm still trying to figure out if it will hold my weight.

getting religion

One of the books from which I'm currently keying notes over my morning coffee is The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Like anything written by William James, it's a treasure-chest of deep insights into human behavior and motivation, expressed with a confident pithiness, as though he were simply stating something obvious and known to all.

This morning I was typing from the lectures on "Conversion", in which he discusses the changes that come over one when one "gets religion", as they used to say. It's fantastic material--the more so since I have personal experience of the phenomenon.

The most famous instances of conversion are sudden--like Paul's experience on the road to Damascus, when he turned from Christian persecutor to Christian evangelist--but, as James observes, conversion happens with equal power and effect over time, as a slow phenomenon. The difference, he thinks, is a matter of how much of the processing occurs in the unconscious as opposed to in conscious awareness.

My own conversion was of the slow type. (I don't do anything fast! Well, except maybe type...) I've written before about how the door opened for me in Italy in February 1979, while I was reading The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. In Buddhist terms, I had an experience of the dharma or truth: reading the book woke me up and opened my mind to the present moment.

It was like eating that first potato chip: I had a hunger for more. When I returned home from all my travels that year I began my search for a spiritual path. This search would have many vicissitudes and, so I thought, blind alleys. The turning-point was in December 1986.

By then I knew clearly that I wanted to take up Buddhist meditation. This had been my inspiration when I'd read The Way of Zen, but I had had some second thoughts and reversals along the way, mainly because I thought that in order to pursue the kind of Buddhism I was interested in--Zen Buddhism--I would have to go to Japan in order to do it in a wholehearted way, and, looking at myself honestly, I wasn't prepared to do that. This realization had made me feel like somewhat of a spiritual failure: too fainthearted to pursue the path of his own salvation. What a chump!

But by late 1986 I realized that I wanted to take up meditation, no matter how second-rate or inauthentic: it would be better than just doing nothing.

My search had finally turned up the Vancouver Dharmadhatu (as it was known then--now the Vancouver Shambhala Centre) at Heather and 17th, in the lovely tree-lined district around Douglas Park. I attended their Monday night open house to listen to a public talk, and, returning to the center the following week, I took up their offer to receive meditation instruction before that night's talk.

The meditation instructor on duty that night was Dr. Ron Greenberg, tall, blond, lean, softspoken. In the little carpeted office of the center he taught me the simple technique of shamatha meditation as practiced in that tradition, then asked me if I had any questions.

"Yes," I said. "This is a Tibetan meditation center--but there aren't any Tibetans here. It's all run by local, white-bread people. All the teaching, all the meditation instruction."

Ron nodded.

"Well," I said, "how can I be sure that this is authentic? That I'm getting the real thing?"

"That's for you to decide," said Ron.

His response, soft and matter-of-fact, hit me like an electric shock, it was so unexpected. For me to decide? And yet right away I knew he'd spoken the truth. The authenticity of anything cannot come from somewhere else, is not carried in certificates or assurances. If he'd tried to persuade me of his authenticity, I would have been left in doubt. By putting the responsibility on me, he gained my complete confidence. At that moment I knew that Dharmadhatu was the place for me. I was converted.

Since then there have been many twists and turns. But I did more or less enter the "state of assurance", as James chooses to name the experience:

The characteristics can be easily enumerated.

The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same. A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing center of this state of mind.

The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become lucid; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words.

A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo. An appearance of newness beautifies every object.

James goes on to say that when conversion happens, one pretty much retains the outlook thus attained, even if one does eventually backslide.

I am a backslider. I have departed from the close practice and study of the dharma that I followed for 15 years. In a sense I'm a lost sheep, I suppose. But in another sense this is simply the next leg of my own individual path. I am far from repudiating the training and teachings that I have received; on the contrary, that remains my spiritual education--and we should all have a spiritual education. There are not words to express my appreciation for its excellence.

And I'm certainly paying a price for backsliding: conflicts, doubts, and worries encroach on my mind like ivy overtaking a shed. But at the same time, I feel a deep sense that these things are not fundamental concerns--I don't feel "alone" with them as I once did. This is the lingering effect of my "conversion"--one for which I will always be grateful.

study as path

More reading, more keying-in of notes from my source books. Where is it all going? I don't know.

On the one hand, my Buddhist training tells me that book-learning is not and can never be a path to true knowledge--to ultimate truth. The truth--especially truth in the sense of a solution to the "puzzle" of life--can be realized only directly and nonconceptually. It is an experience, not something that can be put into a sentence.

I remember clearly when this teaching broke through into my mind. Perhaps paradoxically, it was via reading a book: The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. It was February 1978 and I was traveling through Europe with my friend Tim. Running low on funds, we had decided in Rome to turn around and head home. As we drove north out of the city, Tim was at the wheel of our 1970 Westfalia and I was sitting at the table, reading. And as I read, in the dim twilight of that overcast day, about how Buddhists discover reality by direct experience--through meditation--rather than learning about reality through words, I felt a deep sense of recognition and excitement. I wanted to have that experience!

For a time, maybe an hour or two, I felt a tremendous sense of elation and connection with my immediate experience. I really saw the interior of the van, the smudges on its windows; I smelled the cocktail of scents of its damp, food-containing interior. My senses were open, rich, alive: I was experiencing the world as directly as I had ever done, and it was a delicious thing.

But it quickly passed, and I was distressed to find my mind sinking into its ordinary worries, distractions, and even peevishness. I felt sickened by the plunge from such an exalted state of mind to such a grouchy, unpleasant one. If only I could stay in that more uplifted state! Why couldn't I?

That experience, fleeting though it was, was a key one in leading me to take up of Buddhist meditation myself in late 1986. I learned that the enlightenment of the Buddha would take sustained effort for an unknown time, probably many lifetimes. I also learned that enlightenment will never be realized in the future--it can only ever be realized in the present, the only moment we can actually experience. So, like all Buddhists, I trained in paying attention to the present moment. Even if you don't have the enlightenment of the Buddha, this is a wonderful way to live life--indeed the only way to truly live life, to actually be present for your life while it's happening.

I also learned that for all the talk about how enlightenment is nonconceptual, the Buddhists have a vast literature and students are urged to study it all the time. Indeed, it is held that to attain enlightenment through meditation alone--that is, without any accompanying study--is vastly more difficult and time-consuming than to follow a path of both practice and study, sometimes known as "walking with both feet."

