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How the Light Gets In

 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

–Leonard Cohen

It’s a truism that the very things we would wish away—our flaws, our misfortunes, our tragedies, even—are the very means of our growth, or (dare I say it) our enlightenment. It makes perfect sense that light gets in through the cracks, yet a bald statement of fact means little. How a truism becomes reality is through lived experience. This blog is an assortment of some of mine.

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Equanimity

Note: The following is the text of a dharma talk that I gave on November 1 for the Northfield Buddhist Meditation Center in Northfield, MN.

I want to establish at the outset that I am speaking not as a scholar, but as a practitioner, who has some knowledge of these matters based on reading, dharma talks, conversations with teachers and other practitioners, and personal experience. What I am about to say represents my personal conclusions as a result of these inputs. 

It didn’t occur to me until after I agreed to the date for this talk that I would be doing it two days before the election, and it didn’t fully occur to me until after I specified my topic that “Equanimity” might be a hard sell under these circumstances. Still, I’ve come to realize that a dharma talk on equanimity is one of the most useful things I could do in exactly this situation. We have all arrived at this moment from a place of deep feeling, and not all of that feeling has involved loving-kindness or appreciative joy. My Twitter feed, where I spend way too much time, is full of anxiety, anger, disgust, and a desire to see certain people ground into the dirt. We are all deeply invested in outcomes. 

What kind of case can I make, then, for equanimity? I’ll begin by saying that none of the Brahmaviharas needs my intervention, being as they are the four sublime dwelling places for the heart. Their sublimity consists not just in their limning out of the highest possible standard for human life, but in their perfect functionality for bringing about human happiness. Keep in mind that the Buddha announced his project by claiming, “I teach only suffering and the ending of suffering.” 

Each of the Brahmaviharas has a near enemy and a far enemy. The far enemy of equanimity is passionate attachment, while the near enemy is typically described as indifference.  Everyone can easily grasp how the far enemy of equanimity would look. Back when I was on the job market, a friend of mine told me that she’d “stop breathing” if she didn’t get a certain job that had come open. She didn’t, and she didn’t, as far as I know, but her feelings are not hard for the rest of us to understand. It is that feeling that life just couldn’t continue without getting one’s way in something, or the fear that something would go horribly wrong, that gripping pain in one’s soul, that is the far enemy of equanimity. 

The near enemy is harder to distinguish. Indifference is not-caring, an attitude anyone can accomplish for at least something or other. I used to follow baseball as an avid Boston Red Sox fan, back in the day when they hadn’t won the World Series since 1918. When they finally broke their losing streak in 2004 I was ecstatic, and when they won again in 2007 I was pleased and relieved that their previous victory hadn’t been a fluke. Since then, however, I have lost interest; I could even say that I am now indifferent. It’s likely that a lot of my feeling for them was based on their perennial underdog status, although I think I also had a personal investment in them as my parents’ favorite team and because of their association with the area where I grew up. 

Likewise, when I was young I, like many young people, longed to travel. How I envied other people my own age who were world travelers! My first trip to Europe after I graduated from college was like a dream come true. I was positively dazzled the whole time I was there, even through moments of disorientation and physical discomfort. But now, I have to admit, I could take it or leave it. I’m not sure why I feel this way, nor do I believe my lack of interest does me any great credit. It probably has to do with an aversion to discomfort and inconvenience. It certainly helps not to want to travel now that we’re all enduring the restrictions brought on by the coronavirus. 

Equanimity is a different animal altogether from its near enemy. Our English term comes from the Latin for evenness of mind, and it appears that the Pali term means something similar. A person with equanimity will neither go into raptures over a good outcome nor become despondent over the opposite; indeed, a person with equanimity recognizes the transient nature of all things, the fact that with each season there will be yet another turn of the wheel. Indifference is an attitude we take towards particular things, and those who pride themselves on being low maintenance might be alarmed to discover that there are still certain things they care about a great deal. Someone who is indifferent to a great many things may be suffering from depression. None of these permutations has the flavor of equanimity. 

While we are investigating what equanimity is not, I would like to suggest another near enemy, that being spiritual bypassing. This is a term many people in spiritual circles are familiar with, and the phenomenon comes up in most traditions. It goes hand-in-hand with repression. An example might be my friend wanting that job so desperately that she thought she might stop breathing. If she were to identify as a Buddhist, she might tell herself that she didn’t really need that job even though it might be very nice to have, that she was capable of living with whatever outcome the search might take, and that she wasn’t worried about money because money is, after all, just a subset of the Eight Worldly Winds: praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, and finally fame and disrepute. If any strong feeling of desire threatened to rise up she would quickly slap it down. In the meantime, she would find a consoling satisfaction in her realization. 

It’s easy to make gentle fun of another person’s rationalizations, but spiritual bypassing can occur even among those at advanced stages of practice. One yogi of my acquaintance found himself out of a job, yet his attainments made it possible for him to shift into a gentle state of bliss that cushioned him from any anxiety. As the months ticked by and the bills piled up he floated through his days in continuous nondual awareness, enjoying a flow state from one moment to the next. At some point a sheer animal terror broke through, and the results were impressive in their awfulness. 

A different kind of spiritual bypassing is demonstrated by the many advanced level dharma teachers and gurus who commit horrific offenses against their own students, charging high fees in order to indulge in luxuries, exploiting their students’ labor, abusing them emotionally and even physically, and of course engaging in predatory sexual behavior, all the while assuming a role of spiritual leadership. One recent example, a teacher in his 70s with a well-regarded book and an extensive community of students, was discovered to have engaged in extramarital relationships with multiple women, some of them sex workers, to whom he had given substantial sums of his students’ money. I met this man at a retreat two years ago, before the scandal broke, and was deeply impressed at the time by his serenity, his wisdom, and his deep kindness. What made this scandal particularly poignant was the emphasis he placed on Buddhist ethics in his teachings, and the focus of his meditation manual on samadhi, the unification of mind that brings with it the divine abiding of equanimity. 

There was a lengthy period of discussion on public forums after that story broke, as those who knew and had worked with him tried to make sense of it all. Was he a complete fraud? Were any of his attainments real? And for that matter, of what use was his meditation advice if it produced such results? His own explanation was that he considered his private life to be his own business, which he compartmentalized. The truth, as far as I’ve come to see it, is that he had engaged in a pattern of spiritual bypassing, which allowed him to claim that even while indulging his appetites he was still able to walk into his sangha and relay his valuable insights to his students. 

I need not belabor the point that this type of thing is not equanimity. The trouble is that equanimity may be one of the Divine Abidings, and yet anyone who aspires to such an exalted dwelling will still be a human being. The meditation teacher just referenced ultimately recognized that he had unresolved issues from his early life to deal with. Acknowledging that the problem of uneven development is not unique to one or a few unscrupulous or misguided gurus, leaders in the meditation world have been discussing formulas that address all facets of our inner and outer life; one of the most influential is Ken Wilber’s phrasing of wake up, clean up, and grow up, to which some people add, show up. 

Looking at any of the Brahmaviharas gives us cause to wonder at our human condition, in both senses of the word “wonder”: to wonder what it really is to be human, and to regard life as a human with a sort of awe or wonder. I am reminded of the words of the Elizabethan poet Fulke Grenville (1554-1628):

O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law; to another bound; 
Vainly begotten, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound. 

Greville’s context in this expression of dualism is Protestantism. The law under which we are born is the law of sin, characterized by the instinctive drives toward sex and violence, with the goals of earthly survival at all costs or, failing that, the survival of one’s family or tribe at the expense of everyone else. For Christians, the savior Christ in one perfect action cuts through the duality and sanctifies humans under the law of divine love, by which we are healed of our sickness and made sound. 

For Buddhists, the duality is brought about by the illusion of permanence and an enduring self, which results inevitably in the sickness of dukkha. We may be poisoned by greed, hatred, and delusion, but each of us, even the severely cognitively impaired, carries within the dignity of Buddha nature, just as the Christian god created humans in his own image, no matter how besmirched by sin. For Buddhists, it is not the action of a savior but the three jewels of Buddha, dharma, and sangha that bring us to realization. The Four Divine Abidings are the expression of this realization: universal love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. I like to describe them as follows: the first, metta, wishes for good things to everyone; the second, karuna, shows compassion for those who experience bad fortune; the third, mudita, expresses joy for those who experience good fortune; and the fourth, upekkha, acknowledges the fact that all are subject to forces beyond anyone’s control. Equanimity is thus the embrace in which all are held, the happy and the unhappy alike. 

