I can tell the U.S. presidential election is getting nearer by the frequency and increasingly shrill tone of postings on social media sites. Whether coming from the left or right, sharp, cutting messages from otherwise well balanced friends and family, stand out in contrast to the usual photos of kittens and sunsets. Epithets lobbed across the lines, some badges of honor, others of derision: 'teabagger', 'socialist', the 'war on women', 'traditional marriage', 'forcible rape', etc.
The main outcome of all of this rhetoric on both sides is to reinforce duality and a "right vs. wrong" line of thought. And we fall into it so easily, even those of us who know better. Caricatures only serve to reinforce divisions and preclude any possibility of finding concensus.
And yes, I've got my own causes that are near and dear to my heart, and have fallen into the same patterns. When I see protestors expressing themselves legally, beaten or abused by riot police, it turns my stomach. But then, the challenge becomes to see the "other" as human too, to see myself in my enemy. To consider the possibility that there may be some truth in positions that I don't hold, or that, if I firmly believe in something, that I do it in a way that respects the humanity of those I strongly disagree with. I like the approach of Thich Nhat Hanh, whose engaged Buddhism during the war in Vietnam got him kicked out of the country. His goal was to find the middle ground, and to work so that neither side would gain an advantage over the other, in order to bring some sort of peaceful coexistence to his homeland. Maybe I am just naive and out of step with the times. Perhaps we really are in the age of Kali Yuga, as the Vaishnavists say, on the tail end of a degenerate age as it all crumbles, before being reborn, yet again. If so, then I think Neal Cassady had the best advice when he said, with only a hint of sarcasm, "enjoy it!". Being in the middle of such things, it's really hard to know, kind of like an ant trying to see the world outside the ant hill. Even so, whatever the big picture, I will focus on staying balanced and avoiding extreme views in this situation, dodging the potholes in the road as the rhetoric of division swirls all around. And if I have to take a position, I'll try to do it with a little bit of perspective and, dare I hope, humor.
"Momentary delusions and confusions obscure our true nature, including our luminous heart, the bodhichitta, the awakened heart-mind-body consciousness that is within us all." Lama Surya Dass
Here I am, sitting on the balcony this morning,
enjoying the scene before me. The air is cool from last night's rain,
birds chirp in the trees, and a squirrel runs along the telephone wires.
Yet, all is not well in this idyllic plain.
The
thoughts in my mind break in, rumbling through this scene like a
loud, obnoxious garbage truck. Conflicts real and imagined, points of
disagreement, disconnects and dissatisfactions, all rushing in to fill
the beautiful empty space in my awareness with an early morning collision of dissonance.
And yet, as I raise my eyes up from the imaginary garbage truck on the landscape before me, I see the blue sky unfolding in all directions. It is a scene of deep and saturated blues punctuated by wispy clouds advancing steadily. This is what is known in Tibetan Buddhism, and in their indigenous Bön tradition, as Dzogchen, or the "Great Perfection". The basic idea being that our true nature is that of spontaneous and vast emptiness, expanding to infinity. Yet, with that comes the corresponding challenge of cutting through the clutter of our mental formations to recognize that clarity on a moment by moment basis. Thankfully, the sky did that for me this morning. It brought me the recollection that I am not the thoughts gathered ominously in my mind. And so I let them rumble around in my head, watching them, and then before too long...they dissipate, they're gone. I don't know where, or exactly how, but it points out their illusionistic nature. Continually rising and falling, this is karma in both the positive and negative senses of the word: action. Processes acting and playing themselves out across the clear space of my awareness.
Looking up into the sky now, all of the clouds are gone. It is just a blue expanse of emptiness. I breathe in, then out, deeply and slowly.
You know how a book can sit on your bookshelf for years, and suddenly you notice it like for the first time? That just happened with me and "Vipassana Meditation: as taught by S.N. Goenka", the very first book on the subject I ever read.
Six years ago, it kick started my lifelong interest in all things contemplative, giving me for the first time, an actual set of tools to dig deeper on my inquiry into the nature of things.