Study is closely connected with the deeper meditation experience known as vipashyana, or clear seeing. The basic idea is that it's easier to see things when you know what you're looking for. Through study you learn theory, such as, say, the nature of the mind. Then, through practice, you put that theory to the test. You look to see whether the mind is as you've learned. Or, maybe more accurately, you glimpse directly the way your mind is, and recognize it as being what you've studied.

For a time I felt neurotic and anxious about how "conceptual" I was, and felt bad about my thirst for study. Eventually though that went away. Concepts--thoughts--in Buddhism are often likened to clouds in the clear blue sky of the mind. For the beginning meditator, the mind seems completely overcast, and the notion of clear blue beyond is mere hearsay. One nervously and anxiously looks for signs of clear blue.

It seems that the only real antidote to that nervousness and anxiety, which are themselves "overcasting" the sky, is to become thoroughly bored with the meditation practice. When you're bored enough, you start getting a "who cares?" attitude, and somewhere in there you notice the distinction between thoughts and the space they're floating in: the blue sky. You can start to relax about thoughts, since, as clouds, they're insubstantial, transitory, and basically nonthreatening. It's not particularly important whether they're there or not. Indeed, as the painter John Constable found, clouds are what make the sky so interesting and exciting.

So I continue to study. I know I won't become enlightened through study, but I will find new ideas, and new ways of connecting them, and therefore will find new things to look for in my own experience.

Interesting. I entered the path of Buddhism in the hope of finding nonconceptual reality, and have emerged from my training with a heightened ability and appreciation for study--for concepts.

happiness: how to

If we were to ask, "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is for most men the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. Even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the interest revolves.

Thus (compressed) opens lecture 4 of William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, entitled "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness", delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901.

James goes on to examine the spiritual strategy of seeing the world and everything in it as good. In some cases this positive, optimistic outlook is inborn in an individual; in others it is acquired as a worldview, as part of a system. Based on a conviction that creation must be good, one simply sees it that way. You look for the good, and wherever you look, you find it. When presented with suffering or evil, you quite possibly don't even see them. If you do see them, you refuse to acknowledge them as in any way negating or vitiating the basic good of creation; rather, they contribute to the greater perfection of the world.

As James points out, there is much to be said for this outlook. To name just one tangible benefit, many people have been cured of serious physical ailments simply by changing their attitude and refusing to succumb or even to acknowledge illness. Miraculous cures happen, but they happen only to the "healthy-minded". Modern experiments have shown that having a positive, optimistic attitude magnetizes good fortune: good luck comes to such people. They even find money lying on the ground that is missed by pessimistic people (I kid you not--read The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman). And, all things considered, what does negative thinking really have going for it anyway?

Still, although James is impressed with the achievements of the "religion of healthy-mindedness", he feels that these people have not really engaged with life as fully as those who find religious faith from a condition of having a "sick soul"--those who experience great suffering and evil. These, to him, are the spiritually "twice-born", whose faith is deeper because it is not in any way blinkered with regard to the dark side of life.

Happiness is a central concern of Buddhism. The behavior of all sentient beings, without exception, is seen as a ceaseless, restless, and futile striving for happiness. As a practitioner, you learn that your thirst for happiness is itself the cause of your suffering. This condition is given the technical name samsara, the best definition of which is: "wanting things to be other than they are."

One of the boldest statements about happiness that I've found is in The Practice of Tranquillity and Insight, a text on Buddhist meditation by Thrangu Rinpoche, abbot of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton. In fact, I read this while I was a monk at the Abbey. I was jolted when I read on page 6:

The attaining of day-to-day happiness is...the result of shamatha and vipashyana.

Shamatha and vipashyana are technical meditation terms: Sanskrit for "tranquility" and "insight". Tranquility is what most of us associate with meditation. The mind becomes calm and relaxed. In that state it becomes capable of insight, also known as "clear seeing": seeing things as they are. True clear seeing, true insight, is possible only with tranquility. You can have tranquility without insight, but you can't have insight without tranquility.

So there you have it. According to Thrangu Rinpoche, happiness is indeed attainable, and requires very little in the way of wealth or props. It really comes down to whether you believe him. Considering the radiant, genuine smile that seems to be his normal facial expression, I see no reason to doubt it.

what babies say

Vacation mode. Vacation means departure from workaday routine. For the likes of me, that means that my usual activities require an extra push of intention in order to get done. That applies as much to things like brushing my teeth as it does to writing posts for this blog.

So: a push of intention this morning. I wanted from the beginning to offer a window into the life and mind of a writer--this writer anyway--and that window stays open only so long as I actually come down here and write. I want to do it; I just need to remind myself.

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading What Babies Say Before They Can Talk by Paul Holinger. (I feel a sense of accomplishment and pleasure whenever I finish reading a book. My coffee-table is like an airport: books still in progress are like aircraft circling, awaiting a landing. Every time I actually finish one I feel like I've brought in another load of passengers safely.) It's a good book, and I found it stimulating and provocative for several reasons.

Holinger has aimed his book at the parents of young children. He has drawn on recent studies of how newborns express emotions (apparently we are all born "hardwired" to express nine distinct emotional "signals": enjoyment, interest, surprise, distress, fear, anger, shame, disgust, and "dissmell"--the reaction to a bad smell) to suggest ways to help one's children grow up in good mental health.

I bought the book as part of my ongoing philosophical investigation into the phenomenon of identity. Inspired partly by the ideas of William James, I'm looking into the idea that our personal identity, our inward sense of integrity and unitary being, consists, essentially, of a set of thoughts. By thoughts I mean what James would call conceptions--mental images that are stable and recognizably the same at different points in time. It seems logical that the basic conceptions, if they show up enough in the mind, are what we give the labels called words.

In James's view, some of these discrete, stable conceptions have a certain quality of "warmth" or "intimacy" that marks them out as belonging to ourself: we recognize them as being part of me. He likens such thoughts to cattle that have been branded, so that, in a stream of cattle passing through a gate, their owner can immediately recognize them as his, even when mixed with other cattle. (Interestingly, the word character originates from just this same process of branding or stamping something with a permanent distinctive mark.)

In mathematical terms, such branded cattle form a set: a collection of discrete members drawn together by a rule of inclusion. I'm calling this set Me: the set of conceptions that I regard as "branded", as belonging to myself. The name "Paul" belongs to Me; the term "English-speaker" belongs to Me--and so on, millions of such conceptions. The entire set of these represents Me: the collection of thoughts that I regard as true statements about myself. The totality of Me is what I consciously regard myself as being.