How do we as humans express equanimity in our lives? Some people say that a truly equanimous person feels the same under all circumstances, whether they are being tortured or are experiencing bliss. I know someone who had an attainment that was so powerful that he no longer has thoughts flowing through his mind; in addition, he claims that his feelings for his own children are no different from his feelings for anyone else. Other people say that equanimity does not demand such absolute impartiality.

For clarity I turn again to a Christian comparison, in the case of a dispute between 16th-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam and his humanist colleague and friend, John Colet, the founder and dean of St. Paul’s School. The dispute concerns Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which he asks God to “take this cup away from me,” but then concludes, “not as I will, but as thou wilt.” The final phrase reflects equanimity, as does the phrase “thy will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer. The dispute between the humanists concerns what comes before: is Jesus experiencing the fear of torture and death in asking that the cup be withdrawn? Erasmus argues that as fully human as well as fully divine, Jesus experiences everything that other humans do, while Colet claims that as God incarnate Jesus cannot feel anything so base as fear, and so these words must refer to something else, such as concern for the Jews who are about to commit the sin of murdering him. Erasmus countered by saying that if Jesus Christ’s sacrifice is to be efficacious for humans it has to mean something, in human terms. 

In the case of Equanimity as the fourth Divine Abiding, can humans embody Buddha nature so perfectly that they are impervious to any of the afflictive emotions, or are they subject to these things but able to bear up under them? I am of the view that Equanimity embraces all of human life. It is not an impossible, transcendent ideal, but rather a refuge that is available to everyone, even those without meditative attainments. When we aspire to what is beyond ourselves, we run the risks of spiritual bypassing and repression and all that follows. What does Equanimity look like when considered in human terms? It means that we are willing to be afraid, grief-stricken, and even angry without identifying with the fear, grief, or anger. It is likely that as a person advances in practice, such emotions will occur much less often than before, but they will still appear. What decreases dramatically is the involvement of the ego. 

What I’d like to do for the remainder of this talk is go through specific human emotions and experiences and examine them through the lens of equanimity. 

I’ll begin with fear. The emotion of fear is the mind’s way of protecting an animal from danger, and as such, it is functional. It can, however, become paralyzing, especially when it metastasizes into anxiety, a chronic state of mind that is a response to ongoing stress. Ordinarily, fear allows an animal to spring into action to avoid a threat, the well-known “fight, flight, or freeze” response. Once the threat is over, the animal shakes itself and then goes about its business. Humans, with our capacity for embedding memories, usually aren’t so lucky, and may need time to recover. Some don’t recover, and find themselves suffering from PTSD. 

It would seem that equanimity is at odds with lingering fear of this type, since fear is linked to one’s desire to extend one’s life as an individual. In cases where the fear takes the form of a social anxiety, what is at stake is not one’s life but rather one’s status in the eyes of others, which uninstructed worldlings especially are desperately averse to losing. Yet I’m prepared to suggest that even a phobia might be held in equanimity, as long as a person does not identify with it. 

I can cite an example from my own life. I have two phobias, both of which are the result of traumatic experiences. The first is a fear of driving on highways, which developed after I wiped out going 80 mph on the Massachusetts Turnpike at the age of 19. I thought I was going to die, and ever since, I have responded to highway driving as if I were facing a situation of mortal peril. Needless to say, I have found this aversion to be a serious limitation, and as a result I have worked hard to overcome it. 

The other phobia dates back to my teens as well, when I wanted to pursue a career as a professional violinist. I went to summer music camps, took lessons with a high-powered teacher, and crafted an identity around being a musician. Unfortunately, I developed a case of stage fright that manifested as a tremor in my right hand, which caused my bow to skip on the strings. I did my best to work around it, but it not only continued to plague me but it caused me horrendous embarrassment and frustration. 

I struggled with these phobias for decades, entering into therapy, reading self-help books, and working at desensitization. I also took an impressive array of drugs. Most importantly, however, I saw myself as a victim, and bewailed my suffering. My mental health was affected as I was drawn into an image of myself as a person who was crippled by my own mind. I eventually undertook my meditation practice in the hopes of conquering these demons for good. 

What happened instead is that I more or less kept the phobias but dropped the sob stories. To this day, if I had to drive on I35 I’d be able to do it, but my muscles would tighten, my blood pressure would increase, and my breathing would become shallow. I can also say that if I were to attempt to play a scale on my violin in front of this group rather than giving a dharma talk, I would start shaking all over the instrument. Yet I am grateful for both of these handicaps because without them I would never have begun my meditation practice. My phobias are glitches in my equipment, not having anything essential to do with me. Of course, at the moment I’m not called upon either to drive any distance or to play the violin, although before the coronavirus I would try to get up to the Twin Cities now and then. But on the whole, I have developed some degree of equanimity around the fear. 

Next comes anger. Being equanimous with anger is difficult to imagine as a possibility, since almost nothing is more irrational and compelling than a towering rage. I can recall being in the throes of fury from time to time and feeling that absolutely nothing could pull me out of it. Later on I would realize how pointless my anger had been, but at the time whatever reasoning power I possessed was thoroughly disabled. Even worse is the fact that anger generates hatred and ill-will towards other people, and can lead to harm and even violence. One of the most common triggers to anger is a real or imagined slight to one’s self-esteem. A person cuts me off in traffic: how dare they treat me in this way! Someone criticizes me, maybe even constructively: how could they not see me as the paragon I know I am! Sometimes anger is triggered when someone hurts or insults a loved one, as for example when another parent disinvited my then 5th-grade son from her son’s birthday party. I was furious. 

Like fear, anger is also a survival mechanism. If someone shows contempt for me or my family and I do nothing about it, others looking on might think I’m a pushover and feel free to harm or even kill me. Anger also kicks in at the moment of a threat and gives an animal the necessary energy to mount a counter-attack. I remember years ago when I was on that European trip I mentioned earlier, I was walking with my mother after dark back to our hotel when a man jumped out in front of us out of nowhere. I pushed my mother out of the way and stepped up to him with raised fists, ready to kill him with my bare hands. He laughed and withdrew, and that was that. 

My response was a pure lightning-bolt of animal energy, a force of nature coming out of the same place in the brain that drives my toy poodle to charge at another dog many times his size, barking fiercely. Of a different ilk is anger that festers and hardens into rumination and resentment. Rehearsing conversations in one’s mind, lying awake at night, plotting revenge—these experiences are the very essence of dukkha. Yet equanimity can hold even this kind of anger in its generous embrace, recognizing that yes, we have “let ourselves go there.” One of my favorite memories is of a grad school buddy with whom I’d have lunch once a week. Inevitably we’d start telling each other stories of our previous week, silly arguments we’d had with our boyfriends, ridiculous moments of our clownish egos rising up, and then we’d laugh uproariously. We weren’t proud of these moments nor were we ashamed of them; they were simply testimonials to our shared humanity. 

Onward to sexual desire. This is an instinct that comes in for a lot of disapproval in most religious traditions, including Buddhism, even though none of us would even be here without it. Desire of any sort is one of the three poisons, and sexual desire in particular is apt to be compulsively enmeshed with the ego. Lust can be described as the drive for sex unaccompanied by the niceties of love or even interest in another person. Passionate erotic love may seem to be a more positive force, yet it is typically grounded in illusion and leads inevitably to heartbreak. Both lust and sexual love are enemies of a composed and unified mind. 

Still, it is important to remember that the god of love is a very dangerous god indeed, and to insult him by treating him lightly is to court disaster. I refer back to the senior meditation teacher with his multiple ongoing, secret affairs, which caused him to lose his wife, his retreat center, and his reputation, not to mention making him an object of ridicule on account of his advanced age. Repression of sexual desire has a way of biting a person in the backside. What, then, are humans to do?

One way of looking at sexual desire is as a form of energy, along the same lines as anger. Energy can be channeled to good ends; in fact, long before Freud formulated his psychological theories, the medieval troubadours claimed that nothing good can come about unless it has its wellspring in love. The love of a man for a virtuous woman was regarded as the beginning of his own evolution as a virtuous man, the civilizing influence that turned his power as a warrior from ruthlessness and rapacity to the service of protecting the weak. 

This type of energy has an added element of vulnerability, because it is by necessity rooted in a relationship with another. Experiencing one’s vulnerability can be deeply painful and unsettling, but it is absolutely necessary to the process of understanding and, ultimately, detaching from one’s ego. Believing oneself to be immune to the pain that comes from involvement with other human beings is a form of what Christian spiritual writers call spiritual pride. If people are willing to learn love’s lessons, they can begin to recognize and cherish what is vulnerable and beautiful in all beings, which is, in fact, the practice of metta. 