Through studying that book, and putting into practice its methodology, I learned how to follow my breath into my body and experience the sensations there on an increasingly subtle level, eventually beginning to recognize the emptiness of our seemingly concrete bodies, a space filled only by vibrations, made up of the continual rising and dissolution of experience within ourselves.
That was a nice start, and gave me a little bit of perspective. Stuff like not freaking out so much when I'm in pain. A couple of years after beginning Vipassana, late one night I got a splinter in my eye. I was alone, with no friends to call on, and no doctor I could get to, just me and the excruciating pain. Remembering the practice, I decided to lie there in the dark, and focus on the sensation of the pain. When I did, it almost immediately became manageable. True, it still hurt like hell, but what happened is the conditioning in my mind, related to the experience of pain, began to fall away. I discovered for myself the basic truth that my mind embellished the experience with its own level of imagination, i.e. karma 101. This helped me to cut through the amplified mental reaction, and experience the pain for what it really was, a signal to focus and send healing to the place that hurts.
Instead of pushing away the pain, I tried to embrace it and enter into the experience. As S.N. Goenka says, "once we start to investigate our true nature, the running away must stop. We must change the mental habit pattern and learn to remain with reality." A specific practice that helps to focus the mind, so that it is not led away on the wild horses of the imagination, is known as samatha (Pali / Sanskrit), or zhiné (Tibetan). The term means "calm abiding", and the exercises teach you to concentrate and focus your mind.
The first level of calm abiding practice is to sit in the meditation posture and stare at an object. Whenever the attention wanders, which it does continually, bring it back to the object. I use the flame of a votive candle, or sometimes even the plumes of smoke from a cup of hot tea. Truly, anything you can look at without attachment will work. In other words, images or objects that evoke strong reactions are probably not good candidates for developing zhiné. This beginning practice is known as "forceful" zhiné, because it requires effort to bring the mind back to the object.
Eventually you will get to the next level of practice, where your attention is focused in a more diffused manner, without the aid of an object. This is known in Tibetan practice as "natural" zhiné. But, I get ahead of myself. Last night, I woke up midway through the night, and my mind almost immediately became filled with a jumble of thoughts, racing in all directions. At moments like that, I wonder what benefit these practices bring to me. But, just as quickly, I began to ride the thoughts, experiencing them as vibration, noticing them rise and fall, and see them for the immaterial phantoms they really are. That helped me to calm down, and eventually, fall back to a dream filled sleep. And this is the end game of the whole practice, learning to recognize the impermanence and interconnectedness of all of our experiences, and to relax into that base of pure non-dual awareness which is always there, our true nature, or rigpa (Tibetan).
That sounds good to me, especially the part about cutting through the mental conditioning and reactions. I'm gonna keep on trying it: zhiné, for the win!
Hanging out the last couple of days in east Austin, I've really been noticing the small mom and pop stores, hand-painted signs and murals, and DIY aesthetic of the neighborhoods.
This has always attracted me, but I've never really analyzed it, just thinking it had something to do with growing up in a small town at the foot of the Ozark mountains, before WalMart and corporate America stamped out most of our individuality.
This morning, stepping out of Mr. Natural, a home grown natural food store, the girl behind the counter waved, and the realization hit me as to why I'm so into this. I had only been there twice, yet she already treated me like a neighbor.
It got me to thinking that the whole DIY aesthetic taps into something really deep in our veins: a sense of community, of self-reliance, of how Paleolithic humans lived prior to the rise of the city state. Small bands of like minded people acting with intelligence and intuitive awareness to improvise a way of life based on connectedness to the land, and each other.
With the mom and pop stores, you have people who spend their whole life cultivating personal relationships with their neighbors. They collaborate in very localized ways and develop systems of exchange based on these intimate relationships.
This stands in sharp contrast to the rise of corporatism, a system of impersonal, leveraged situations built on power that emanates from the top down. Some of the really successful corporate brands are really good at imitating the look and feel of aspects of the DIY experience, but make no mistake, they are large organizations who have these things in mind: market share, expansion, profitability. Think Starbucks, or Whole Foods.