All right. Thinking along these lines got me interested in learning how babies acquire and express language. How and when do they start speaking? What words do they use first, and why? Could I find traces of how a newborn starts to form a Me set?

I was drawn to Holinger's book because it deals specifically with the communication of babies before they can talk: and so it might hold clues as to how babies think and acquire language.

And it does hold those clues. A baby, when born, is a completely dependent person whose survival depends largely on its ability to communicate its needs, in the hope of having these met by someone. According to the researchers on whom Holinger draws, these needs are expressed in exactly nine discrete ways. These basic, inborn expressions of affect become refined and combined into the full suite of adult emotions. In this view,the basic affects anger and "dissmell" combine to become contempt, for example.

Holinger stresses the importance of helping children learn how to verbalize what they're feeling. In this way they--we--learn to talk about feelings instead of simply acting on them. We develop self-awareness and "tension-regulation". We become able to say "I'm angry" instead of punching someone in the head.

In my terms, this means recognizing feelings as recurring, nameable things, and giving them labels--words. The feelings themselves are not conceptions. Only the thoughts that recognize and label them are. In my view, an unnamed feeling can't be part of Me. But a distilled conception that recognizes a feeling, like "I'm angry", can be. The thought "I'm angry" is not itself an emotion; it's a dispassionate thought that includes anger temporarily in the Me set. If it happens enough, a further thought might arise: "I'm an angry person". That would be an effort to include the feeling of anger permanently in one's own identity--to brand the feeling as belonging to Me. One then identifies with anger.

These are just a few thoughts. There is a great deal more here to think about. For one thing, my Buddhist training had much to say about emotions vs. conceptions, and their natures. One way of looking at emotion is as a raw energy that in itself has no particular flavor or color; it is just dynamic and powerful, or perhaps simply naked dynamism and power. This is one way of looking at the view of Vajrayana Buddhism. When the energy is colored, we experience it as a specific emotion, such as anger or desire. It takes on qualities and attracts concepts that support it and "explain" it and so on. From this point of view, our inward "talking" about our "feeling" can actually distance us from its intrinsic power and purity.

As often happens, I've said more than I expected here, without really going where I thought I wanted to go. So be it! The writer shoots from the hip here, and the bullets go where they go.

enjoy your life

Here I was puttering through my morning, puzzling a little over how there seemed not much to do. Then I remembered my blog. Oh yeah--I'm supposed to do a blog-post!

I'm in semi-vacation mode (the mode I go into when Kimmie is in actual vacation mode). No alarm-clock, no fixed requirements on my day. To be sure, I'm lying awake in the night for long stretches, more than I usually do during regular "working" times. I put that down to particular circumstances in my life at the moment rather than anything to do specifically with being on "vacation". Jesus counseled us to be carefree--as have other spiritual teachers. At Gampo Abbey a quote from Suzuki Roshi was photocopied and hung on various walls to pop into one's view unexpectedly as one went about the day: "Enjoy your life."

Enjoy your life. Good idea--why not? For us monks and nuns, leading a disciplined, vegetarian, sex- and drug-free lifestyle, it was wonderful advice, and very accessible. Speaking for myself, I would have to say that my time at the Abbey was perhaps the most enjoyable of my life--in many ways. Certainly there were times when I experienced a greater depth of joy there than I have anywhere else.

Suzuki Roshi was pointing, I think, to the idea that enjoyment of one's life is more a matter of choice or attitude than of circumstance. Whatever's happening, why not enjoy it? What's the alternative? And why would you prefer that alternative? You can feel hard done by, ripped off, and cheated--and maybe in some sense you have been cheated. Well--what of it?

I think about Epictetus, the philosopher-slave of the 2nd century AD. How we respond to any situation is up to us: a tyrant can send me into exile, but he can't force me to be uncheerful about it.

Life might be a horror--but don't people pay to see horror movies? Our love of story proves that we recognize deep down that life is in some sense a problem--an unending series of problems. And yet I feel ripped off when I face problems in my own life, as though they shouldn't be there.

But do they have to be so hard?

Years ago on Saturday Night Live there was a sketch done in the form of a late-night movie, some low-budget Italian show about Hercules that had been dubbed poorly into English. A pot-bellied, cigarette-smoking, middle-aged Hercules was going about his labors. One of his labors was to lift a boulder. He strains at it briefly, then says, "That rock is too heavy. Perhaps I can lift a lighter one."

Yes, maybe I can lift a lighter rock. But somehow, this seems to be the one I've actually got in front of me.

not easy--not supposed to be

Over the weekend my mother sent me a quote she found in a book she had just bought:

If I were to describe to you my situation during the past three months, you would hardly be able to believe it; it's totally impossible for things to go on this way. My wife can't take any more; I can't take any more - things have gone so far that novels and short stories mean nothing to me measured against a single tear shed by my wife: that's how things are.... Up to now, I've been unable to work freelance, nor do I earn enough to buy shoes for my children. I've simply undertaken something impossible, and I have to confess that I've reached a dead end.

Thus Heinrich Boll in 1950, 22 years before he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

I found his expression of despair heartening. It was a salutary reminder that writing is hard even for those who are the very best at it. And it's not only that the practice of writing itself is hard: being a writer is hard. It's hard on one's psyche and one's family.

I think back to one of my consultations with my meditation instructor, Geoff. I was plodding through the first leg of a practice called ngondro (Tibetan for "preliminary practices" or "foundation practices"). The first leg involves performing 100,000 full prostrations, with accompanying visualizations and repetition of certain words. One is not supposed to linger on the practice, but rather to power through it as much as one can (not in one session, of course! most people take at least months, more usually years, to complete these). I was in one of my periods of uncertainty, even dejection, about the practice. I faced Geoff alone in the small shrine-room, where we sat cross-legged on meditation cushions.

"It's not easy," I said, by way of trying to sum up the situation with an understatement.

"It's not supposed to be easy," he said.

In a way he was merely stating the obvious. But his words flipped my mind in a new direction. I was carrying the expectation that things should be easy. That if I were doing it right, I would not find the practice so hard. The unreasonable demands of the practice provoked feelings of anger and resentment, along with self-doubt, tedium, and even despair. It was supposed to do these things--and that somehow made it seem even worse: like a torturer deliberately inflicting suffering on you. But the difficulty kept on seducing my mind into dwelling on notions of success and failure, and this preoccupation was itself the source of much of my suffering. Ngondro is a kind of spiritual purgative that forces you to spew out your neuroses and emotional baggage, and then pushes your face into the revolting mess--your revolting mess.