The craving for money, status, and/or power is so common that we scarcely notice it in ourselves, although it is usually obvious when we see it in others. I spent my career in the academic world where, as a colleague once pointed out to me, the rewards are primarily at the level of the ego. Academics often tend to see themselves as deserving respect that they deny to others. Even those of us who try to resist such posturing find ourselves on the receiving end of other people’s attitudes toward us. Among academics, as is true for all professions, there is a lifelong experience akin to white privilege, which gains us deference we hardly even see because it is a part of our everyday experience. 

In spite of these obvious benefits, academics are painfully aware of gradations in status among our own kind. People value their colleagues on the basis of their accomplishments, not just the number of  publications but the quality of the journals and presses that publish our work. There is the daily reminder of who counts and who does not in the politics of faculty meetings, where some people are listened to with respect while others are ignored. Wounded egos harden into lifelong antagonisms that play out with every issue that comes up, again and again. New faculty are soon instructed by members of warring factions as to where their bread is likely to be buttered. All of these problems in one’s home institution are carried into the larger academic community, where colleagues in similar fields vie with one another over whose interpretations of what we study are of superior merit. Younger scholars set out to establish their reputations by toppling older, established scholars from their pedestals, all the while shoving their own peers out of the way in an effort to be noticed. 

This kind of pettiness turns academic life, which to outsiders looks like paradise, into living hell-realms to those going through it. I can’t say that these problems are anything like the hell that the multitudes of poor in our country endure, but they are a nasty source of dukkha nonetheless. Most of us strive to overcome these conditions by moving up to the top of the heap, but aside from the uncertainty of outcomes, there is the problem that even those who occupy the top ranks are in relentless competition with one another. 

The only means of getting off the wheel is to cultivate equanimity and the other Divine Abidings. We usually do this as an absolute last resort, as if the most precious jewel of all is only a booby prize left over when we fail to get what we really want. Even then, the threat of the near enemy of spiritual bypassing looms over our efforts. It may help us mortals to realize the extent of the threat that professional status-seeking poses to human happiness when we see the extent to which even highly-realized dharma teachers fall prey to it. Recognition of our weakness, acknowledgement that we are all in the same boat, and gentle humor at our own expense go a long way to alleviating such misery. So does forgiveness of self and others. Finally, as long as we are human beings in this world, we will be working with these temptations. 

I now arrive at my conclusion, which is that equanimity is yet another example of the Buddha’s teaching of the middle way. We cannot transcend our humanity, but neither can we allow ourselves to wallow in the poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. As we anticipate the election that is about to take place on Tuesday, we will continue to experience the negative emotions that are embroiling our powerful country, and unfortunately, the aftermath will not solve all our problems no matter how the election turns out. Around a month ago I was researching real estate in Winnipeg, but the truth is, no one can escape living in this world, surrounded by others of our kind, and facing what is going on with our own minds and bodies. I wish you well in the days and weeks ahead. 

Thank you. 

Resuming

It has been almost 18 months since I last posted anything. Things happen, life gets in the way, and so on. But it’s time to resume.

Everyone I know carries on about how awful 2020 has been, and I am not arguing about the merits of that view. For me, though, 2019 was the year that did me in. Deaths in the family, serious illnesses, alienation among loved ones, surgeries, and more packed the calendar to the point where I found myself wailing, “It’s too much!”

And then, (some) things began to get better, even while coronavirus ravaged the land. A few months ago I discovered that I had been living with a low-grade chronic depression ever since my mother’s death more than three years earlier. I figured this out only when it lifted and I found myself thinking, “oh, so that’s what it was.” My son started college at a school that suits him to a T, even with the disruption of having to do classes by Zoom. My meditation practice finally began to perk up and feel good again. I did a three-week self retreat at home in May, which I thoroughly enjoyed. My lifelong sugar addiction seems to have disappeared.

Being at home actually suits me. Years ago I took the Myers-Briggs test and discovered I was exactly in the midpoint on the introvert/extrovert scale. This does not mean I am perfectly happy as either, but that the point at which I find balance is a specific mix of time with people and time without. Since my diagnosis of fibromyalgia, I have moved further in the direction of introversion, but I still need some contact with people. (Even my husband, a true introvert, recognizes the value of engagement with others.) In many ways my social life has improved because meeting people in cyberspace is easier than traveling to join a group or see a friend.

Being happy seems odd because such periods have been relatively rare in my life. It’s especially odd to be feeling this way as winter is approaching and the days are beginning to get dark at 4:00 p.m. It seems almost selfish to allow myself to be happy in a world full of so much suffering. But I am also realizing that it helps no one for me to allow misery to engulf me, and that I have certainly indulged in my share of it. I also accept that the causes and conditions that have led to this outcome at the moment will change. My advice to myself and others: when such a moment arrives, appreciate it.

More Stuff

Back in September I published a post named Stuff, about my mother’s move to Minnesota. I promised a followup, which is this post here, “More Stuff”.

It’s hard to see how the subject could warrant another discussion at this point, because it is so repetitious and predictable. Stuff piles up in people’s houses, we’re all materialistic to a fault, we overbuy things, and so on, and then when we are old we suddenly have to watch helplessly as someone else disposes of it because we failed to do the job when we could have had some control over the process. It’s also easy for onlookers, adult children especially, to shake their heads and think, “What is the matter with these people!” In truth, however, we are all in thrall to our stuff, one way or another.

In December of 2001 and then a month later I and my husband traveled to Vietnam to adopt our son. While we were there we saw people living in the streets at a level we’d never experienced before. In the meantime the exchange rate between American and Vietnamese money allowed us to buy whatever we wanted for almost nothing; it was almost like grabbing things off the shelves. We were limited only by what we could take home with us.

After getting home I vowed that I would never again take for granted all that I had, and that I would be satisfied to live in our 1800-foot house (which isn’t even the average for the U.S.). The effect lasted for about two weeks. After that my perspective returned to what it had always been, and soon I was complaining about the neighborhood, the kitchen, the floors, and the furniture, wanted something larger, newer, more convenient. Our son grew up with all the luxuries he wanted, which were what most of his peers had, even though we tried not to spoil him.

When my mother moved to Minnesota, she moved into a 1400-square foot apartment in senior housing that had more closet space than our house, plus rented a storage area in the basement. Boxes upon boxes, mostly books, went down there, the plan being to open them over time and sort through them. I spent months opening the boxes that remained, pulling out packing paper, toting it off to the recycling down the hall, and trying to find places for their contents. We bought new furniture for the larger bedroom, which became a study, but no matter how many shelves or drawers there were we were unable to find space for everything. I had all I could do not to lose my temper as I went through it all.

My mother lived in that apartment for almost six years, for the most part happy ones. The time came, however, when she had to go into assisted living. She wasn’t ready to do it, and the fact that she was developing dementia made it impossible to convince her that it was necessary. She ended up in a tiny apartment less than half the size of the one she left, so once more we were faced with the job of dealing with her stuff.

The books in the basement went to a fundraiser without our even having opened the boxes (apparently among them was the wedding album from my first marriage, I later found out). A lot of the furniture, china, crystal, and other kitchenware came over to our garage, which I eventually let go for a song to an antique dealer who took on the task of carting it away. We paid $100 a month for a storage unit for whatever was left beyond what we wanted to keep for ourselves. In the meantime, we lovingly arranged what would fit in her small apartment, although she scarcely recognized most of it because she was so miserably unhappy. Within six months she had to be moved into memory care, this time a single room, and we shuffled things around yet again.

The cruelty of dementia, of watching one’s parent disappear by inches, is compounded by the sense of violation one feels in disposing of all that was precious in that person’s life. As I live surrounded by my parents’ things I feel they’re not really mine, even though my mother made it clear that she wanted me to have them some day. In another five years or so my husband and I will move into an apartment half the size of our house and more of this stuff will need to go. We are already beginning the process.

My parents enjoyed their possessions while they were alive, and when they passed them on to me, they hoped I would enjoy them as well. Now that I face my own choices I realize that I can’t keep most of it, nor do I even want to. It’s hard to know how to evaluate my own priorities while the tug of nostalgia is so powerful, but I have been forced to do so over and over, packing my mother’s gowns for charity, sifting through her jewelry. I hear that younger generations, millenials in particular, want a simpler life. I am glad of it.

