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.

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.

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.

the artist's wandering mind

I'm a distractable person. I'm not sure whether I'm more or less so than other people, but my attention seems to wander.

I venture to guess that most people would say I'm the opposite: I have good apparent powers of concentration. If I recall correctly, in graphoanalysis concentration shows in the smallness of one's handwriting; my handwriting--what little of that there is nowadays--is fairly small, and has definitely grown smaller over the decades of my adulthood.

So what do I mean. I do tend to have an active or hyperactive mind. In my meditation career I had to get used to the busyness of my mind. In general one does not seek to control mental busyness in meditation, since efforts to do so tend only to produce more thoughts, more mental churning. It's like telling someone to relax: it tends to make them more tense. In meditation, the main way to settle the busyness of one's mind is simply to meditate more. This is one of the major benefits of a longer, more intensive meditation program or retreat: one meditates much more than usual, and the mind gradually exhausts itself. You get bored with your thoughts and kind of give up. The present moment becomes much more interesting and stimulating, and you become more anchored in it. I think of a crystal paperweight: the mind becomes clear but also heavy, in the sense that it isn't easily pushed around or jostled away from where it is. It seems to sit down, just as your body sits down on a meditation cushion.

But if you don't have six or more hours a day to meditate, there are some tricks that can be used to tone down the hyperactivity of a restless mind in meditation. One such trick is to think about your own death and the deaths of your loved ones. These thoughts, if entertained seriously, tend to have a depressing effect on the mind, which is the same as saying that its busyness is dampened. When I was a monk at Gampo Abbey, even though there was a fair amount of meditation every day, I found there was not enough sustained meditation to really get my mind to sit down, so I found myself resorting to some of those tricks, with mixed results, I found.

While I could never prove it, I believe that I am more inclined than most people to "dial out" of reality and entertain myself with my own thoughts and fantasies. Indeed, this may be one reason that I am a creator: I have a vivid imagination, and I use it. Or rather, mostly I do not use it, in the sense of harnessing it to productive purpose; but rather I kind of hang out in it. I get bored with what's going on around me, and vanish into my own thoughts. I do this with an ease that I myself find sometimes distressing (because I like to think of myself as a well socialized person). It can also be irritating for others, since they sometimes--not all that often, to be sure--might ask for my agreement or opinion on something, and I have to admit, "Sorry--I wasn't listening."

As I say, I suspect I am more "tuned out" than most people. Most of the time it doesn't seem to make too much difference. Indeed, I'm alone much of each day, so I don't really need to be socialized too much better than Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away. (I don't have a volleyball to talk to, but there are some cushions, glassware, and in fact any inanimate object that can do in a pinch.) But I worry that my distracted state puts me at a disadvantage with regard to my writing projects. The very imagination that makes creative writing possible also pulls me away from the task at hand, and has me chasing other rainbows all the time. Indeed, as evidence I can point to a host of abandoned projects lying rusting at the side of the road of my life. I start things, then, in the slowness of my execution, lose interest in them and start something else. This is entertaining and stimulating for me, but fatal careerwise.

When I was in my early 20s, working as a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital, before I ever took up meditation, and knew I had a reputation as a "thinker" because I often seemed to be absorbed in my own thoughts, I became interested in what I was thinking about. I recall sitting in a chair in the ultrasound department one evening, making a mental inventory of the kinds of things that occupied my mind. In truth, I found that "thinking", in the sense of working through problems and so forth, played a very small part. Mostly I was in reveries: memories or fantasies of one kind or another. Mainly I was just trying to enjoy my mind.

The artist's task is to leave off enjoying his own mind--at least for a little--and to get its products out there for other people to enjoy. Can I stay on track enough to achieve that?

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.