Geoff was challenging me: Why do you expect things to be easy?

It's a good question. When things are easy, you can coast on autopilot, and success is almost assured. You can stay more blissed out, in the pleasure-zone. When things are hard, your attention is forced onto the matter at hand. You have to deal with it--think. And failure looms over your shoulder, watching your every move.

Failure. It's a painful affront to one's self-esteem. And yet even some of the world's great seeming successes have been failures when viewed from certain angles. Great works of art are often regarded as failures by their creators, who envisioned something more.

The easy way is not the heroic way. As Joseph Campbell points out, when the hero accepts his adventure (and often he tries to shirk it), his mettle will be tested to the utmost. And there are heroes--or would-be heroes--who fail. Their stories stand as cautionary tales, as warnings to those who hope to do less than their best and get away with it.

I did not finish my prostrations until 2002, when I was at Gampo Abbey, eight years after starting them. It was a long journey--and not easy.

terra incognita

Yesterday was Canada's Thanksgiving holiday. Here in Vancouver it was sunny and clear. And for the first half of the day I found myself uncharacteristically depressed.

I know that depression is normal, but for me it is unusual. As I used to say to depressed friends: I tend toward anxiety rather than depression--mental agitation rather than painful mental inertia. Yesterday it struck me that depression is lethal to an artist, or to any freelance. Self-motivation seems to be one of the first things that the psychic defoliant called depression takes out.

Kimmie suffered from depression in the 1990s. She was treated for it for some time before the doctor twigged that Kimmie was entering (very early) menopause, and saw the depression as a symptom of a larger process. One of the things the doctor recommended was reading the book Darkness Visible by the novelist William Styron, who had suffered through severe clinical depression. I read parts of the book myself. It was chilling, and I admit that I have always found depression to be a scary disorder.

Another thing that the doctor gave Kimmie was a depression self-test questionnaire. One day Warren and I both did the questionnaire, and discovered that, whatever our other problems, we were both normal in that respect, or at worst only mildly depressed.

Antidepressant medication is a major industry, and Kimmie was on these for awhile and received clear and obvious relief from them. Nonetheless, I do not feel that depression is "caused" by brain chemistry, or is a disease in its own right, any more than fever is a disease in its own right. Fever (elevated temperature) can also be controlled by medication, but that is not the same thing as treating the underlying disease. If a persistent fever has an unknown cause, it is irresponsible simply to keep throwing Tylenol at it. This is essentially what I tried to do in 1990 when I got a cold or flu with accompanying fever, and kept taking Tylenol for the fever. It barely worked, which eventually led me to visit the doctor, who determined that I had pneumonia. No amount of Tylenol would have helped me.

My own feeling is that depression, as a mental state of low initiative combined with sad, pessimistic feelings, is a symptom. This is clear enough in cases of normal depression, as when some calamity occurs, like the death of a loved one. You become depressed, and you know why you're depressed. In time you work through the grief and start to function more normally again.

So-called clinical depression--depression that has no obvious outward cause--I believe is also triggered by underlying mental facts, but these are out of sight. The "event" is in the unconscious, and is probably shielded from consciousness just because it is so painful and unpleasant. In some unknown way, one is somehow maladapted to one's situation, or ignorant of an important truth about oneself. The maladaptation has become a crisis, a kind of mental tumor, drawing resources to itself and draining your conscious budget of energy.

As I recall from Styron's book, clinical depression is often suffered by those who have undergone trauma as children, and who have alcoholic tendencies. To me it seems clear that these traumas will have lasting effects that most likely will continue on, influencing our lives in countless ways. Maybe it's sort of like breaking a bone and never having it set properly. It knits together in some random way, leaving one partly lame.

And, as I mentioned recently, Daniel Goleman's book Vital Lies, Simple Truths explains how the psychology of self-deception is not merely an isolated clinical event, but a pervasive fact of conscious mental life. He shows how to be conscious means to be continuously self-deceived to some extent. The task of consciousness, of adaptation, of maturity, is to become ever less self-deceived. Consciousness is intrinsically a highly censored experience for all of us. In this state, it seems obvious that inward events could color our conscious experience without our being aware of what they are. Indeed, as Goleman shows, we're generally aware of precious little.

Probably the greatest doctor of the mind is still the Buddha, who provided both diagnosis and treatment for the ills of the human condition in his Four Noble Truths. He fingers the problem in the Second Noble Truth, the Truth of the Origin of Suffering: ego-fixation. When we come to the realization that "I am suffering", we habitually try to get rid of the suffering--but that doesn't work. He said that the part that needs to go is not the "suffering", it is the "I am". If we can do that, the suffering disappears at the same moment. But where does ego-fixation come from?

The root-cause is ignorance. According to the Buddha, all of our suffering arises from the state of our knowledge, specifically our self-knowledge. The Buddha would have agreed wholeheartedly with the directive inscribed at the entrance of the oracle of Delphi: "Know thyself." If you can truly achieve that, you can escape suffering. You can also become a truly useful and effective human being. Indeed, if you go all the way with it, you become a buddha.

Yesterday afternoon, when my depression had lifted and I was doing my reading, one of the books I read was What Babies Say Before They Can Talk by Paul Holinger. To help with a baby's healthy development, one of a parent's tasks is to act promptly to relieve the child's distress. Often, though, figuring out the source of the distress is hard. A baby can move from distress to rage, and you don't know why. One mother eventually discovered, by accident, that her daughter's socks were too tight. (I recall now that this was also one of the theories for why the Grinch in Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas was so mean-spirited: his shoes were too tight...) It's the same with our own minds, our own lives. Figuring out the source of distress can be hard. We're terra incognita even to ourselves.

As for yesterday's depression, it was a briefly chilling experience. I feel lucky not to have that millstone hanging around my neck more often.

not afraid

In yesterday's post I talked about Who Are We?, a nonfiction book project that I work on as a kind of hobby apart from the fictional opus that is the (supposed) subject of this blog.

But I have other projects on the go as well. They might not actually be developed enough to be termed projects, but I have them on the go in any case. Within the folder labeled Writing on my PC, for example, one of the subfolders is labeled Thinking. In this folder I have set up a number of Word documents, each devoted to a topic area--things that I like to think about, at least sometimes. One of these is Identity, of course, but there are others, things like Evil, History, Purpose, and Story.

What do I think about these things? What do I believe?

Here I record my thoughts, mainly sparked by material that I read. In a sense these files are my way of entering into dialogue with the authors I read.