Enchantment and Disenchantment

I watched “Leaving Neverland” soon after it came out last winter and came away perplexed. All over the Internet, there had been articles about how overwhelming it was for people to come to terms with what appeared to be irrefutable testimony to Michael Jackson’s guilt as a child molester. Did people have to give up the music, the videos, the memories? I was perplexed because I myself had no association with any of his work; I had barely even heard any of it. I remembered the outpouring of grief in 2009 following his June 25 death, which also made no sense to me at the time.

This time around I was sufficiently intrigued that I decided to see what the fuss was all about. I started with the music video of “Thriller”. At first it bewildered me, the long opening scene between a strange looking boy and his date and the Vincent Price voiceover. But then, a transformed Michael snapped into formation with the ghoulish dancers and began to move, letting loose with the song, and I was transfixed. I had become enchanted by Michael Jackson.

I made a study of him over subsequent days, and for awhile I fell more and more under his spell as a vocalist and a dancer. And then, almost ten years after the fact, I began to grieve his death, and to understand what so many people have been experiencing ever since that documentary came out. Do his actions cancel out the merits of what he accomplished? People may differ in their answers, but one conclusion is impossible to avoid: Michael Jackson was and still is a master of enchantment. 

The term “enchanting” has been watered down in our vocabulary to suggest  something lovely or appealing, although there is power that still lurks under the surface. A true enchanter is a dangerous weaver of spells, someone who can capture another person and lead them anywhere. Our modern world has a hard time even acknowledging such power, much less coming to terms with it, even though our obsession with celebrities throws us directly into its path.

Nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber describes the modern world as disenchanted, with the onset of scientific thinking that has diminished the importance of religious belief. There is something tragic about the loss of enchantment with the appearance of reason at the center of our universe. Certainly few people can argue with the benefits of science and medicine, nor would most want to bring back the bad old days of homophobia, misogyny, and hideous tortures as punishment for the sins of blasphemy and heresy. An enchanted forest may sound exciting, but in folklore it is a place of terror, where all sorts of dangers could catch a wanderer unawares.

Yet many of us seem to have a longing for enchantment nonetheless; we want a world that is more than the sum of its parts, that has hidden and unknowable depths inaccessible to the rational mind. This desire finds outlets in such phenomena as the Harry Potter or the Twilight books of ten or more years ago, which may fall in the category of young adult literature but are enjoyed by many adults who are no longer young. And then there are our celebrities, those quasi-divine beings who are the focus of our unacknowledged longings. Michael Jackson was the consummate celebrity of his time, combining extraordinary creative abilities with powerful charisma (another bleached-out word).

The trouble with being enchanted by a celebrity is that it’s a lot like trying to wrap one’s arms around a ghost. Jackson is dead two times over, first in 2009 and now in the death of all illusions about him, but even so, he was for his fans no more than a dream while he was alive. According to the Buddha, all of life in samsara is just as much a state of enchantment. We seek fulfillment where none is to be found, until our disenchantment motivates us to practice (although the process is not automatic; most people continue looking for lasting satisfaction in the world of appearances right up until the end).

Such is one side of traditional Buddhist thinking, which comes with a substantial dose of asceticism. There is another side, however, which is populated by deities and gives rise to vivid imagery, an enchanted world that only the most advanced yogis can enter in states of deepest concentration. This is the source of the religious art and ritual that is so strange to western thinking, with its own asceticism of scientific materialism. While one project of western Buddhism seeks to reconcile the Buddha’s teachings with the scientific study of the brain, there are other teachers such as Rob Burbea and, recently, Daniel Ingram who are calling for greater openness to our capacity for enchantment.

In the words of Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” As we travel more deeply into our own minds, we find these words to ring true.

Doing Time With Thelma And Louise

 

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I had a dream about my grandmother one night when I was about 17. She had been in decline for a long time, but still clung to the desire to stay in her home. My mother, her daughter, struggled with her for several years. It was about two years after that dream that she succumbed to multiple myeloma in a nursing facility, the very kind of place she didn’t want to be.

But back to the dream: it was evening, and my grandmother, wearing one of her old-lady rayon frocks, her gray hair in a hair net, was standing in the waves close to the shore. She was walking further and further out into the water. She was a slight figure, but her face was determined. One after another the waves would knock her over, and each time she would struggle back to her feet, only to be knocked down again. When she finally failed to get up, a group of rescuers at the shore went into the water to bring her back in. They carried her back, laid her down, except instead of my grandmother, the person was a young girl, one of my classmates, in fact, and as I gazed at her, I realized that it was me lying on the sand. And I knew with absolute certainty in that moment that nothing—not time, not age, nothing—separated me from the old woman who had disappeared in the waves.

The iconic ending to Thelma and Louise is a sublime moment of absolute freedom. Everything has closed in on them, but rather than obey the authorities and let themselves be taken, they choose to “keep going”—right over the edge of the Grand Canyon. It’s a beautiful sight, that Ford Thunderbird flying through the blue sky against the backdrop of one of nature’s marvels. They hang for a moment, suspended in midair, and of course we all know that within seconds their lives will be extinguished in a fiery crash. But there they are, at that moment, suspended.

What do you suppose is going through their minds? Do you think Louise is looking at Thelma, thinking “I wonder what she really thinks of me . . .”? Or maybe Thelma is asking herself, “Do these jeans make me look fat?” The very thought is ridiculous. At such a moment, there is no to-do list, no goals, no projects, no 5-year plan, nothing but the air and the space around them and the seat of the car against their bodies. And what would you say if I told you that all of us, at every moment, are in just that space, suspended in each instant, no before or after? That nothing, absolutely nothing, separates us from extinction other than thin air?

It’s impossible to put ourselves in such a frame in ordinary life, with so much else claiming our attention, not to mention the fact that we furiously resist any such insight out of self-protection. The Buddha once asked his monks how often they thought about death, and concluded with the admonition that they should all have their own death on their minds every single moment of the day. But who can stand to do that? I certainly can’t. Yet what the thought of our death does is release us from every petty concern we have, to leave us in infinite space as we sail effortlessly through the air.

One of my dharma friends suggested that whenever we feel frightened of something, the internal message is, “and then I will die.” So for me: “If I try to play my violin in front of even the smallest and most supportive audience, my bow arm will shake all over the strings and I won’t be able to play a damn thing, and everyone will know how scared I am and I’ll be ashamed . . . and then I will die.” So I stop playing altogether out of self-protection, to save my life (you can fill in the blanks with your phobia of choice). The shaking is part of the sympathetic nervous system’s flight-or-fight response, which is the body’s way of trying to save our life.

This is common knowledge, yet what gets submerged is the life-and-death peril we so often feel without realizing it. When someone cuts us off in traffic or when a colleague contradicts us in a meeting, that jolt of fury we feel is the sense of panic transformed into a fight response. I remember one evening when I was walking through a strange town after dark with my mother a man jumped out in front of us, opened his raincoat, and laughed out loud (he wasn’t even exposed, just trying to scare us). I immediately shoved my mother behind me, planted my feet on the ground, and raised my fists, my face contorted into a mask of rage. I didn’t even think.

Actually, being able to act without thinking, completely in the moment, is one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have. In that case, fear for my own life was banished by a powerful protective instinct. Many years ago I saw a young mother who lived in the apartment next to mine dive down an open well to rescue her toddler, who had wandered over and fallen in. Her husband dragged them out, shaking, saying, “I thought I’d lost both of them.” Prey animals cornered by much larger predators will turn on their attackers and often send them packing.

There is a thrill in such moments when a creature acts in complete abandon, all fear banished by the immediacy of the situation. Thelma and Louise are sailing through the air, putting their physical survival on the line in order to preserve something that matters more, their survival as free beings. Homer’s bloody epics are thrilling because of the heroes’ total abandonment to their freedom as warriors. These men despised fear and anyone who displayed it.

In ordinary life we can all be aware of moments of fearful constriction and moments of absolute freedom, when we lose our fear of death and realize perfect stillness, in the suspension of time.

Late Winter Blues

I got depressed a few weeks ago. Off-and-on depression is a familiar experience for me, but this one was especially nasty, on a par with the grief I felt when my mother died. I was thoroughly blindsided, and felt helpless to pull myself out of it.

Right up until that time, I’d been on a bit of a roller coaster emotionally, but I’d been meditating a lot and was on the whole doing well. Then: bam! I got sucked down into the vortex. There was a trigger, which I won’t go into, but it became a source of desperate fascination for me. Meanwhile, in my daily life I was experiencing a lack of the kinds of experiences that help to produce good feelings. The weather was awful, with a grey sky, rain and snow, and worst of all, ice that made walking the dog a treacherous gauntlet. Even worse, my sleep took a nosedive.