True, many of these corporate giants started off as small companies, but their focus quickly turns from uniqueness and idiosyncracy into mass-produced stamped and cloned replicas of the original idea, with uniqueness being left at the side of the road.
Mom and pops, on the other hand, are based on ideas built from the ground up, ideas that come from an individual or small group, that direct themselves toward a local clientele, who give them direct feedback on the experience.
To me, that sounds a lot like the way early human community developed. Small groupings of individuals developing skill sets with an immediate response from the members of their local tribe.
Tribes have gotten a bad rap recently, as an example of small mindedness, or closed thinking, but truthfully, if we can learn to think with a global mindset, yet still act in ways that are specific to the people, place and time around us, we have the opportunity to create something special.
Imagine a world that is not stamped out of a corporate cookie cutter. Imagine neighborhoods with unique businesses that don't exist anywhere else. Imagine non-conformity and innovation springing from the ground up.
That is the world I want to live in. That is why I want to support mom and pop stores. That is why I believe in DIY.
Here in the west, karma is almost exclusively thought of on an individual basis, that is, in how it affects us personally. This makes sense, considering that in America individualism is probably the dominant philosophy. In eastern thought, however, karma is not only individual, but also collective.
In Buddhist and eastern forms in general, karma (literally action) generates
material existence. In this world view, we collaborate with other
sentient beings to mutually create and sustain planes of existence.
The Kamadhatu (desire realm), commonly known as the six realms, is made up of those planes with which we are most familiar. They are, in order from high to low: the gods (Deva), consisting of beings who are engaged in pleasurable distraction; the demi-gods (Asura), who though powerful are dominated by envy; humans, who are led mostly by desire; animals, in a state of natural, though ignorant, perfection; hungry ghosts (Preta), driven by insatiable appetites and greed; and hell beings, dominated by anger or hatred. These realms are depicted in the Bavachakra, or wheel of life, in Indo-Tibetan iconographies. This all seems rather esoteric, until we begin to apply the concepts to ourselves. On reflection, I can see elements of each of the six realms within myself. At various times I am engaged in pleasurable distraction, envious, driven by attractions, happily ignorant, greedy, or filled with anger. And expanding beyond ourselves to look at societal groups from family units, to social networks, upward to larger groupings based on regional, political, religious, or national affiliations, we can see the same tendencies.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan teacher in the indigenous Bon/Buddhist tradition, speaks about the six realms of existence, saying: "karma is collective, the beings in each realm share similar experiences in a consensual world, as we share similar experiences with other humans. Collective karma creates bodies and senses and mental capacities that allow individuals to participate in shared potentials and categories of experience."
If we can begin to see society on those terms, I think we can also start to understand larger patterns of behavior. An example of this would be the recent spate of mass killings, in which unbalanced individuals have gone on public rampages, leaving many dead and injured, and the karmic fallout that the rest of us have to deal with, all while seeming detached from their own actions. Considered out of context, these seem to be random and isolated events. But, zooming out far enough, to consider the history of our country and its very foundation built on violence and individualism, and then zooming back in to see the glorification of brutality and vengeance in our media, the wars we actively create, as well as the estrangement and social disconnects we all suffer, then it becomes less of a surprise that these things are happening in our midst. And not all collective karma is bad. We also share a generosity of spirit, in which people step up to help others in times of hardship or tragedy. Countless individual acts, both selfish and selfless, combine every day to create this mutually sustained existence seemingly filled with love and hate in equal measure. The importance of understanding the six realms is not so much in believing in them as separate places of existence, but in recognizing them as states of being that we experience not only within ourselves, but also collectively, and to use that awareness as a platform for our own liberation, and that of society. If we want a new world, we literally can (and do) create it, every moment of every day. We can choose to consciously build this world together, based on higher motivations, or we can continue to unconsciously generate the aspects of dysfunction we are all so familiar with by now. Being a realist, I accept that both directions exist at the same time, but also being an optimist, I am willing to work toward and believe in the possibility of something better.