Where are all these files going? I don't know. They represent what William James called "thought in movement"--the thinking process of the mind seeking the stillness of "thought at rest", the condition of knowledge or belief that can serve as the basis of action. (I've talked about this in previous posts, such as this one.)

I think one function of religion is to put an end to such questing. Rather than being suspended in uncertainty, unknowing and therefore unable to take action, we click into a belief system that seems to work for us. A revealed, worked-out religion provides a backstop of belief: answers to the basic, most searching questions.

If it's a religion that we are not raised in, then it can't be just anything, of course: a chosen religion has to suit our outlook, has to be "believable". In my late teens and 20s I searched hard for this believable faith, and eventually found it in Buddhism--more particularly in the Vajrayana Buddhism that I discovered (or was led to) in my quest.

I would not say that I've left that faith altogether behind. But my relationship with it has changed. There are a number of reasons for this, or factors in my decision to distance myself from the practice of those teachings. An important one, as I've expressed before, is the realization that I felt I could not be fully free as an artist so long as I held a received faith as my truth--my final "belief". I can hear my Buddhist companions expressing dismay that I could make such an elementary mistake: to regard Buddhism as a "faith". As one Western teacher of Buddhism put it: "I became a Buddhist because here no one ever asked me to believe anything."

That's true--but only up to a point. It's certainly true that our training was never to accept anything merely on someone's say-so, not even that of our teacher or the Buddha, but to test the words against our own experience. In this way, Buddhist practitioners become realized people--people whose knowledge of the teachings may be slight, but is nonetheless genuine and practical. They are not mere parrots or Bible-thumpers. (I had a couple of these appear at my door yesterday--two attractive young women asking me whether I read the Bible. Yup, read it.)

But there are aspects of Buddhism that must be taken on faith. One is the doctrine of karma and rebirth: that we continually experience the results of actions we've made in the past, including an infinite series of previous lives. (Interestingly, while many Westerners struggle with both karma and rebirth, I have no problem with either and believe in them both.) Another, of course, is that there is indeed such a thing as supreme, perfect, complete, great enlightenment and that the Buddha attained it. This is made easier by being in the presence of an authentic teacher or guru, such as Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (whom I never did meet or see in person), who is a living example of such enlightenment.

Furthermore, over the centuries and millennia Buddhism has accumulated a great deal of elaborate doctrine and what amounts to a theology of enlightenment, Buddha-realms, bodhisattvas, and so on. It's said that very advanced practitioners experience these things directly--but I wouldn't know.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing these teachings, which in my own experience I can say are profound, powerful, and extremely effective. They have survived for a reason, and have caught hold in the Western imagination for a reason. But as an artist, I saw, only very gradually, a need to go my separate way. Even in a great world faith, I found I was in it, but not truly of it.

I may have made a very big mistake.

So be it. As an artist I find my credo not in any sacred text, but in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in the words of his hero Stephen Dedalus speaking to his friend Cranly:

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

who are we?

As established in yesterday's post, I never have only one project on the go. What else, then, have I got going besides a massive novel (and intended sequels thereto)?

One project, I suppose potentially a nonfiction book, is a more or less directed inquiry into my own beliefs. What do I believe? What do I think is true?

I remember reading, years ago, I think in an astrological text by Zipporah Dobyns, that it is a good idea to discover what one's beliefs are, to bring them from the darkness of unconsciousness into conscious awareness. Twenty years later I'm still working on it.

Who knew that this task would be so difficult? It is much complicated by the fact that, as the painter Robert Henri put it,

Most folks don't think what they think they think.

He's pointing to our capacity for self-deception. For while we tend to deceive others more or less all the time, or at least conceal our true thoughts from them, the issue of self-deception is less obvious, and indeed impossible to discover without outside help. It doesn't have to be professional help: other people are well able to act as mirrors for our self-deceptions. Others can see clearly where we're kidding ourselves, as we can see where they're kidding themselves.

The specific project I'm now working on is centered around the question of identity, and my working title for it is Who Are We? Who are we? I find this question provocative, mysterious, koan-like.

And indeed in a sense it's a very Buddhist question. Buddhist analysis shows that the root of all our suffering in life is one thing: what we call our ego, or the thing denoted by the word I. Then it instructs us to isolate this I to discover what exactly it is.

The Buddha's answer is that if you look long and hard enough, you will discover that there is no I. What we call I is a shifting collection of thoughts that exist first of all for convenience, and then become a matter of intense emotional attachment. When we look very closely, we find that everything we think I is, it isn't--and that it isn't anything other than these things either. It's a movie projected on mist.

Very well. I'm prepared to accept that the ego, the I, has no ultimate existence. It's not for me to contradict a wisdom tradition of 2,500 years' standing, or the teachings of a practice that has brought me so much personal benefit. But how about on the relative level? My keyboard and coffee-mug don't have any ultimate existence either, besides being a temporary agglomeration of atoms in a particular configuration. Nonetheless, for practical purposes, in those configurations they have existence and usefulness. As my teacher Sangpo at shedra, the monastic college at Gampo Abbey, taught us, relative truth is not so much in dispute, because it's all a matter of convention and convenience anyway. These are the things that are true essentially by agreement, rather than in the nature of things. If we argue over whether a certain thing is or is not a coffee-mug, for instance, it's really just an argument over a definition--not over the essence of anything.

All right. But in purely conventional terms, can I define what I am? Can I discover how I, and how we all, use what we all call I as the basis for our actions? What do I think I mean when I use it?

In writing my story for The Mission, I came to see the issue of identity, especially as it manifests in what we now call identity politics, as a key thematic strand. Why do "my people" hate "your people"? What's going on there? Why do we care about the fortunes of our local hockey team, even when its members hail from Sweden and Finland rather than anywhere nearby? Why do thousands get depressed if the team loses against "them"? Isn't that peculiar?

These questions are just a few bite-sized samplers of what got me involved in a parallel nonfiction project--a work of philosophy, really.

I have other projects too--but more of that perhaps another time.

restless attention

I never have only one project on the go. I'm not like, say, Kimmie, who can keep at a single activity almost indefinitely. Up in her sewing-room, her "mad scientist's lab" as we call it, putting together patterns, fabrics, and trim for Barbie clothes (or as she now calls them, "11.5 FD clothes"--meaning 11.5-inch fashion dolls, the technical term), Kimmie can go all day, pausing only reluctantly for meal-breaks. (It helps that I provide room service for hot drinks and, later, wine.)