After surgery on my right shoulder in January I still had lots of pain, plus I had developed a case of bursitis in my left shoulder that felt even worse than the one that had been cut open. My ability to do the simplest tasks was severely limited. For awhile I had been enjoying scented candles, which provided sensory pleasure that offset some of the physical nastiness, but then I developed a cough and had to give them up. My brain was foggy enough that I couldn’t read anything even remotely challenging.

Then there was the troubling acknowledgment that I needed to stop taking opioids, now that I was over six weeks out from my shoulder surgery. I can’t say that the pills reduced the pain all that much after the initial week, nor did they provide reliable sleep, but they did make me feel good all over. When I reluctantly gave them up, I discovered that I had become dependent on them, maybe even mildly addicted. Suddenly my nerves became a source of jangly noise in my head and my entire body felt miserable. When I tried to meditate I felt like jumping out of my skin, so I stopped sitting entirely. Prior to this experience I had looked on opioids as an occasional respite from pain. I had an ongoing prescription for times when my fibromyalgia pain got to be too much, which I took at the rate of about three times a week. The result was a welcome feeling of euphoria. Now that was gone, and my own brain chemistry was exposed in all its deficiencies.

The result was overwhelming. I felt as if I had become plugged in to all the sadness and melancholy of the universe. I cried a lot, feverishly struggled to find answers, and dove into distractions. In daily life I could barely function; could barely manage to get dressed and make the bed in the morning or make a cup of tea. My poor dog stayed at my side throughout, but I felt no comfort from his presence out of guilt over how little I could respond to him.

People who knew about this implored me to get therapy, but I didn’t have the energy to pick up the phone and make an appointment. There was nothing I could do by way of self-help either. Throughout this time, I was bedeviled by a painful question: why am I still here? Why am I even alive? My mother’s death of two years ago hung over my head like a cloud of unknowing. She was 97 and had dementia, so at the level of all reason it was more than time for her to go, but her death made me an orphan, a motherless and fatherless child, and at 63 years of age I couldn’t make sense of myself with no parents to mirror myself back to me.

It is impossible to describe this feeling to anyone who hasn’t been through it. I have been a practicing Buddhist for almost 10 years; before that I was a liberal-minded Christian for about 30, yet in the condition of existential despair absolutely nothing made sense. There is nowhere for the logical mind to go under such circumstances, no verbal formula to pull oneself out. The trigger for this recent bout of depression involved another person’s death from years ago. I remember thinking, how can a person be here in the world, making an impact, and then be irretrievably gone? It’s not as if I haven’t understood the teaching on impermanence, nor am I unacquainted with the facts of life and its inevitable end. Yet at certain times, this time being the most recent, death presents itself as an impossible enigma. How can this person, that person be gone and I still be here? And what am I even here for?

The conventional wisdom is to get a person out of this dangerous place as quickly as possible, to return them to ordinary life and functioning. But as I look back on it, I recognize that my time in the wilderness was itself a form of wisdom, a doorway, a point of disclosure. Religions offer among other things a means of making sense of death, but no one ever really makes “sense” of it because death, either the prospect of one’s own or coping with someone else’s, is beyond sense. At the point of someone’s death, even the death of a pet, there is a tear in the fabric of our universe that leaves an aperture into the unknown. For a time we are suspended in this radical uncertainty, until the tear closes up and we begin to inhabit a new universe without the missing piece, in its place memories and stories that give comfort. Of course my mother is gone, my father is gone, and all of this was bound to happen unless something worse were to happen and I were to die first. Of course I will die some day, and here’s hoping it’s not before my time and I leave no loose ends. Life goes on, people move on, adult or even minor children readjust, spouses remarry, friends mourn and then resume their social and work lives in new formations. And all the while, under our feet there is the abyss, which can swallow us without warning when we find ourselves undefended.

On Boredom

For many or even most people, boredom is an evil to be avoided at all costs. Young children wail, “I’m bored!” at their parents, expecting them to drop everything and provide them with entertainment. During my years as a college teacher, I knew that the worst thing I could do was conduct boring classes. Students want to feel “passionate” about their work, and resent anything that is repetitious or empty of the kind of content that can engage them personally. When they leave school, they want to move into exciting and meaningful careers. Older people encounter midlife crises, which are above all else a rebellion against sameness, routine, and boredom. They quit their jobs, leave their marriages, and reinvent themselves in the hopes of reigniting that same passion their younger selves expected out of life. And finally, retirees face the challenge of finding activities that can fill the otherwise vast emptiness of their days.

These are all ordinary, middle-class people who seek entertainment, excitement, and meaning at every point of the life cycle. People who fall outside of that demographic, people who are unemployed or stuck in jobs that offer no intrinsic value, not to mention people who suffer from the kinds of illnesses or disabilities that make it impossible to work full time, face even more acutely the challenge of boredom. For many of them, the poet Mary Oliver’s famous question, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” appears as nothing more than a mockery of their situation. People without options can neither plan nor do.

With so much at stake, it pays to ask ourselves what boredom really is. Buddhist teaching treats it as a form of aversion, alongside the more vivid manifestations of hunger and thirst, pain, terror, and hatred. At first glance it appears not even to be that powerful of an aversion. It’s obvious that being tortured is far worse than sitting through a monotonous lecture on the structure of the Cluniac order of monks, or being forced to endure an afternoon visiting one’s elderly great-aunt. Yet boredom can be as deadly as outwardly worse afflictions if it hardens into depression. Ordinary, prosperous people whose lives lack variety, interest, and meaning, and whose relationships with others are characterized by superficialities and one-sided obligations, can be driven to despair if there seems to be no escape.

If we pay attention to it rather than push it away, we can discover that boredom manifests in the body in recognizable ways. For me there’s a dull headache, probably from tensing up the jaw and neck in frustration. There is also a weird metallic taste in the mouth, as if boredom were something I would like to spit out. Finally, while we tend to think of boredom as putting us to sleep, its initial effect is agitation, as the mind casts about for anything at all that can relieve the tedium. When we eventually fail, we fall asleep as a way of getting away from it.

Boredom is so hateful that most people actively prefer emotions that would otherwise be considered painful, such as anger or even fear. Talk radio or just ordinary news broadcasts are appealing because they stimulate these feelings, as does watching violent entertainment. People become embroiled in long-standing feuds with coworkers, family members, or former friends and claim that their adversaries are making them miserable, yet they can’t disengage. If they were completely honest with themselves they’d have to admit how seductive these unresolvable conflicts are. Long gossip sessions with allies are deeply satisfying; unfortunately without the common enemy the satisfaction would dry up at its source.

What is it about boredom that makes it so awful? To begin with, boredom is not just a lack of stimulation, but rather a form of suffering, which includes resistance to a situation. Furthermore, what provokes it varies according to individual taste. What one person might find hopelessly boring—the lecture on monasticism or the company of the great-aunt—another might find interesting and valuable; some people love loud parties, while others might find them miserably boring. In any case, however, a person could choose to let go of expectations and allow the experience to unfold in whatever way it does, without suffering. Yet simply deciding to do this is next to impossible for most people. We need to go deeper.

To unlock the secret of boredom, we need first of all to look at the resistance. Part of the frustration of a boring situation is that it is beyond our ability to control. We can’t just get up and run out of the room, or find something more interesting to do. We are stranded, robbed of agency, powerless. This is a more serious threat to well-being than simply not having enough to do; in fact, being powerless is a threat to our very survival.

Even worse, a loss of agency in an unstimulating environment offers an unwelcome window onto a truth that we do not want to face: the fact that we are hurtling through time to an unknown end; that as sure as we are born we are going to die, and when we do, we will no longer have power over anything. Our relentless activity and stimulation allow us to forget about this fact, or else they give us the illusion that we are doing something either useful or pleasurable with however much time we are given. Even spending hours mindlessly surfing the internet can keep such demons at bay, until we look up from our obsession hours later and realize we have lost an afternoon.

These kinds of escape-hatches are ultimately unsatisfying because they must end sooner or later, leaving us feeling empty and unhappy with ourselves. It’s not that there is no point ever in watching a video or reading the news, but doing so over and over as a way of killing time is a recipe for depression. Even the satisfaction of a task well done is limited by the fact that as the moment passes, we are left where we were before. But if these approaches all fail us in the long run, what are we to do?

One of the most satisfying experiences people can have is a flow state. People experience flow when they are creating something, exercising their talents, out in nature, jumping out of an airplane, or skiing, depending on their inclinations. People love the activities associated with flow states, and seek them out. But what if you could be in a flow state regardless of what you were doing—what if you could get flow just watching paint dry? What if a lot of people could do that? Talk radio hosts would be out of a job, while gossip would be reduced. There would be far fewer blog posts to read (such as this one!), or “likes” on Facebook, or videos to watch.

In order for that to happen, people would have to confront the aversive state of boredom, examine it, and allow it to unfold. They would have to sit with things as they are, not as they’d like them to be, watching sensations as they rise and pass away, allowing the quiet and the inactivity to continue. Along with bodily sensations, thoughts would come and go, some of them pleasant and seductive, others of them distinctly unpleasant. This is insight meditation, and it is no easy thing. Beginners find themselves practically climbing the walls as the mind struggles to stave off boredom until it suddenly turns quiet and goes to sleep. Even experienced meditators will have sits in which they feel an overwhelming urge to get up and run out of the room! The difference is that over a long time and with experience, a meditator learns to work with these phenomena without reacting and without resistance–most of the time.

The long-term effects are an ability to watch paint dry without boredom, among other things. Every moment, without exception, is a banquet of experience that a person can observe and investigate. Even deeply unpleasant experiences can be allowed to be as they are. Our most painful and difficult emotions become accessible in a way that allows them to do their work and then dissipate. We would lose our fear of being stranded with nothing to do.

This is an ideal that is not easy to realize, but even steps in the direction of such realization can greatly alleviate the suffering of boredom. As we begin to take those steps, we learn to know ourselves in a way that allows us to feel compassion rather than impatience and condemnation. There is no single experience, even repeated regularly, that can compare with the benefit of knowing that at every moment, what is given is just enough.

On Sadness for Loved Ones

Okay, I’ll come out and say it: my soon-to-be eighteen-year-old son has a substance abuse problem. At this point it’s primarily alcohol. I am grieving.

I have learned from my early life with two autistic brothers that the sadness one has for oneself is a piece of cake compared to sadness for the pain of loved ones. I think of Mary at the foot of the cross, the archetype of all such grief, and not meaning to be melodramatic or anything, I’d so much rather be up on that cross myself. “There is a crack in everything—“ yes, and one of the hardest is watching the child I love flounder with the kind of thing I know all too well is far more powerful than his youthful self can understand.

There’s the rebuttal that most kids drink at some point or experiment with drugs, and that I’m overreacting. Maybe so, or maybe this situation is more serious than most, apart from the fact that what other kids do and what one’s own kid does are experienced as entirely different things. What I myself have done and what my child is doing are also different things. I remember that I abused alcohol when I was young, and in the process endangered and even harmed myself. My parents were lucky not to have known about most of it. I turned out “all right,” although the things that prompted me to do it haunted me for years and many of them haunt me to this day. Still, in my own case, I have a sense of ownership over my actions and their consequences, however illusory. In the case of my loved one, all I can do is stand helplessly by, after having taken the necessary steps as recommended by the wisdom of whatever experts weigh in.

The Buddha says this kind of suffering is brought on by attachment. Like all suffering, it is governed by the equation Suffering = pain + resistance. I want things to be different. I want the path before my child’s feet to be smooth and easy, at least for the time being while he is still young and not fully formed, even though I know that this wish is impossible. I am attached to him and to outcomes I wish for him. Does knowing this help? Yes and no. In the thick of it, the suffering is still there.

The Buddha also teaches that to end suffering one must give up all attachments. Is this possible, or even desirable? Let’s look at it closely. My suffering does not help my son. He does not want to see it, to have to deal with it in any way. His problem is his own. So one thing I can do for him is keep my tears to myself as much as possible, establish boundaries with him, talk to him as necessary about our expectations as a part of this household, make resources for recovery available to him, and then demonstrate that I trust him to work things out for himself.

When I was his age, my mother and I were almost literally at each other’s throats. She made it clear that I had disappointed her, and that she took it personally. I got the “I carried you in my body for nine months” speech, which in my son’s case I could amend to “Your father and I traveled across the world to get you” speech. It had the effect of pushing me away and causing me to act out more recklessly than I otherwise would have done. What creates the hardship for the child, or any beloved person, is the parent’s message that the child’s life is not their own, that they will always belong to the parent more than to themselves. No free being can tolerate such a thing.

And so I realize that letting go of attachment is not the same thing as ceasing to love someone; in fact, it’s the opposite. My son has his work cut out for him, while I have mine. I cannot take his work on myself, nor should I attempt to pile my own work on him. That is all.

 

Update and Dharma Talk

Hello, everyone:

My life blew up in my face around four months ago, and I’ve been thrown off my writing ever since. I don’t want to go into details out of concern for others’ privacy, but will simply resume posting, beginning with a dharma talk I gave yesterday at the Northfield Buddhist Meditation Center on the Three Characteristics. May it be to the benefit of all beings.

The Three Characteristics

One of the foundational teachings of Buddhism is that there are three characteristics that are integral to absolutely everything we experience. These are dukkha (which is often translated as suffering, but perhaps better as unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (no-self or not-self). Thus all of lived experience in this world is unsatisfactory, impermanent, and devoid of a solid, enduring self.
Now we can understand each of these characteristics at two levels. First, there is a mundane or everyday sense, which everyone can relate to without special training. In addition, there is a more refined or supra-mundane sense, which we begin to experience when we train our minds through meditation practice. I will begin by describing each of the three characteristics in the everyday sense.

Dukkha

Dukkha, translated usually as suffering, is something all of us can understand easily. Everyone without exception encounters the ills life has to offer, although for some it seems that bad fortune is worse than for others. Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall” addresses this phenomenon in a famous scene:

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.

Obviously, people with certain disabilities might beg to differ with his characterization of their lives as horrible, yet his point is that ordinary life is not happy, but miserable. People suffering famine, genocide, torture, and war are obviously in a different situation than those of us in the western white middle classes, and yet even our fortunate lives are subject to the kinds of suffering that render us miserable. If we die young, there is a sense of unfulfilled potential and tragedy, while if we live to be old, we watch our friends, acquaintances, and family members die. Losing a parent is traumatic, no matter how old or how sick, while losing a child is devastating. In the lottery of life, those of us who escape losing our parents by default die young enough for our parents to outlive us.

Yet even taking these things into account, we might look around us and be tempted to conclude that some people seem to have all the luck. They grow up in relatively uncomplicated, prosperous families, get into the best schools, enjoy robust health and good looks, marry well, and have good-looking, healthy, accomplished, and loving children. Everything they touch seems to turn to gold. Yet even these individuals are subject to sickness, old age, and death. In the Upajjhatthana Sutta the Buddha offers five recollections to keep us mindful of these things:

I am of the nature to grow old; there is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health; there is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die; there is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My deeds (karma) are my closest companions. I am the beneficiary of my karma. My karma is the ground on which I stand.

Knowing the very conditions of our existence, we begin to recognize that there is no basis for envy or resentment of anyone. All of us are in the same boat, even those who enjoy better seats on the boat. When we embrace this knowledge fully we can open up to unconditional love, compassion for the suffering of others and ourselves, and the experience of joy in the joy and good fortune of others. The painful sense of separation between self and others begins to dissolve.

Anicca

The inevitability of old age, sickness, and death is central to the characteristic of impermanence in the mundane sense. We all experience changes throughout our lives, some of them longed-for (for example, New Year’s resolutions, which are all about desired change), but others deplored. When we are children we look forward to growing up and having the power and autonomy we assume our parents have. When we are young adults we take our strength and beauty for granted, but desire the money and status that older people seem to enjoy. As we age we undergo change, noticing our flagging energy, grey hairs, and weight gain. It gets more difficult to undertake what at one time we could do with ease. Many of us marry, start families, and watch our children go through the changes we remember from our own youth.

Circumstances around us change as well. Older people often deplore these changes, looking back to the good old days when we imagine things were better. Life was simpler back in the old days, we didn’t have all of today’s modern conveniences and electronic gadgets but we knew how to have our own fun, people used to look out for one another unlike the impersonal society around us today, and so on. Change, in fact, is at the root of a lot of life’s unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha.

Our children grow up and move away, leaving us with empty nests and a sense of bewilderment over where it all went. Family members die and we find ourselves missing them at certain times of the year, especially the holidays. The jobs we once enjoyed no longer give us the same satisfaction they once did, as a new boss or a new policy takes over. Many jobs disappear altogether, never to return, taking with them our identities and our sense of purpose and community. At no point can we rely on anything to remain the same for as long as we’d like.