Not me. I tire of things. The activity of which I'm capable of the most sustained effort is reading, and the utmost I can manage there is about three hours. I can rarely read from a single book for longer than an hour, no matter how interesting I find it. It palls on me; my mind wanders and I feel overfed. I need a change.

For a long time I saw this trait as a sign of native dilettantism. If you can't focus on any one thing for any length of time, how can you achieve anything meaningful?

When I attended the Vajradhatu Buddhist Seminary in the Colorado Rockies in 1994, my meditation instructor was Ruth Astor, an elderly woman (who has since died) of, I believe, the famous American Astor family, which became prominent through the fur trade and New York real estate. A former filmmaker and veteran of the three-year meditation retreat, the pinnacle program for Vajrayana students, she was one of the instructors of the seminary, and developed a special fondness for me over the course of the 11-week program. One day I expressed to her my worries about this shifting attention of mine, how I couldn't stick with any one project. Her answer was immediate: "You need to organize your space so you can grab whatever you want to work on at that moment."

She didn't see my restless attention as any kind of problem in itself; she saw the issue only as one of setting up my office space. (She also predicted that I would be famous.)

I have tried to keep her advice in mind. The advent of the PC has made things a lot easier. Now I have folders for my various projects and ideas, and I can shift between them at will with a few keystrokes.

But still I worry. For as new ideas arise, new projects crop up, the old ones get muscled aside. They become the runts of the litter that can't make their way to a teat, and they shrivel and starve. I'm the sow lying on her side, unconcerned with the accumulating corpses of my farrow, because I'm always interested in the latest, and there's always plenty more where they came from.

In short, I write the way I read: with more or less intense concentration applied in short bursts. And as you can tell from the growing reading-list in the sidebar of this blog, I always have several books on the go, and many of these lapse unfinished. My interest and attention move on, and I need new inputs; the old ones die away, perhaps to be picked up another day.

Rarely do I commit to finishing the reading of a book. I can't stand the slog of continuing to read material that I have lost interest in, that I am continuing to read only because of an artificial decision to reach the end. I like to trust the wayward horse of my interest to find its own way. Because, even as it continually changes direction, it's always going somewhere. And I'd rather be animated by the passion of the present moment than by a promise made in the past.

But while this noncommittal, devil-may-care approach seems harmless in reading, I feel more anxious about applying it to writing--my creative output. Nonetheless, I have to acknowledge the pattern is there. Just as in my reading-list, so in my writing-list: there are a lot of unfinished works lying dead at the roadside. I have to take solace from the fact that, as in my reading-list, so in my writing-list, there are also finished works. I do finish reading some books, and I can even say that I also, sometimes, finish writing them.

At this stage, that's just going to have to do.

An interesting side-note: Three-year-retreats are conducted not in complete solitude, but in small groups. (The actual length of the retreat is three years, three months, and three days.) One of Ruth Astor's fellow retreatants was Migme, an ordained nun and one of the senior residents at Gampo Abbey, who had spent her working career as a paleobotanist. When I was a temporarily ordained monk at the Abbey in 2002, Migme, well into her 70s, was my meditation instructor. I remember how she teared up in recollection when I mentioned that Ruth Astor had been my MI at Seminary. As with Ruth, I felt that I had a special connection with Migme. It feels very significant to me, as well as profoundly fortunate, that I have had a deep and beneficial spiritual connection with these two women.

May I live up to the teachings I have received from them!

the music of time

My connection with the Buddhist sangha is maintained now through continuing monthly automatic withdrawals from my bank account. Even if I'm not currently (formally) practicing these teachings, I do believe in supporting them. As a result, I still receive copies of The Dot, "the quarterly newspaper of Shambhala", whose tag-line is "Nothing happens and we report it."

The autumn 2007 issue arrived yesterday in the mail. As I flipped through it while lying in bed, I felt pierced by feelings of recollection and nostalgia, as well as dissatisfaction and impatience. But I felt a jolt of surprise and recollection when I flipped to page 24 and found this headline: "Warrior in the World: David Nichtern".

I knew the name David Nichtern from 33 years ago, on the album cover of a record by Maria Muldaur. He was a guitarist, one of her musicians, and in fact the writer of her hit song, "Midnight at the Oasis". How many David Nichterns are there? The black-and-white photo accompanying the article: could that gray-haired guy in horn-rimmed glasses be the same as the ginger-haired, bearded young man on the album cover? Ye-e-es, it could: look at that faint, knowing, impish smile--that's the same, isn't it?

Indeed it was. I quickly saw "Midnight at the Oasis" mentioned in the article, and the fact that Nichtern has a career in music, as well as now being director of Buddhist studies and practice at OM Yoga in New York.

My gosh. Who knew? In 1974, when I was 15, "Midnight at the Oasis" was my favorite song, and I had a teen passion for Maria Muldaur, an olive-skinned, gypsyish beauty with a lovely warbling voice, a bit reminiscent of the folk singer Melanie. I would listen to the record and scan its jacket to learn what I could about its makers.

I noted that "Midnight at the Oasis", the only hit song on the album, was also the only song written by one of the musicians; the others (as I recall) were all covers--tunes like "My Tennessee Mountain Home" written by Dolly Parton. Why was that? I wondered.

I was fascinated by the phenomenon of writing--excited by the idea of writing as a basic creative act, which could take different directions: novel-writing, scriptwriting, songwriting, even writing computer programs. I was excited that all these different activities used that same creative verb, to write, and I wanted to do them all (and indeed have done them all). I wanted to be a writer in this total way.

My love of that song caused me to remember its creators, and I formed a kind of loose connection with it and them.

In 1980 I saw that Maria Muldaur was playing in Vancouver at a place called the Bombay Bicycle Club. Warren and I decided to go (he was able to fill me in on more information about Maria Muldaur--in particular that she had formerly performed in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band in the 1960s). We sat at the bar of the little club and soaked up about three sets of Maria Muldaur at close range. To my astonishment and delight, between sets she made her way to the bar and sat right next to us. Indeed, she had to brush right by us, making Maria Muldaur the most famous person I've ever actually physically touched. She didn't look at us or communicate with us; she seemed very withdrawn, even depressed, and sat in her black outfit, flipping through a newspaper, head down. But on stage she radiated smiles, power, and excitement. And she sang "Midnight at the Oasis" twice.