Even desired changes are unreliable. People who win the lottery or lose significant amounts of weight, for example, often find that they are no happier than they were before. New problems take over where old ones leave off. When Obama was elected in 2008, I thought a new age of enlightened government had dawned, only to find myself horrified by the way he was treated by the opposition. Those of us who now anticipate a happier 2019 with a Democratic majority in the House will doubtless find ourselves frustrated by the limits of positive change—although don’t get me wrong, I am one of the hopeful ones. For every chance to make things better, however, the realities of life remain.

None of this means that we shouldn’t celebrate the good things of this world and work to remedy the bad things, or that we give up taking care of ourselves and others. What we want to cultivate is the equanimity to face the inevitable ebb and flow of life with as much courage and awareness as we can muster.

Anatta

I’ve observed a lot of arguments over the best translation for this characteristic: is it no-self, or not-self, or even non-self? The question is hard to resolve, because the first syllable is a negation of what follows, atta, or in Sanskrit, atman, meaning self or soul. Some say that what is being negated is not any and all selfhood, but a stable, abiding self, while others see the negation as total. We can look to the Buddha’s teachings in the Suttas for some clarification, beginning with the Anatta-lakhanna Sutta. He describes to his monks a series of attributes to which we might attach a sense of an enduring self: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The problem is that none of these are within a person’s control. The Buddha then asks his monks the same series of questions for each attribute:

“What do you think of this, O monks? Is form permanent or impermanent?”
“Impermanent, O Lord.”
“Now, that which is impermanent, is it unsatisfactory or satisfactory?”
“Unsatisfactory, O Lord.”
“Now, that which is impermanent, unsatisfactory, subject to change, is it proper to regard that as: ‘This is mine, this I am, this is my self’?”
“Indeed, not that, O Lord.”

For those of us trying to grasp what this means for our lives, it might be helpful to consider that nothing, from our bodies to our thoughts, is personal. When someone insults us, it’s not personal. When it’s cold outside, it’s not personal. When we’re in a bad mood, it’s not personal. I invite you to fill in the blanks in any way you choose. Anger, hurt feelings, the answer to a problem, the determination to begin a task may all arise, but none of it is you, me, or us. We recognize this fact when we begin to observe closely. Addiction is a good example: at some point, at some time, triggered by whatever, the addict has had enough, and recovery begins. Fear descends on us unasked for, and then withdraws. Sexual desire appears and then disappears. We begin a project with a plan for how it will go, and find ourselves looking at something quite different at completion.

The changes occurring in the course of our lives give the lie to any sense of a separate, enduring Self. I may continue to exhibit qualities that were in evidence when I was a child, but these qualities do not in themselves constitute a self. Even the “I” pronoun with which I am making all these observations is merely a convention. To quote George Harrison, “and life goes on within you and without you.”

As this characteristic becomes clearer to us, we suffer less. We do not respond with hurt feelings or with defensive anger in the way we once did. Working to hold ourselves together is, according to the Buddha, the true basis for dukkha. We open ourselves to the Divine Abidings of unconditional love for all living things, compassion for all suffering, joy in every good thing, and equanimity in all circumstances when we finally see through the illusion of Self.

The Supramundane

It is time now to move on to the less obvious ways of understanding the three characteristics. But before I begin to discuss them at the level of the supramundane, I wish to point out that the mundane is by no means trivial or even inferior to the supramundane. Understanding the three characteristics as we live in this world is foundational to our ethical behavior. Still, with vipassana, or insight (“clear seeing”), we can put our experience under a powerful microscope. The microscope is our minds, highly trained by practice. When we do this, the lessons penetrate to a deeper level of understanding, and have the ability to transform the way we experience the world.

There are countless approaches to practice, and unfortunately, practitioners often argue vigorously over which is the right or best one. Even yogis at high levels of attainment can get attached to the path they were taught, the path that brought them their attainments. None of this means that the rest of us must throw up our hands and conclude there’s no way of knowing what to think. I have my own set of criteria for effective practice, which I’ll outline here.

  1. First, a good practice is effective in bringing insight. Now I recognize that many meditators are not interested in acquiring a microscope, and I honor that choice. Most people in our culture these days are trying to find relief from the stresses in their lives (stress being another translation for dukkha), and a meditation practice helps them find a measure of peace and balance. But for people seeking a more advanced level of insight, a practice should help them do that. Some practices are particularly powerful, but since this is a talk about the three characteristics and not about practice per se, I won’t go into the nuts and bolts here.
  2. Second, a good practice is balanced. Imbalance can lead to negative personal side effects, all the way to the horrifying examples we see of dharma teachers abusing their positions and their students. To my mind, a balanced practice is one that incorporates all of the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. There is no good practice that bypasses morality, and practice that leads to an attainment topheavy with insight and not much else is not good practice.
  3. Thirdly, a good practice takes into account the needs and situation of the individual student. It would be a bad idea to take someone with severe depression or psychotic tendencies and send that person on a rigorous course of powerful insight practice, for example. Some people have natural abilities for concentration, whereas others need help with it. Someone in the midst of a challenging life, caring for children and/or sick relatives while holding down a difficult job, is going to have a different approach to practice than a person with a stable life and abundant free time.

Be that as it may, my emphasis in this section is on vipassana, clear seeing, on what happens when we get that microscope and begin to see the three characteristics in all sensations, beyond our experience of everyday life. I shall begin with anicca, impermanence, because in my own tradition and experience that is the one that appears first.

In the fifth-century a.d. the Sri Lankan monk Buddhaghosa wrote a commentary called the Visuddhimagga, which maps a series of stages that practitioners experience as they develop insight. This map, called the Progress of Insight, has sixteen stages altogether, leading ultimately to a breakthrough moment at the end that is the culmination of what has come before. I will focus on a few of these in a general way, beginning with the fourth stage, called “Insight knowledge into the arising and passing away of all phenomena” (“A&P” for short). This is the point at which impermanence is brought home to us at a microscopic level. Experience takes on a vibratory quality that can lead to an ecstatic explosion of sensation. We are not just seeing change over time; what we are seeing is each sensation as nothing more than a momentary blip, no sooner experienced than gone, to be replaced by whatever comes next. There is a sense of awe and excitement, as the meditator watches these sensations come and go at lightening speed. Practice becomes effortless and even thrilling.

The A&P has the feel of a tremendous breakthrough, which in fact it is, but eventually it is followed by a series of insight stages into dukkha, suffering, beginning with the fifth insight stage, Dissolution. Whereas at the A&P the meditator sees phenomena rise and pass away in real time, at Dissolution everything appears to be lost, gone before it is even experienced, as if the observer is barely alert enough to notice. It’s a tremendous letdown after the excitement of the A&P, yet it’s as necessary to insight as the more powerful and gratifying experiences of that prior stage. An entire parade of nastiness follows: insight into Fear, Misery, and Disgust, followed by insight into Desire for Deliverance. Sometimes these insight stages pass quickly, while at other times people can get stuck in them, maybe even for years. The last of the dukkha insight stages is called Reobservation, which pulls together all of the unpleasantness that has gone before.

What are these like in real time? Insight involves being able to see all experience in samsara, the world on the wheel of craving, aversion, and delusion, for what it is. The essence of these stages lies in the fact that we are still invested in the illusion of Self, even though we have experienced the breaking up of the sensations that constitute Self in the ecstasy of the Arising and Passing Away. Jack Kornfield has written a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, but we could at this point in the Progress of Insight map say that we are experiencing After the Ecstasy, the Freakout. This is why insight at this level can be unsafe for some people, especially those with a fragile sense of their own boundaries. We all need functioning egos to get through the day, for without them we are left unprotected in the face of a world of confusion. We need teachers and a sangha to whom we can turn to be reassured that we will eventually emerge on the other side, and to help us do that skillfully.

So, a person could have nightmares, flashes of panic, bouts of crying, and feelings of nausea. On the cushion this can amount to unpleasant sits with painful sensations, while off cushion a person can experience unexplained mood swings that can be confusing to themselves and to those around them. There’s a researcher at Brown University named Willoughby Britten who specializes in helping people through these stages, which are all too often ignored in traditional teaching.

Eventually a practitioner comes out on the other side into a stage called Insight into Equanimity, in which experience becomes peaceful and beautifully vibratory. Everyone loves equanimity, and most would be happy to stay there forever. Think of those days or experiences when everything clicks, when the sky takes on a particularly lovely shade of blue, the breezes are gentle and refreshing, and there is harmony within oneself and in relation to others. Shinzen Young describes happiness as “the body is at ease and the mind has answers.” Equanimity feels like this.

The Progress of Insight path is also called the Path of Purification. Having been through the disconcerting freakout of the dukkha stages, we have looked at life honestly in its suffering and unpleasantness, and have arrived at a sense that whatever happens, we can deal with it. Of course this feeling is temporary, like all the other stages on the path, and most of the time meditators fall back into the earlier stages to experience them again. This is a cycle that can repeat over and over, in fact, until the true breakthrough occurs, leading to the insight into anatta. Once again, I will not go into the nuts and bolts of how that happens here, but will instead describe what the experience of not having a self is like.

First, let me emphasize that Buddhism teaches that self is an illusion, and that we create this illusion by stringing together experiences as if they are solid and enduring, whereas in fact they are vibratory and fleeting. We could do a direct pointing exercise in which we look all over for the elusive self, just as the Buddha did in the Anatta-lakhannasutta Sutta quoted earlier. Perhaps we might look at our bodies or our heads and try to locate the self in space. For most of us, the prime location we imagine for it is behind the eyeballs, as if there were a little person lurking in that spot directing the whole show.

The absurdity of this image is obvious, but there is more to the illusion than that: we see our pretend-selves in everything that is “out there” as well as inside our heads or our heart centers or wherever. When we admire a flower, we project our enjoyment onto the image/scent/texture of the flower, bringing that object into our own felt-sense of who or what we are (“I am a person who admires flowers”). The flower then becomes an extension of our self-talk, and of ourselves. As we continue to engage in self-talk, we flesh out the object we are working so hard to create and sustain. Every strongly held opinion, every preference, every judgment we make, even seemingly trivial ones like “onions are disgusting,” gets woven into the portrait. The desire to live a full life, to travel, to experience the world, is all part of that creative act that engages us for our entire lives, until it somehow mysteriously stops.

The most famous pointer the Buddha has given us is the Bahiya Sutta, in which he instructs his interlocutor as follows:

Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of dukkha..

This, then, is the supramundane understanding of anatta, according to which the self has no place either in the world out there or in here.

What is life like without a self? Pretty much the same as life with it, minus the irritating pebble in our shoe, or the hot coal we are always carrying around. There is no angel choir, nor are there visions (although these can come with advanced-level concentration states). Life goes on as before, complete with sickness, old age, and death. We do our jobs, raise our children, retire, hang out with our friends, drink coffee (or not), with the one exception that we are not inserting Self-illusion into everything we do and experience. Objects appear as they are, empty and luminous. In the words of Sara Teasdale,

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

As depressing as this may sound, what it describes is a world that is empty of the self delusion. The war in this context is what I would describe as our samsaric war of craving, clinging, and aversion. After the war is done things appear just as they are. They do their thing, oblivious to whether we are present or absent.

There is a lot of debate about how this state comes about, but I find that the Progress of Insight map, with its path of purification, works as well as any other system I have seen. Its use is a key part of the Mahasi Sayadaw Burmese Insight tradition, but some would argue that it unfolds for all spiritual practitioners in all traditions. I have read and listened to many discussion of this question, from which I’ve drawn the conclusion that the map may be imperfect and maybe even counterproductive at times, but it is nonetheless a powerful tool for turning an untrained mind into a microscope.

I would like to conclude with Daniel Ingram’s parable of the kazoo. Life is like a beautiful concert, performed by the most celebrated symphony orchestra, in a perfectly designed hall. We have paid substantial sums of money to hear this wonderful performance. The players are all in their appointed places: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion in full array, with a renowned conductor ready to begin. There is, however, an old, beat-up little chair in front of everything. Just as the conductor is about to bring down his baton, a shabbily dressed elderly man carrying a kazoo shuffles out onto the stage, and half apologetically takes his seat in the chair. He has no idea what the orchestra is about to play, he hasn’t even rehearsed with them, but as the music begins he takes up his kazoo and several beats out of sync begins to interpret what the orchestra is playing. The audience is so transfixed by the kazoo’s sound that it doesn’t even listen to the orchestra, focusing entirely on the little kazoo player’s interpretation. Sometimes the rich tapestry of orchestral sounds will stand out and catch a listener’s attention for a moment, but inevitably the kazoo succeeds in covering it up.

Such is life in samsara. The point of practice is to begin to hear the orchestra. There will still be the buzz of the kazoo as part of the mix, but our attention will no longer be fixed on it as the dominant sensation. This is your life, for which you have paid a high price. The Buddha is telling you to do everything you can to sense the amazing tapestry that life weaves at every single moment. It is your birthright.

The Default Mode

During the course of our daily lives the vast majority of us spend almost all of our time in what is called the Default Mode, activated by the Default Mode Network of the brain. It’s the DMN that gives us our very selves, constructed from memories of the past, observations during the present, and projections into the future.

This way of existing  is so utterly familiar that we don’t even notice it unless we are forced to pay attention—if, for example, we are overwhelmed by ruminating on something embarrassing we did, or on someone’s slighting us. Even then we have no idea what we’re doing or why, and are helpless to stop it. And so we thrash around with various attempts at an explanation (“I’m so stupid! Why did I do that?!” “That person is such a jerk! I hate her!”).  These thoughts may be painful, but they appear to point to a solution. If I’m stupid, maybe I can figure out a way to wise up, or if I can identify another person as a hateful jerk, maybe I can undermine them in some way.

We need the Default Mode Network to get through the day. It’s what keeps us on track, helps us know what to do next, and makes it possible for us to learn from our mistakes.  Alzheimer’s patients are progressively hampered in their functioning by the erosion of the DMN. Unfortunately, the DMN can drive us crazy when it is overstimulated. People suffering from depression have an overactive DMN. The symboliste poet Charles Baudelaire describes this condition in Spleen II from the Fleurs du Mal: “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais milles ans”—

I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years.

A heavy chest of drawers cluttered with balance-sheets,
Processes, love-letters, verses, ballads,
And heavy locks of hair enveloped in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my gloomy brain.
It is a pyramid, a vast burial vault
Which contains more corpses than potter’s field.
— I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon,
In which long worms crawl like remorse
And constantly harass my dearest dead.
I am an old boudoir full of withered roses,
Where lies a whole litter of old-fashioned dresses,
Where the plaintive pastels and the pale Bouchers,
Alone, breathe in the fragrance from an opened phial.

Even without running amok, the DMN is behind what causes ordinary dukkha, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. I’ll give an example from this morning when I took the dog out for his first walk of the day. Just as I stepped out the door I was immediately struck by the warm, humid air and the breezes. “It feels like swimming,” I thought, as the dog urged me forward from the driveway to the sidewalk. There was something delicious about the breezes, about the way they caressed my neck and entire body, as well as the smells of vegetation and the sounds of the morning. I saw the leaves of the trees rustling gently in a delicate dance.

Meanwhile, my dog was sniffing along the walkway for information about what other dogs might have passed the house and when, adding his scent at strategic points. My mind began to wander, thinking about the day ahead, wondering what I would try to do with my time, and evaluating my level of physical energy. I stopped being aware of what was going on around me as I became absorbed by pictures in my head. I saw myself doing laundry, doing dishes, sitting in meditation. Imaginary conversations popped up.

Later, as I was digging up a few weeds, I began talking to some image of a younger person—maybe my childhood self?—about the kinds of weeds I was seeing. “That big sprawling grass is actually pretty easy to yank out, but the taproot thistles are the worst! And those smaller grasses have networks of roots, and if you break them off and leave a piece, they just come right back.” Maybe I wanted to share my knowledge with someone. I used to be a teacher, and had a young child once who is now 17 and doesn’t listen to anything I say. Who knows.

We live with stories about ourselves, some of them helpful, others not so much. Some are paralyzing. At different times in our lives, different stories capture our interest. Sometimes we go to therapy, where we can learn to identify disabling stories and substitute positive ones. When stories become dominant over a culture or subculture they can harden into ideologies or belief systems. The work of historians is to make sense out of data and turn it into a narrative, an explanation, an account.

These activities are our defense against chaos, but underlying the stories about who we are is a noise machine in the brain that we scarcely notice, spouting random thoughts and images without letup. I sometimes play a game of trying to trace back a chain of thought to its origin. The mind leapfrogs from one idea to another, based on associations, puns, or resemblances, beginning its journey with an input, something we see or hear that strikes our notice, and ending far, far, away. In the meantime the leaves are shimmering with a light breeze, and the body is alive with a play of sensations, and we aware of none of it.

In the Default Mode we sleepwalk through our life, dreaming our dreams while life goes on in and around us. The consequences of not paying attention can be tragic and deadly. The work of spiritual practice is to open our minds to awareness, to move us in the direction of waking up from our enchanted sleep.