Next, in the winter of 1983, I saw that guitarist Amos Garrett was playing at the Town Pump in Gastown. He too had played on Maria Muldaur's first solo album, and since I was then playing guitar in my own garage band, I decided to check him out. He put on an excellent, all-instrumental show with his band, introducing the numbers with fairly technical comments about their musical qualities and style, much to the delight of the other musicians in the house, of which I'm sure there were many. He would call out challenges to the audience such as, "can you name this riff?"--seeing whether anyone could identify a particular riff he was playing (someone could! It was B.B. King). Anyway, I was thrilled when he played an instrumental version of "Midnight at the Oasis", including his guitar solo which itself became famous, at least among guitarists. (I was intrigued that he played with finger-picks, not a flatpick, as most guitarists do--and felt particularly glad that I'd received finger-picking training from my first guitar teacher, Barry Hall.)

Later, when I had hooked up with Kimmie, I turned her on to the Maria Muldaur album, which she loved. She even thought that she would like to put one of its tracks ("Don't You Make Me High (Don't You Feel My Leg)") on her "stripper" tape--a slate of tracks she would like do strip-teases to: a life-long ambition of hers. More of that, perhaps, another time...

Then, of course, I got into my own Buddhist "career", and got away from music. And last night, seeing David Nichtern's name in that unexpected place, brought all these memories flooding back. There was a sense of connection, of intertwining, such as that suggested in the Anthony Powell novel-series, A Dance to the Music of Time.

There are some benefits to aging, and this is one: opportunities for this kind of threading-together of the strands of life. A dance indeed.

boneless tongues

I probably need to make a lifestyle adjustment in order to get back to writing. As time goes on, I will need to make a regular place for paying work, and right now that's sitting right smack in my usual writing period of the day. In the past I have bumped my writing period to first thing in the morning, over my morning coffee, but this is not my preference; it has the flavor of duress. Of course the problem of creation vs. earning has always been central to many artists' lives.

In some sense I'm not (yet) too exercised about my long tarrying at chapter 30, since the problems I have been tussling with in it--and solving--reach far beyond the confines of that chapter. On the other hand, no matter how slowly this train moves, I don't feel comfortable when it's just sitting at the station.

For the time being, over my morning coffee, I'm keying notes from A Study of History, volume 1, by Arnold J. Toynbee, and from A History of Israel, volume 1, by Theodore H. Robinson. I continually ingest more research books and convert these slowly into typed notes for myself. I suppose this process will not end until I have polished my last draft for the last time. Indeed, the only thing that will probably end it will be the taking up of reading for my next project, whatever that might be.

Yes, folks, I love reading. I always have loved it, and a day in which I don't read is both rare and, for me, feels rather wasted. I feel that I've cheated myself of what I love the most.

When I was first exposed to Buddhist thought while traveling in 1979--in the form of books, of course: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and The Way of Zen by Alan Watts--I discovered that conceptual knowledge, the kind derived from books, can never lead one to an accurate relationship with reality. I found this to be both liberating and disappointing. Liberating, because it seemed to confirm a sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction in trying to learn the truth from books. Disappointing, because I felt that what I had always loved to do was now, in some sense, a waste of time.

This tension followed me in the ensuing years. When I took up meditation in 1986 I learned again that enlightenment can never be attained conceptually; it can only be a matter of direct experience. Nonetheless, the meditation center offered courses in which books were studied, and this type of study was encouraged. I latched on to it and studied dharma books--along with my regular diet of reading, which I never gave up.

Luckily, as I progressed in my Buddhist practice and studies, I became more relaxed about the role of reading. While concepts were still regarded as a faulty and incomplete way of knowing, they were still essential for the student. The real problem was in clinging to concepts: solidifying them as "true" and thereby creating stumbling-blocks for oneself.

I remember attending a dharma talk given by the late Tibetan teacher Jamgon Kongtrul in Vancouver. He was a young man (soon to die in a car crash in India). As I recall, the teachings were on the bardo--the "in-between" state that we inhabit between successive births. In the Tibetan teachings, a number of vivid, phantasmagoric events happens to us in this state. The question came up as to whether such experiences were real or not.

Jamgon Kongtrul responded that "these experiences are beyond duality, so you can call them real or unreal, just as you please."

This struck me. On the one hand it seemed annoying and irritating that there was not a clear answer as to whether something was real or not. But on the other, I felt power being placed in my hands--in the hands of all of us. Whether we call something real or not, in any given situation, is for us to decide. How we term things, how we see them, how we choose to respond, is a power that always lies with us. Even "reality" is situational: something that is useful in one moment, but not in the next.

I recalled another thing I had read, a commentary by some Zen master on the enigmatic statements of another master: "His tongue has no bone." At first it was a baffling image, but soon it clicked: our boneless tongues can move any which way. They're not constrained or forced by anything; they are not limited; they are free. Free to say "real" one moment, and "unreal" the next.

When I was at the shedra or monastic college at Gampo Abbey in 2002 I did lots of reading and writing--more than I did meditating. There we were taught to regard study itself as a practice, like meditation, undertaken with discipline and a certain attitude. We were still taught that a buddha's mind is free of concepts, like a cloudless sky. But I was and I remain skeptical of this. As far as I was concerned, if a buddha was using words, he was using concepts. It seemed to me people were too eager to usher concepts out the door, like unwanted relatives at a party.

But then again, what does it matter? We can call them concepts or not, just as we please.

my people

Forward progress on The Mission has slowed lately. On the one hand I have copywriting to do--and therewith the earning of (some of) my keep. On the other I have problems with my story, and with the world of my story, that I'm still working out. These things combined have brought the course of my stream, which has never been a torrent, to the stillness of a lake. Now I'm just poling the raft along, searching for the outlet so I can resume my journey to the sea.

Last night on CBC's Sunday Night was a segment on monasticism among young women in Canada and around the world. I watched with much interest, since I was myself, briefly, an ordained Buddhist monk at Gampo Abbey on Cape Breton. The segment specifically focused on the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary in Michigan, whose convent was founded 10 years ago. According to the report, the average age of a Canadian nun is 74, but this convent is filled with young women who have turned to a life of poverty and chastity in order to commune with God.

Kimmie and I were both impressed with the convent and with the girls. As I recall, the convent houses about 90 nuns, of which nine are from Canada. All the ones that appeared on the show were young, and it was clear that the convent was not a dumping-ground for unmarriageable Catholic daughters, but a destination of choice for thinking and spiritually aware girls who had many other options open to them.

I found myself identifying with these girls as they talked about wanting to do something meaningful with their lives, and enter into the question of why they were born and why they are here. Some of them had given up athletic and political ambitions, and all of course are giving up aspirations of having a family of their own--as well as personal possessions.

I recognized the "feel" and the attitude among the nuns, for I venture to say that the monastic experience is probably not too different between the different spiritual traditions. When the girls get up to pray to God, it's not so different from the morning gathering of the Buddhist monks and nuns to chant and meditate before breakfast. Each person there has made a definite, conscious decision to orient his or her life around a spiritual discipline, and has implemented that decision fully. It's an extraordinarily powerful basis for a community. While Buddhists don't refer to their ultimate reality as God, they share with the Catholics an intent to live in accord with ultimate reality, and their discipline and their behavior are probably not very different. They lead spare, unadorned, mutually supporting lives.

The girls interviewed were in no way sanctimonious or zealous. Their speech had a soft, heartfelt, and candid quality that I recognized from my own monastic experience. These are not people who "can't cut it" in secular life, but rather people who have perceived the emptiness and unfulfillingness of many worldly goals, and who have decided to do something about it. The Buddhist monastics I knew included bond traders, zoo-keepers, scientists, athletes, and nurses.

While I don't think that monastic life is for everyone, I had a strong feeling while watching the segment that the world needs people who have had monastic discipline--as many of them as it can get. We need selfless people who take a long, deep view of things and speak from the heart. We need spiritual people as much now as we ever have, and maybe more.

Yes, as I watched these young novices and nuns I had the feeling that I was again among "my people".

transplanted faiths

I seem to be in a time of painful, unsettled emotions. It’s probably not due to any one cause, or if it is, that cause is buried within the structure of my psyche.

In years gone by, meditation was a leveling influence in my life. When I was working on The Odyssey in the early 1990s, I was under tremendous pressure and stress for months on end. I used to cycle up to the rec center early in the morning for an aerobics class, and I practiced meditation as much as I could, which sometimes was not much. Even so, I was more irritable and beleaguered than usual for myself.

Meditation practice gradually enables one to see one's own insanity. Not real insanity, of course, but the everyday neuroses, which I once defined as "causing needless pain for oneself and others." I've been a huge beneficiary of that practice, but I haven't done it now for several years.

I got away from it, not because I wanted to stop meditating, but because I felt that my relationship with Buddhism had changed fundamentally. I realized that in order to be fully who I was, I could not accept the teachings holus-bolus, even though I had found them to be so profound, helpful, and fulfilling. Maybe it wasn't so much a decision as a recognition: I was not fully with the program.

Spiritual traditions cannot be transplanted unchanged. To move a religion is to transform it, possibly into something unrecognizable. This is a point made very well by Hans Jonas in his excellent book The Gnostic Religion. He notes that after the conquests of Alexander the Great, the worlds of East and West mixed to an unprecedented degree. People of widely different culture and belief found themselves crammed together in the new Hellenistic cities that arose in Alexander's wake. To the extent that they interacted, their ideas started to compete directly with each other.

One effect of this was that spiritual beliefs often came to be stripped of their local, cultural content. In the case of Judaism, for example, the notion of its message applying only to a tribe of people descended from Jacob would have made it of no interest or use to people from other backgrounds. Jews found themselves having to assert the universalism of their God and their religion against other traditions--Yahweh was not just a local, Jewish God, after all; He was the king of the universe! Persuading other peoples of this message meant emphasizing the aspects of Jewish belief that were "portable"--that could be accepted as valid by non-Jews.
So Judaism, like other religions, entered the marketplace of ideas. When it was taken up by certain Romans in Rome in the century before Christ, it was taken up in a selective and incomplete way, which would have been dismissed as completely invalid by pious Jews in Palestine. The Romans were drawn to the non-Israelite aspects of the system, its universal ideas.

In a similar way Buddhism has come to the West. If it is to survive here, it must undergo more or less radical change. The aspects of it which are ethnically or culturally Asian won't survive, since these elements are foreign to Westerners. The universal aspects are not foreign to Westerners, and it will be these that form the basis of Buddhism in the West.

Meanwhile, my own relationship with it is unclear to me. I have let that unclarity jam my relationship with meditation. Meditation in itself is not "Buddhist." And yet it also does not happen in a vacuum; teachings surround the practice, and they must surround it if it is to be of any real benefit.

So: still stuck.

instructor, instruct thyself

Another night of too little sleep. When I wake my mind is crowded with gloomy, disturbing thoughts. I finally rose at 3:10 to pour myself a whisky, and sitting up in the dark allowed the fire-water to remind me of a more carefree way of looking at things. The mind becomes too inefficient to trouble itself.

You need to show signs of believing in yourself. Interestingly, that's not exactly the same as actually believing in yourself. Based on my observations, people, in developing an opinion of or an attitude toward you, take their lead from you. For example, if you see yourself as being attractive and interesting, most people will probably go along with that. In general we all have difficulty forming independent opinions about anything--it's a lot of work, and it exposes us to risk ("What? You're nuts!"). It's easier to take cues from others around us, and just work with those unless they cause us serious difficulty.

It's the same for any major speculative endeavor, such as writing a long work of fiction. I believe one's own attitude toward it is key to forming others' attitudes toward it. This was one of the thoughts pressing in on me last night: my own nagging and seemingly incurable doubts may be poisoning my very prospects for success. You need to become that fanatical, obsessed crackpot who has unshakable faith that his Thing is going to be a huge success, no matter how objectively unlikely that seems. I'm not sure that such an attitude actually will make the Thing successful, but I believe the attitude will help you finish the Thing.

I think back to when I was a practicing meditation instructor. A student once expressed doubts that she could ever experience a more confident, awake way of being. I told her that from my own observations over a couple of years, the meditation practice had already had a big effect on her--but she didn't believe me, since she didn't see it herself.

So I suggested that she "fake it till you make it."

She nodded. "Fake it till you make it," she said.

Of course, "faking it" is the antithesis of a Buddhist approach to life. I was trying to suggest that her nervous self-criticism and self-doubt were actually the sham; they were the act that she couldn't give up. By "pretending" that she had already "made it", she could give herself permission to take a vacation from that sham, and perhaps see that it was unnecessary. Indeed, her behavior was already more confident and awake; her self-doubt was based only on a habitual way of seeing herself.

My student really liked that advice. She didn't have to wait until some ironclad, unmistakable proof of her realization came along; she could experiment with acting like a realized person. In some sense the difference between acting confident and being confident is just a slight adjustment of viewpoint. There's no practical difference between the two. The real point of my advice was: "relax."

Now I need to let my erstwhile student reach out and teach me.